There aren’t many sports where many amateurs train 20+ hours a week, are sponsored, buy for 10s of thousands of $ in gear, etc.
Longue distance triathlon is too small of a sport.
Also, who cares really. It’s fun to pass “pros” during races (well for me, not for them).
Could part of the solution simply be how we manage pro races?
Solution 1 - fewer pro races. IM stacks the deck so that all the pros are funneled into the pro series and they can support more pros at each race. Gaining your pro card becomes harder because you’re actually having to gain it against the best in the world.
Solution 2 - Limit who can get into the pro series but then make the proving ground be the pro races at other IM events (that they already run). IM limits the number of entrants into the pro series and then takes the top x athletes based on points from last year or rolling 12 month period or something - or something similar to how T100 does it.
Now you have A series pros and B series pros and a promotion system. Give the B series a similar pro series point system, but with fewer points per race - something so that the top B series pros are earning more points than the BOP in the A series and you have a promotion/relegation system. Now decide who gets in to what race based on your system, rather than first come.
Let’s not sleep on the problems of slow pro men impacting the women pro race.
But is that their fault, or the rules of the race and the RD?? Seems like we have had a multitude of threads here over the years with very easy fixes to this that doesnt involve the slower men pros, so why blame them??
Yeah pro license requirement rules that allow vastly unqualified men to race pro. Thats an objectively fair criticism. The RD’s have logistical issues to deal with that can’t hand wave away the problem
But culling the pro card doesn’t even automatically solve the issue because this is more of a race procedural issue (time between start groups), and even then it’s specific to swim+bike ability, so how do you actually solve that from an gaining your elite card? Put in specific swim paces and watts requirements?
Try it and see what happens
Right but if you don’t improve the swim demands you aren’t actual addressing the problem you’re complaining about.
IE- create a “lap” rule or something and you’ll get the solution you want. So again culling the standard still doesn’t solve the issue. So why not actually create rules that solve the solution you want to solve,
My guess is that most athletes who pro card Q are “runners”. So you can’t just cull the standard cus you’ll still not be addressing the actual issue you want to address.
I think there are too many male pro’s in the US and it’s too easy to qualify. It is silly to see pro’s getting easily beaten by AG’ers but at the end of the day, they aren’t hurting anyone (though there is an argument to made about impacting the female race). People go pro for various reasons… they want to be a “pro athlete”, earn prize money, chase a dream, cheaper race fees, earlier starts, cleaner course, access to pro only porta potties, etc. The list goes on.
Making it harder could help clean up the back of pack males that get in the way for females but I don’t think it’s a true fix. There are better fixes for that.
That’s the problem with this qualification process. You have an overall athlete qualifying for the card that is based on overall time, and we are complaining about specific issue that currently has no way of actually implementing a standard during said qualification race (Unless you add an itu style lap rule or stand down etc)
And generally most athletes in US who PQ are “runners” so they by default will be slower in swim than not (in my expeirence). So even if you cull to to 1st only, you still have slow bop swim athletes affecting fop females coming into the sport.
So if you want to cull the number of pros by all means do that. You’re not automatically fixing the biggest issue however.
Point of Order, they’re amateurs, not Age Groupers.
You’re allowed to be an amateur and not take prize money because to take prize money you must have a professional license.
Let’s take a step back and compare this a bit to golf.
In Golf, not so much in tennis. You have more than a few amateurs who are better golfers than folks with PGA Tour cards. But they choose to be amateur and hold down a real job. I guess your point is there are too many of these people. And too many pros that are just shit. But instead of shitting on the pros that do race, I think we should really focus on culling the pro card holders that are non-participants first. Get rid of them and you clean this up a ton.
Allow amatures to take money spot of a sand bagging pro. plain and simple
Then there’s no point in having a professional licensure process and just get rid of it. Make it an open game like Rugby.
Not entirely true. USAT refers to them as age groupers not amateurs. Age groupers can take prize money if the race offers prize money less than $5k.
Yes, we have heard you and just about the same with your anti carbon shoes rampage a few years ago, don’t see your ideas gaining any traction 
Jokes aside, can’t think of a good reason to use a cat system in non draft triathlon (yes, I have race both including UCI licensed U23). In road cycling part of the goal with cats is to keep the Cat 5 Fred’s out of the way of the competent racers due to space, safety and race dynamics. With LC tri being non draft (on paper at least) none of these issues matter and we can have everyone racing at the same time. So again, feels like yours are providing a solution to a non existent problem.
Back to topic, becoming pro in LC tri…it’s easy, making a living, very hard.
I’m fine with eliminating people who don’t race but what is that solving?
Let me also add. Federations the size of US will always want an “healthy” number of pros in their system. So if you cull the number of eligible spots each year, you also are going to run into a situation where x% still will stay AG regardless of that culling as well. Because is it even 75% of pro eligible athletes even take the pro card each year? I think simple math, there is apprx ~200 spots a year non-draft pathways.
A decade ago they used to have an easy to find “pro list” of names. I haven’t been able to find anything like that in years.
When USAT added the USAT scoring criteria, it became a lot easier. If you just removed that criteria itself, the pro list would decrease.
The other criteria’s are much harder to achieve IMO.
Amateur golfer prize money limit is $1,000 per the USGA on a per tournament basis.
The courses become congested draft fests, and this idea isnt only for LC