Bifff wrote:
Triathlon should be considered a race. The rolling start doesn't make for any less drafting on the bike unless the stagger is over a long period of time, which isn't possible for an IM with a midnight cut off.
A mass start is a cleaner swim after things get sorted out in the first ten minutes. With rolling or wave starts you are always swimming into slower swimmers in the waves in front of you. Its a real mess at IM Lake Placid on the second loop.
The solution to drafting on the bike is to have less people in the race.
Rolling start still has a clock, so uhm, still a race but in time trial format.
The rolling start *does* mean there is more separation on the road and drafting is not nearly as inevitable as it is when 700 men come out of the water within 12 minutes of each other as they do in Kona.
Have you swam Kona before? Not sure about the 10 minute idea. I swam 57 in Kona and had a pack the whole way. In a normal IM, my swim does mean I swim alone after 30 seconds usually. We are specifically talking about the Kona swim start here.
In my experience, when you catch the people in the waves in front, the speed differential is so great that it is generally not an issue. Wave-based swim caps help as the other person knows they are being caught by a faster swimmer and lets them go, rather than racing someone in their wave.
No second loop in Kona. In terms of lapping people on a 2 lap course, when I catch people on their first lap and I'm on my second, I go past them so quickly they are not in my way.
Fewer people in the race sounds nice, but it means much higher entry fees or a lower profit/sustainability for IM events. People (correctly) already point out that IM is already very expensive.
I get it from an ego point of view; I love coming into a fully packed T1 and totally empty T2. But at the end of the day, people don't even know the top 10 pros, and most of them don't know the podium, just the winner. So it's really your race against your time. The wave starts will increase fairness; whether the time gaps between the waves is sufficient, we will see this year, no?
In terms of the qualifying time idea, I do not think it is workable based on qualifying times. Wetsuit vs non wetsuit swims, currents, different distances etc.
I'm surprised IM has not monetized the solution by holding a mandatory 500m time trial two days before the race. This will increase the value of the race to local communities (people have to arrive earlier) and hence IM's bargaining power to extract more free stuff from the host community. For Kona, I think it would actually work well as you have to check in 2 days before Saturday anyway. It would be a pretty fun event in my view and add a little buzz before the Thursday underpants run. BUT...the key problem they are attempting to address is congestion on the bike, not in the swim, so the wave solution can work without this additional event.