Also was the location of ITU Long Course Worlds which was a major race during the '80’s and '90’s.
I doubt it. It’s certainly a more interesting course than Kona is.
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Objectively true.
That scene with Sodaro and the cars spoke volumes. I felt like Nice didn’t even care themselves about it too much. Also re-hashing the course and not creating a new race for the WC is kinda meh.
That’s just your personal opinion. The data is the data and facts are facts. While the Nice races were sold out from a participant standpoint in regard to pure numbers it was only because they were just giving away slots via (often times) ridiculous rolldowns or mega slot races for women where like 1/3 of the field qualified. Meanwhile the Kona races had little to no rolldowns. In the couple of years they allowed deferments to Kona that was taken by most of the qualifiers. People didn’t want to race the IMWC anywhere else. This wasn’t a knock on Nice. This would’ve played out the same for any other alternate location.
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You really think the French Riviera is not interesting?
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For the women’s race that was far from the case.
That’s a good point to make, but women have been open to race in IM and Kona from the beginning. There just aren’t less women racing IM because Kona is out of reach in any significant numbers. As the distance goes up, female participation goes down. As you get closer to sprints, female participation becomes closer to equal.
But I do agree that if you want to commit to long term, generational change, 4 years isn’t enough. I’d just add that, an organization like Ironman can’t afford to make generational bets you hope might become profitable after 10 years. They need to see movement towards profitability much sooner than that.
I think of all their decisions, essentially having an every other year in Nice for the 70.3 is a great idea. I think putting down roots is important for the long term and this does that.
What is intriguing about all of this is, why the delay? Surely they could have had Nice already lined up for next year. The didn’t even need to announce 2028 - that almost suppresses participation. It’s a bad move. If you’re trying to qualify for Nice and you miss it, you’ll find another race to make it. But if you know you’ve got another shot next year, no rush, I’ll get the house reroofed this year and plan on Nice again in 2 years sorta thing. It’s a small quibble, that’s aspect, but what I’m saying is what did they gain by telling us about 2028 now? And did they need to wait so long to do it?
Now the Kona announcement – well, they already had 1 day a year anyway. So why the long delay on 70.3 worlds announcement? What does that have to do with Kona? I suppose the male slots just got cut in 1/3 or more for Kona next year, so the delay there did get IM signups for Kona hunters that might not have happened? I know if I wasn’t racing Nice this year, I wouldn’t have signed up for an IM to attempt KQ next year, but would have just gone the 70.3 Worlds route next year…
I wonder if there was some delays on their end because they were trying to make something work that didn’t pan out and they’ve fallen back to this announcement?
What do we think there? Is there really any news about 70.3 worlds that they needed to wait this long for?
Maybe by waiting they wanted to ensure as many male slots as possible get filed for the IMWC this year because some percent would just say, no thanks I’ll go when it’s the 70.3? Was it all a tactical delay?
This is good news! I think many of us were expecting this to happen eventually.
I think for the pros, winning a world championship is winning a world championship no matter where it is; but for us age groupers, participating in IMWC Nice is not the same as participating in IMWC Kona. The numbers clearly show that, as pointed out in the article.
I’m curious how they’re going to do the coverage. Are they saying they’re going to have two streams, one for the men’s race and one for the women’s? I enjoy watching the races and want to see both. Does this mean switching back and forth between streams/channels? That seems awkward. I think better to invest in better coverage of a single comprehensive broadcast that can effectively cover both. How many people are actually watching anyway, they’re going to split that up?
Although, I do think it’s kind of fun to be in that group that will have had a chance to race one of the only world champs outside of Kona (StG and Nice).
A potential broadcast option that was discussed is to have a main channel (broadcast), then have a men’s only and a women’s only feed as secondary options. Whether or not they’d have separate commentary is another (I would guess probably not).
Keep in mind that we have all of one cycle worth of data. I always thought you were going to need at least two full cycles before you could really make a determination on participation value – particularly that first women’s race in Nice was always going to be an uphill battle. IM decided to pull the ripcord early.
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We really need split screens and/or quad box on the main broadcast with someone monitoring the race to be able to single in on a specific race when there is something about to happen or is happening in the moment. And then someone needs to get in the announcers ears that they need to speak to the situation.
Wouldn’t this typically be a producers job?
The broadcasts situation awareness is pretty poor.
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I think all they need is just greater diligence on their broadcast balancing both genders. There’s 9 hours to fill, and there are a lot of boring parts on the broadcast - filling it by swapping back and forth between the genders gives you twice the number of things to talk about.
One of the ideas that they can borrow from cycling is that they rotate commentators - notably there are different commentators on men’s vs women’s races. I’m not sure how you swap back and forth but if you have 2 people whose job it is to fill time for each gender, they’ll generally do a better job vs 4 people talking about everything (or the current 2 people covering everything).
Add a few more motos to ensure that you’ve got coverage of both races. Once your men’s podium has finished, switch to 100% coverage of the women’s race and do both sets of interviews after the women’s race.
Anyway, there’s lots of ideas - the easiest is just to get out a stopwatch and make sure the women get 4h:30 of screen time.
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I do think it’s a bit unfair to suggest they pulled early though. They can see the trend of women signing up for races and how deep slots are rolling for Kona. There’s no reason to assume it will suddenly explode in numbers if they continued the alternating champs into Nice next year. Nice would get EVEN harder to sell slots for. So they got killed last year in Nice, and you’d ask for them to get slaughtered next year in Nice to give it one more chance? So after they hypothetically get slaughtered in Nice, you would want them to give the round one more go, and see if their numbers are marginally better from slaughtered so they can declare things are improving the dead horse just twitched?
I think the scenario I laid out is far more likely than, next year their F-Nice numbers will be equal or better to their F-Kona numbers this year.
So it’s only from an ideological dreamer perspective that they pulled early. From the real world data perspective, they stopped the bleeding as soon as they could.
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This X1000, people just have these Pollyanna ideas that don’t have any relation to the real world and the economics.
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Nice was too hard a course, athletes want hard, just not too hard…
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Right. IM said, ‘women historically participate in long course in smaller numbers and a couple years of separate WCs did not affect that enough to make it worth our while’. The problem is that the impact of separate WCs was never going to manifest that fast. And we don’t really know whether separate WCs in the same location would have done.
One other thing I’m curious about is the polling. According to Triathlete, “Over the past year, Ironman has conducted a community-wide survey of more than 10,000 past, present, and potential triathletes, which revealed a significant majority of women and men, across all age groups and amateur/pro fields, wanted to race in Kona”. There’s a lot in that statement that raises questions about who was polled and how the questions were framed. I’d sure like to see the survey questionnaire and results released.
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Completely random thought, but I do wonder if IM could increase entries and overall participation (female included) if they simply offered the marathon portion of their race as a stand alone event inside the actual Ironman race.
Different finishers chute, different medal, but how many people would be up to run the Kona marathon during the Ironman event? You might start to see some more cross over interest from women just signing up for the marathon looking around at their peers saying, “I could do that too…”
There’d be some timing issues for when the marathon race wave starts, but it seems like a reasonable way to piggyback on the race. Since they own other running races, I assume they’ve thought about this?
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Just wanted to share Kelly O’Mara’s take as it’s probably a good idea to hear from at least one woman in this echo chamber of dudes on Slowtwitch.
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