The 64-year-old Spaniard was elected to serve a fourth term as President after seeing off challenger Mads Freund in a virtual vote at the organisation’s Congress on November 29. She will remain a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) following her victory by 86 votes to 43.

After a particularly bitter election in which she was cleared by the IOC’s Ethics Commission of last-minute charges of "gross and multiple violations of the values, principles and regulations" laid against her by four members of World Triathlon’s Tribunal – charges she repudiated – Casado can now set her course for the next stage in her proposed development. So what course will that be?

Having defeated Freund, Casado promised to "take on board" the points his candidacy raised. Her Danish rival's main proposals were – more power for the Continental Confederations, a strengthening of electoral practices, and a re-assertion of World Triathlon’s position as leader within the sport after "lagging behind other brands and associations."

Freund added: "We have reached a point in our organisation where we need new ideas."

Asked what points raised by Freund she might now want to address, Casado responded: "I think most of the facts that Mads was pointing out on his programme were simply not accurate.

"The Continental Confederations have enormous power in our organisation, and they will continue to do so. They sit - the five Presidents - on the Executive Board with voice and votes.

"We have a Development Commission with the five Continental Confederations and myself, with regular meetings and discussions. The Confederations distribute and organise the development funds - and of course we will continue working on this path.

"We are the leading organisation of our sport, and we also believe that we need to work with other organisations and bring them closer to us, under our umbrella.

"We have signed Memorandums Of Understanding with Ironman, Super League Triathlon, the Professional Triathletes Organisation and many others.

"TriathlonLIVE, our OTT platform, is a reference point in the sports world when it comes to new media and digital platforms, and we will continue investing in it.

"Meanwhile our Sustainability Guidelines, our Return to events after COVID Guidelines, have been praised by the IOC and are also a reference for many other organisations.

"So I don’t think we are not innovating. On the contrary, I think we are pioneers, and we will continue to be so. I like to lead by example, and this is clearly something that I will continue doing.”

In her election speech Casado promised to expand the triathlon calendar and increase promotion and investment in events, ranging from local to international level. She also vowed to use her status within world sport to "increase the presence" of triathlon at multi-sport events.

Expanding on those ambitions, she identified what she saw as the main challenges facing the sport in her fourth stint as President.

"In the last years, we have increased significantly the number of events in our calendar," she said. "My goal for the next four years is to continue on this path, offering all athletes, from grassroots and development, para and elite athletes more opportunities to compete.

"In this specific area, my goal is to create regional competitions in developing areas in the world, where athletes are not able to travel far away from their home countries.

"Regarding our presence in multi-sport events, we are now in the programme of the World Beach Games with Aquathlon, and we will be present in the next edition of the World Masters Games and World Games, but we are working to increase even further our presence in these events."

Triathlon, which has been in the Olympics since the 2000 Sydney Games, was a core sport at the inaugural European Games at Baku in 2015, where the winners – Gordon Benson of Britain and Switzerland’s London 2012 champion Nicola Spirig – earned automatic Rio 2016 quota places for their countries.

It did not feature at last year’s European Games in Minsk, but it is back on the preliminary sports programme announced by the European Olympic Committees for the Krakow Małopolska 2023 European Games.

The new elimination style individual event proposed by World Triathlon for inclusion at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was not taken up by the International Olympic Committee when it announced the finalised programme earlier this month.

World Triathlon had put forward five medal events - the eliminator for men and women, the traditional elite races and a mixed relay - on its proposed Paris 2024 event programme.

The exact format of the eliminator concept - which would have seen athletes competing over a set number of rounds, with the lowest few athletes removed from the field after each heat - had not been confirmed, but it had been suggested that event might use the super sprint format of a 400 metres swim, a 10km bike and a 2.5km run.

Asked if World Triathlon will continue to work for changes to its Olympic competitions, Casado responded: “Of course we would have loved for the new events to be added to the Olympics in 2024, and for more triathletes to be included in the programme, and that will be our goal for the next Olympic cycle. But we also understand the current situation.

“The IOC had to reduce the number of athletes competing, and we are one of the very few International Federations that has not seen their numbers reduced between Tokyo and Paris.

“We know that the IOC really liked our proposed new event, and we also know that we are one of the International Federations with fewer athletes competing in the Olympics.

“We are confident that this will be taken into account for the 2028 Los Angeles Games.”

There will still be ripples within the sport following the bitter dispute that flared up shortly before the election.

On November 18, insidethegames revealed that four members of the World Triathlon Tribunal - set up in 2015 to judge appeals and other disputes from members and athletes, particularly in disciplinary matters – had filed an official legal complaint to the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) regarding the conduct of Casado and two other senior officials at the global governing body.

