Sweden
Albert Askengren was born and raised on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea outside the east coast of Sweden. He spend his youth being active in many different sports such as football, ice hockey, karting, orientering and cross-country skiing.
He started his athletic career at the age of 16 when he started with biathlon in high school and moved to Boden where school and sports were combined. He continued competing in biathlon and cross-country skiing at a national elite level, competing in Swedish Championships, Scandinavian cups and international winter games. He skied for almost 10 years before he made the transition to triathlon.
Albert found triathlon for the first time in 2016 by competing in Stockholm Triathlon, an olympic distance race. In 2018 he did his first middle distance race, Ironman 70.3 Jönköping, and managed to qualify for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships 2019 in Nice in his age-group and after that race he decided to switch from winter sports to summer sports and started to focus on triathlon.
Having no swimming background he struggled with improving his swim, an many age-groupers do, but after coming in contact with Barry Whyte and the elite group of Stöcke TS Järnet in 2021 he has made good progress with his swimming and has started to improve his performances overall. In 2022 he did year first year as a professional and even if there were many tough races with varying results he learned a lot and gathered experience. Towards the 2023 season he is looking forward to competing and to see if his hard work and improvements in training will reflect on the race course!
