On that point, we both agree:) As I stated earlier within this thread, I find our 80+ AG and our PC athletes to be the most impressive and inspirational athletes within the IM community. I admire the pros and the top AGs, but I am absolutely in awe of our PC athletes and our oldest AGs. As Bob Babbitt says, IM is an "equal opportunity abuser" and it is from this perspective that I would argue that an IM event reflects the very definition of "equity" as all distances and cutoff times are the same for all.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/equity


equity noun (FAIRNESS)
[/url]
formal
the situation in which everyone is treated fairly and equally

I think we had a debate on this board about whether retired pros should be allowed to compete in the Age Group field or not. Well I have a new one for you, the answer is a Hard No. Dede raced Lake Placid as a pro, she's 50. She finished 6/19 FPRO Finishers.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

A few things, the 2012 race was in penticton and there were 40 spots but almost 3000 athletes it was a pretty fast day. Whistler 2013 was the first time of that event and WTC threw 100 spots at that race in order to kill challenge penticton on the same day….for Whistler conditions it was a pretty fast day…(basically any one semi fast got a spot) I only watched 2019 Whistler, it was a brutal day in terms of times.

But I’m pretty sure he’s agreeing with you, in all three examples he lists the men’s AG times we’re in a relative sense slower and less competitive than the women’s times.

My personal opinion is that if it’s a 40 spot race then any and all winners get a spot. After that you’ll have about 16- 20 discretionary spots which should be allocated on merit and performance not participation and luck as they are currently.

Really simple, apply a formula of 90-92% from men to women and then maybe group all individual AG spots within that.

For example in a 40 spot race the 40-44 AG wouldn’t be 4 men 1 woman. It would be two winners then next best 3 based on an 8-9% handicap.

Or just throw all 20 spots in the mix and they go agnostically to the best 20 handicapped performances after winners.

Because it’s a world championship qualifier the handicap could be based on AG course records in kona.

Anyways, it’s a mess but I guarantee that a bunch more races are going to be canceled so by sometime next year we’ll likely see bump ups in slots at the ones that remain.

2c,
Maurice

1. Anyone can buy search positioning on Google. And Google manipulates it as well. First hit is not meaningful.
2. That is the Critical Theory definition of Gender Equity. It is not necessarily the only or most comprehensive definition.

I’ll throw in my experience in Kona as an example of how IM is hurting women’s participation.

I’ve raced kona from the time of the mass start in 2012 to its current form. In the early ag mass starts, we were right in the middle of the race.

Then they split the men’s and women’s ag fields, and the women rested on a grassy area with access to porta potties, gear bags (fluid and nutrition), and swim warmup in the lagoon until it was our turn, and we were still part of the race. However, one year, they ran out of water on the bike and run course. The following year I asked the CEO in the master’s women breakfast whether I needed to bring extra water, or if there would be enough. His response was that older women were biologically slower, and he couldn’t help that. He seems to have forgotten that he gave others a head start.

In 2019 they split the field by gender and age groups. Masters women now wait hours on concrete with no access to porta potties or gear bags, until we watch the men coming out of the water. We are an absolute afterthought, and don’t feel like part of the race. Spectators have moved on by the time we come out of the water. The front of the race picks up draft (legal or otherwise), and we get dropped farther behind. If you can get to Hawi an hour sooner in the day, the conditions are far more favorable. We get the most heat and wind, and the least support. No one remembers by the run that everyone else got a head start, you are watching most of the field way ahead or finished, and the crowd dwindles. It feels like an expensive supported long workout more than a race. I’ve been in the sport a long time. After the 2019 race, I lost my drive for Kona for the first time. I’ve voiced my opinions to IM, but I doubt I’ve been heard. It seems they don’t want us or value us.

What the OP raises is an interesting question. I think the answer should probably be different depending on whether we are talking about Pro or amateur athletes. It's much easier to make an argument for Professional triathletes since the Olympic Committee has already pushed for gender parity in participation numbers.
A lot has been said already on this thread so I'm going to avoid repeating what has been said already.

One thing I do want to add is: how familiar are people with how slot allocation is actually made?
I'm saying this because the slot allocation over-represents women vs men in terms of percentage of slots over number of starters. In a way, you could say Ironman favours women by default in a way that happens to be dynamic (if more women participate, more slots go to women). The downside of this system is that it takes a big increase in participants to add a second slot.

Since very few races publish their slot allocation, I have created a spreadsheet that I use to calculate and estimate how many slots will go to each age group.
Here is a screenshot example of how slots may be allocated on a race with 40 slots and a small field of 1000 participants. The numbers of finishers I have manually collected from the live tracker of IM Tallinn (I can't tell how accurate this it). Although it may not be the typical race, I doubt the picture would change a lot if the same system is applied to bigger races. A bigger race is likely to have more slots distributed to older age groups and therefore less slots going to the massive AGs of M30,M35,M40,M45. I can share the spreadsheet if anyone would like to play with it and check my process/formulas.


In this particular example women would get 22% of the slots even though they are 11% of the participants. Statistically speaking, you are twice more likely to go to Kona if you are a woman.
I'm not sure what exactly could be done to have more women qualify without some arbitrary inflation for specific age groups (how do you choose which ones?).

Of course one option would be to cap at 1 slot per AG. What impact would it have on the average 30-50 man considering they probably represent the majority of IM customers? Nobody knows.

The only alternative system I could think of would be a system based on finish times similar to how qualification for the Boston Marathon is done. However, such a system would be highly arbitrary with so many variables impacting a long distance triathlon.

A different argument could be made about the "roll down" when a slot is rejected. Instead of a slot staying in the same age group until there are no takers, it could be treated as if it was an extra slot and therefore jump from one age group to the next.

Also, for many people going to Kona is a "bucket list" thing. You do it once and then never again. If a certain year sees a higher proportion of women going to Kona, could this potentially decrease Kona participation for the following year?

Finally, do women actually want more Kona slots? What problem are we trying to solve? Are there areas that could bring more benefits to women? How is gender parity among race organisers and decision makers in triathlon?

Just curious, what race that is? The women's fields are generally much smaller in Europe compared to the US. I've never raced in a field with less than 40 women in an Ironman branded 70.3 or full IM event.

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

IM Tallinn 2021 numbers but with slots set at 40.
I've updated the post to add more info.

I was supposed to race IM Maryland this past weekend but out with an injury. There were 74 finishers in my F50-54 AG. One slot. (26 total this year)

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

Except for the case where an AG has 0 athletes, and therefore its slot gets allocated elsewhere, a 26 slot race should have 1 slot per age group. All AGs then (except for 1 or two) would then have only 1 slot each.

One of the ideas that I don't think has been explored to its fullest potential is the structure of AGs themselves.

For under 45 years old, there's no need to have age groups split every 5 years. Just make one big AG for the under 45s and call it a day. We can quibble about the specific age where declines in athletic ability are apparent, but there's no reason why a 30-34 needs to be any different category than 25-29 or 35-39. While this doesn't exactly solve the issue of what to do with 45+ (or 50+, or wherever you want to set your marker), it does help produce more fair distributions for the vast majority of athletes. Most athletes would then be in the "general competition" category, with the older athletes competing for the same slots as they had before. Maybe you'd also do a 50-60 category or something like that.

Suddenly, your 500 strong "M under 50" gets ~26 slots and you eliminate the variability in fairness, at least among the men for those slots. Ditto for the women, where perhaps you'd wind up with more than 7 slots for the ~100 women due to the allocation. Or, failing that, at the very least, you'd wouldn't block a strong #2 in an AG behind a strong #1.

I think this would be interesting and a little more "fair" for the top guys but not sure about others. In the current set up you could place 3 overall but still miss out on a KQ if there are only 2 slots in your AG and 1st and 2nd are both in your AG. Seems kind of crazy to not qualify but you were the third fastest racer out of the entire race. It just seems really hard to make it fair for everyone unless you really opened up a lot more slots which would ensure like top 3 from each AG get a slot plus some extras for the bigger AGs.

Alternatively, you could just have a choose one: I want this to count towards my overall IM count (for the Kona lottery slot after 10+ IM) OR I want to KQ and don't count this towards my overall IM count.