It’s basically at this point anything non-draft since olympic non-draft is all but non-existence. T100 is no where close to being “long course” but it’s much easier to just lump it all together especially when non-draft athletes go up and down between IM / 70.3 so much within seasons .
I just think with the addition of T100 racing now, your almost going to be forced to go DL / middle distance (T100 / 70.3) / IM when talking about athletes. And yes I know athletes will always move up or down a distance, but eventually we are goign to have “T100 only” type of athletes who’s seasons are going to be very hard to then evealuate vs IM type of only athletes. Again that may be a few years away and it means T100 has to still stick around, but if it does, that middle distance is going to suddenly become an distance that many focus almost exclusively at.
I understand this stuff better than you think and you’re actually arguing my case. I’m saying that the PTO ranking does not necessarily reflect who is the best. Prize money affecting the status of races is precisely one of the reasons it doesn’t.
The ranking points system is good but promoting the best athletes is not its sole purpose. I’m only interested in who’s the best - i.e., how strong the field was and how badly it was beaten.
T100’s SOF was only marginally better than Roth’s. Ditlev beat a field with approximately the same strength as Las Vegas (according to the PTO). His time was 2.7% quicker than the average top 5 (PTO’s Baseline Time for Roth). Geens beat the average time of the top 4 at LLV (there being only 16 finishers, it was top 4) by 1.4%. Quite a difference between the two gaps, considering the fact that Ditlev’s own time drastically reduced the average he was being benchmarked against. Maybe that’s why Ditlev gets about 8 more points for time (6 points per percentage point in time difference). And yet he ends up with 4 points fewer than Geens for the race.
Yes, this was a critically important argument on the internet - the excel part took just a couple of minutes though
Also, for derailing this thread, apologies to all women athletes and especially the contenders for the 2024 Slowtwitch Women’s Long Course Athlete of the Year award
You shouted?
Impacts of Taupo on the final standings are nil for the top 6.
Knibb has that as one of her scores. So does Matthews and by a gnat’s whisker fails to go above Derron. Simmonds climbs a couple of places (which is decent money). Neither Gentle’s nor Derron’s are in their top 3.
An athlete’s best gold race (essentially all IM Pro Series races except Nice/Kona/Taupo) gets a 5% bonus. And the majority of the top 15 ranked WPros have at least one ‘not’ T100.
The PTO have elevated the full and half distance IM Pro Series races to gold tier on the basis that there’s an extra $1.7M as part of the prize reward, tipping the races over the silver > gold tier value threshold.
https://stats.protriathletes.org/rankings/women
The PTO are not publishing the final 2024 rankings till they have spun out the SM announcements: are we on the top 10 yet? (during the insta hiatus while the PTO desperately tries to get those last T100 contract signatures).
first of all i should not have said you dont get the system i should have said we disagree on the interpretation how we see it.
i do agree in part i make your case as strenght of field is one aspect , at the same time most agree chavalier was flaffing around all year and put all his eggs in one basked , so in a way strenght of field is not everything which is
why i like the 3 components. at the same time while geems won he was not even part of the strenght of filed calculation for vegas so in real terms i would argue the strenght of field was in both cases the outlier .
agains a system that uses 3 components helps to outbalance outliers .
what i will say is while haug improved the world record in roth by was it 8 min i think ditlev was more or less the same time as last year i checked 1 min faster so effectively he was slower than last year . had he improved the world recoed the same way as haug he would have gotten more points .
but i do hear you i do think ditleves 2023 race was outstanding and should have been at least 99 plus points . and 2024 points should prob also been higher if you look at relaitve performance .
roth this year was more a world cup race and not a world sereis race , the likes of bishop and stratman are excellent athletes but you are not going to tell me you would add them in your top 8 in the kona fantasy league they are more int the 15th place areas and lange was like 20 min faster than 15th place in kona . stratman 2025 may well be a top 8 contender but not 2024 .
anyway given ajax bays calculation what i would say is the pto ranking is a better source than anybodies opnion …
and if we really agreee that pto racing is long course than the pto ranking is the gospel.
i do not agree of course that t100 is long course as it is closer to oly distacne racing than ironman.and iam pretty sure world triathlon agrees with me in their documents … for me its middle distance racing and so is 70.3 but funnily both gentle 2023 and wilde stuggle with the extra 10 k on bike and 3 k run . i would say wilde would have won dubai .
anyway back to the emotional argument , i was just interested why we pne would not use the pto ranking at leas as some reference if they belive t100 is long course .
Ultimately, I don’t use the rankings as they a.) overvalue certain events, b.) undervalue those where athletes have breakthrough performances, and c.) what fun would it be if we just relied on that system?
Three more articles this week: the men’s / women’s short course athlete of the year, and product of the year.
Being an Olympic year, the men’s and women’s should be pretty self explanatory (can’t upset the peanut gallery too much, will be interesting to see who yall think it will be beyond Yee and CB though just for conversation sake)… But that product of the year, will be interesting to hear. I’m trying to figure out what it new products came out and I guess the biggest one product for me would be race ranger?
Perhaps because quoting the PTO Ranking table doesn’t make copy of quality, unlike the @rrheisler /@Ironmandad chat.
Given the vagaries of performances/venues while constructing my comment above I thought the consistency of the three best scores of several athletes remarkable.
Have a look at the rankings in a few days once they are brought to 31 December (using the link shared above and the dropdown for each athlete).
The other aspect which I think needs addressing is the inexorable creep (as part of the design) in PTO scores within year and from year to year. Now this doesn’t matter ‘much’ except that this will effectively ‘weight’ the last races of the year a few % more than the early ones. The graph below shows this (and I appreciate there are other factors in play) but the SOF of Taupo (WPro) was the (warning Kelly alert) the greatest ever.
Please please please nominate Hayden Wilde, Leo Bergere and, I dunno, Kristian Blu for the short course award I want to see how @Jackets and @JoeX react
Can you outline some evidence for your point. A and B
I would agree that Roth underscored somewhat, but which races do you feel are overvalued? The female 70.3 worlds which got the highest score of the year ?
What is a breakthrough performance and which performance was not rewarded in your opinion ? Again you could say Anne haugs 8.02 Roth course record but what else
All the breakthrough performances have been awarded with world titles.
or would you not agree?
I would say that is a curve one would expect as the sport has always revolved at the end of the season the only real change is December never has been a race month there was always a peak end of may to mid July and then it was business end for 70.3 worlds usually 6 weeks before Kona. And Kona .
Best way to have everyone forgive you for the controversial ST awards for 2024 is to end with a winner to appease the angry ST masses and have a “Social Media Triathlete of the Year” award.
Has the PTO changed the way races are tiered in 2024? Couldn’t find information online. Back in 2023, Diamond-level races, which have the highest scores, need $500k in total prize money. So the old PTO Opens which paid out $600k per race were diamond races. Kona & Nice are the other Diamond races with a combined $750k in prizes.
But now, T100 pays out $250k per race. Is the PTO counting the contracts paid out as prize purses? I know they did that before for Roth so that the appearance fees that Challenge gave out counted to make it a platinum level race. Are the the year-end T100 bonuses also part of the calculation to reach te $500k threshold they set before?
If that’s the case, should the year-end bonuses from the IM Pro Series also be part of prize money calculation to tier the Pro Series races? For instances, Texas was just a Gold level race with only $175k.
I just find the rankings too biased towards athletes racing the T100 series. For example, Flora Duffy who only raced 3 middle distance events in 2024 with one podium, is ranked 10th. Nothing against her. She’s probably my favorite SC athlete of all time male or female. But there’s no way that she’s top 10 in 2024 based on those performances.
I want to see how 