That’s a weird extrapolation? Of course anyone would take an all expenses trip to do an Ironman anywhere let alone Hawaii…
But the facts are if someone is going to have to pay to attend there are a certain number that are reluctant due to the reason I have mentioned. Why do we even do IM… