devashish_paul wrote:
So for all the 60+ crowd saying WTC is throwing you under the bus, they are not. They have been treating this group very favourably in the past 10 years at the expense of 30-49. At one race they are helping the 30-49.....please forgive them for actually doing something fair.
Hey Dev. I don't think combining AGs (as has been suggested) is leveling the playing field. I think that move plays against the older AGs very strongly. Individual endurance sports do not allow older individuals to compete against younger ones. What if BQ qualifying time for all AGs was a hard cutoff? Theres a reason they've applied an algorithm to provide a systematic and gradual increases in BQ times for older AGs. Otherwise, if there was a hard cutoff then all of the "available" spots would be taken by younger individuals. Then we can have a discussion about % participation vs % qualifying for WCs except then it will be a larger disparity for older populations that is very close to 1% which is not very fair.
If you look at Kona this past year the first place male 45-49 would have placed 24th overall if he had to race against all M 30-49. At other races, the 2nd or 3rd place wouldn't even place top 20 racing against a combined AG. It gets even worse for a 75 y/o to race against a 50 y/o. That is absurd.
To shift towards fairness, I like the idea of making only certain races offer KQ spots. I do not, however, like the idea of combining AGs. And this is coming from a 31 y/o male who would benefit greatly from that. (**the below is pure observation, nothing more)
I think its also interesting to note that everyone keeps talking about how Kona should be about the best of the best and that the younger AGs should have more representation because of their numbers. I did some basic math on KNY's post in the IMCHOO thread about wetsuit s non wetsuit.
The younger male AGs 30-49 had an average of 28% elect to keep their wetsuit and forego AG awards or spots. That 28% represented 276 racers.
The older male AGs 50-79 had an average of 24% elect to forego awards or spots and that % represented 139 racers.
For females it becomes 24% and 14% for younger and older respectively (30-49 & 50+)
I realize this is NON scientific at all and represents only ONE data point out of 41 worldwide races. But at face value, more "younger" AGers were not racing for Kona than "older" racers. Broken down farther, the "older" females and Females 18-29 had the smallest percentage opt out of awards. So for arguments sake, the demographic with the largest representative population also has the largest % that is not racing for Kona.
Again, those numbers are crudely punched for ONE race. It is not an argument, just an interesting observation from ONE race that I thought was pertinent to the discussion of fairness based on representation. I would happily change the observation if I had a longer break at work and could crunch more race numbers.
J