Probably. They will have all of the racers’ prior 70.3 swim times. Most will have done several in the last 18 months. With just a tiny bit of analytics, IM can probably get very close to sequencing the racers by their likely swim times. There may be some outliers, but I bet those are fewer than 5% of a predictive model.

Did they change the swim start? Last year it was by age group

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the world's still turning? >>>>>>> the world's still turning

At the 2017 WC in Chatt... they had a similar starting method. 8 people went off at time and we were were all in different corrals. It was self seeding then, so it will be interesting to see if they change to a calculated time based on prior race swims. Guess, I better come out under 30min at my next 70.3!

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I’m stoked to see this, though I agree at the WC, a sub-32 swim is a lot of the crowd, so maybe that’s a case for much smaller increments. I started out as a fan of self-seeded rolling starts at IM Coeur d’Alene in 2013...least congested swim I’ve ever had. Since then, I think so many people attempt to game the system and get out ahead that it’s failing. At 70.3 VA, I listened to a group of people talk about “moving up so we’re ahead of the cyclists.” I swam :15 off my projected time and was swimming over back-floaters 200m in. No way that many people legitimately thought they were 33-min swimmers and were floating minutes later. I don’t understand why someone not super comfortable in the water would put themselves in a position for a faster crowd to overtake them. I definitely don’t enjoy being on either end of that situation.

How about IM use those analytics and assign different cap colors so it takes the guesswork out. All the red caps rolling start followed by the orange caps, yellow, etc. I don’t know how a beginner shows their prediction.