The Tribunal members reported Casado, World Triathlon secretary general Antonio Arimany and Legal and Constitution Committee chairman Bernard St-Jean "for their unsuccessful strong-arm attempts to bypass a World Triathlon Tribunal decision and to silently impose on the Congress an improper change in the judicial system of World Triathlon, and for their attempt to eliminate and replace the current World Triathlon Tribunal members by corrupting the election process for the next Congress."

Casado claimed that the Tribunal’s complaint was intended to interfere with the election.

After ASOIF ruled it did not have jurisdiction to investigate the matter passed to the IOC, on November 25 the IOC Executive Board dismissed the complaint after its Ethics Commission had found "no evidence of any personal unethical behaviour" by the World Triathlon President.

The IOC Ethics Commission said both parts of the complaint "were not related to the IOC" and ruled there was no reason for it to intervene as "there was no evidence of any personal unethical behaviour by Mrs Marisol Casado."

It added that the issue was "purely an internal matter" at World Triathlon.

The IOC Executive Board said it had dismissed the complaint "as no breach of the IOC’s ethical principles has been demonstrated".

On November 29 the entire World Triathlon Tribunal was formally replaced after five new members were elected to the panel.

None of the members who were involved in the complaint were proposed for re-election at the virtual World Triathlon Congress.

They alleged Casado, secretary general Antonio Arimany and Bernard St-Jean had tried to "remove" them from their positions by not presenting them for another term at the Congress.

Tribunal chair Philippe Renz, Nigeria's Ize Ukpoma Matebese, Timo Pennanen of Finland and American Kevin Sullivan claimed they "were not aware they were up for re-election".

In response, Casado said their respective National Federations had received all the communications relating to the election process.

"It is a fact that World Triathlon has received nominations for the election of members of the World Triathlon Tribunal, including from the National Federation of one of the members, that has decided to present someone else as a candidate," Casado said.

Four new members were elected to the Tribunal at the Congress - Monique Houten of Belgium, Australia's Barry Lipp, David Markham of Canada and Italy's Angelo Rigopoulos were approved by the membership.

A fifth candidate had been due to join the panel but the candidacy of Mohsen Hamidi was not given the green light by the Executive Board.

The Congress was only given four candidates to choose from. A new chairman to replace Renz, a Swiss lawyer, is set to be chosen in the near future.

Members then voted in favour of temporarily expanding the Tribunal to up to eight members until the next Congress in 2021.

Asked to reflect upon the matter, and if in retrospect she would have done anything differently in the same circumstances, Casado replied: "This has been a really bitter-sweet campaign. Bitter because we have seen individuals trying to interfere in what should have been serene elections, with false allegations being sent and disrupting our community.

"And those false allegations being picked up by the media, sometimes not even checking if what was said on the allegations was true or not.

"But it has been sweet, because I have seen that the majority of our members do believe that we are in the right pathway and clearly saw that those allegations were false. And that even if the media repeats a million times a false allegation and repeats weeks after the same disrupting messages, that doesn’t make it true.”

Casado has the possibility of serving as World Triathlon President until 2028 after a 12-year term limit was introduced in 2016. As she enters her fourth term of office, she can reflect upon numerous changes she has overseen since taking up her current position in 2008.

"Many things have changed since I was first elected President of World Triathlon," she said. "We have almost doubled the number of National Federations members; we have included the Paratriathlon in the Paralympics programme; we have added the Mixed Relay to the Olympics programme.

"We have increased substantially investment in our development programme and we are a role model organisation in terms of good governance and gender balance.

"Our athletes now have more opportunities to compete, more development tools, more prize money, more windows out to the world.

“We really do care about the athletes, we keep them at the heart of our organisation and that’s something I feel really proud of. And we will continue doing in the next term.

“We have secured the financial situation of the Federation - that provided us with a reserve fund that has allowed us to go through this very difficult year."

Accounts released ahead of the virtual Congress put World Triathlon’s total assets at the end of 2019 at $10.35 million (£7.8 million/€8.6 million).

A message from the Executive Board confirmed that World Triathlon expected a loss for the current financial year which "will be covered by the reserve funds built up during the last eight years."

Insidethegames reported in May that the then International Triathlon Union was expecting a loss of up to $1.4 million (£1.05 million/€1.18 million) in 2020 – a year in which, owing to the pandemic, 90 per cent of the governing body’s activities are said to have been postponed.

Casado’s election was closely followed by the arrival of Annika Sorenstam as President of the IGF, who thus became the second woman in that position with a summer Olympic IF, with Kate Caithness holding a winter Olympic IF Presidency with the World Curling Federation.

“It is not only Annika,” Casado commented. “This week another female, England’s Zena Wooldridge, was elected President of the World Squash Federation. It is not an Olympic sport, but it is important that the number of female Presidents increases.

"We are still a quite small group, so everyone is very much welcomed."

World Triathlon also appointed South Africa's Debbie Alexander as its first vice-president.