Very clever!

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Janyne

Interesting choice of words ("to blame"). As if cancelling a possible super-spreader event that might overwhelm the local hospital scene during a pandemic is a bad thing.

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"Go yell at an M&M"

Event no longer seems special to me; this will be my last Kona. Good call on cancelling in my view given uptick in cases, does not make sense for public safety...... I will go back to drinking now instead of running.

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2024: Bevoman, Galveston, Alcatraz, Marble Falls, Santa Cruz

Believe it or not, that's actually a pretty clever move, from a marketing/nostalgia point of view

February 2022 will mark the 40th Anniversary of "The Crawl"

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

kobayashi wrote:

…seems like the Hawaiian government is to blame for this one.

Hawai'i hasn't had its own government since it was illegally annexed by the US, in a fraud of a treaty with the puppet sovereignty put in place by the wealthy haole plantation owners to protect their investments


Or something like that

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

In other news Felix is offering Messick to hold the IM World's in Roth :-)

Does anyone think that things will be good enough to host this event in Hawaii by Febrary?

If the only real way to get out of the pandemic is to vaccinate and a sizable portion of the US population refuses to be vaccinated, it would seem that options we will have will still be the same in February as now.

From an age-grouper perspective I can easily see a lot of top 2021 Kona qualified age groupers that would have gone to Hawaii in October and doing a fall Ironman early on to qualify for October 2022. This will certainly impact some athletes that thought it would be a little easier with some of the best away...

Just to list a few races...same applies to the Pro field that would like to punch their 2022 Kona (October) ticket

- Ironman Maryland - September 18th
- Ironman Austria - September 19th
- Ironman Chattanooga - September 26th
- Ironman Indiana - October 2nd
- Ironman Texas - October 9th
- Ironman Mallorca - October 16th
- Ironman Philippines - October 17th
- Ironman Portugal - October 23th
- Ironman Waco - October 23th
- Ironman California - October 24th
- and so on...

Or October 2022, or 2023, or 2024.... Seriously, it just feels like we are going to be stuck living in the same 18-month cycle endlessly.

Not at all disagreeing with the decision and I'm not at all surprised. But endless bad news is becoming overwhelmingly demoralizing and it seems like there is literally no point where this situation actually improves permanently.

At some stage Ironman is going to have to make some decisions.To clear the backlog of qualified and legacy promised athletes they will have to start offering full refunds to anyone who wants to bail out and they may have to make the big move of removing qualifying slots to most Ironman events for one or maybe even two years.
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I would suggest perhaps only offering maybe 250 slots for each regional championship and have no slots for any other race until the backlog is cleared.
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This “backlog” problem is of their own making. The orgy of slots given at CdA, Tulsa and LP made this problem a lot worse.

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Sure but it still has to be dealt with and it is going to be brutal.It has to be brutal for the problem to be fixed.
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ironman has been making decisions all along. they haven't postponed making any decisions. the company is trying its best to accommodate during a time when any event promoter of any mass aggregation of folks is bleeding money. now it's on for feb, which is 6 degrees cooler than october. some of us have raced kona in feb, so, same as it ever was!

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Reasons it may be different in Feb: 1. The rate of US citizens getting vaccinated has increased recently as the no. of cases grow. 2. Vaccine mandates are increasing and will likely increase more rapidly after the vaccines get final approval. 3. Booster shots could lead to decrease in hospitalizations.

I feel for everyone having to deal with another postponement.

Good reminder and post here. WTC is doing the best they can.

The biggest question for Q'd athletes would be if they want to chance deferring to a race that is only 4 months away. I also hope that hosts of Airbnb's are accommodating for folks who need to cancel or change their dates.

I think the chances of Oct 2022 could be significantly better than Feb 2022.

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Professional Triathlete
Owner of Blake Becker Multisport Coaching LLC / Team BBMC
blakebeck@gmail.com
http://www.teambbmc.com

Will people for KQ during fall races now get a chance to pick Oct 22 or Feb 22 KQ?

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IG -frebay | Strava

i suspect there are going to be a lot of deferral options. i'm running this down now.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

 
I wonder what the minimum number of AG-ers is to make the race financially viable?

- Will they auto transfer the *remaining* Oct 21 field into Feb 22, or let them have the 2023-2025 option. I'd imagine many/most will go for the later dates if offered, to have certainty.
- If they offer Feb 22 and Oct 22 slots (or a choice) at fall races, I think the Oct 22 slots will go quickly, or be the selected choice.
- To get a decent AG field in Feb 22 they will have to water cannon slots at the Fall races
- If Feb 22 then falls they have 100's more in the queue, and an even bigger problem....

As someone said, it will be brutal - and brutal for 3-5 years.

I think Roth will be getting lots of requests for late entries. Particularly Europeans.

The 2021 pandemic curve so far closely follows 2020. For next year why not look at 2021 numbers, see that Feb was a bad month (not as bad as Dec-Jan), and move the race to 2nd half of March?

By Oct, Kona might be in the clear, but local authorities have to make decisions based on today, and it's bad. That said, there are numerous predictions that delta will soon peak. And it's a fact that the rate of increase in the 7 day average new case count per million is slowing. Yesterday it was 414 per 1M and today was 415 per 1M. A University of Florida study a week earlier predicted the peak would come Aug 18 ... seems they are close. Fingers crossed that it soon levels and the drop begins. There is also evidence from other countries that Delta rips through the community and burns out equally as fast. But since COVID is now endemic, the question in my mind isn't whether this peak will still be there, it's whether we will be experiencing yet another peak around that time. And hopefully, a lot more unvaccinated Americans will get vaccinated after reading all the stories about how Delta is impacting and killing those who aren't.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/some-experts-see-a-peak-steep-decline-of-delta-variant-coming


https://www.wfla.com/community/health/coronavirus/university-of-florida-study-predicts-when-delta-surge-is-expected-to-peak/


https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/566212-deltas-peak-is-difficult-to-project-but-could-come-this-month

Additionally, a significant percentage of unvaccinated are getting Covid. Those that do not die will have a level of protection against it similar to the vaccine. So, while it is an ass-backwards way to go about it, before too long a large percentage of the unvaccinated are going to have similar immunity protections as the vaccinated.

Ask Sweden how that went? Or Brazilian town of Manaus. This virus keeps finding more new people to infect. We've been saying that same thing for a year now and there's still no end in sight.

OTOH if history is any indicator (1918 flu) the pandemic will last three winters and two summers and will die out. We are just about there. Next spring may be it.

Sweden took the herd immunity approach before vaccines were available. That's a guaranteed fail.
Manaus evidence of reinfection is concerning.

US has 70% vaccinated and with Delta a high percentage of the the (surviving) remaining 30% will get some level of immunity from the virus itself. The virus will not go away and it will mutate in ways that could change the game entirely. But, the current delta surge of 150K cases per day will definitely fizzle out before Feb 2022.

Go ask Israel how that's working out.

There's no getting off Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.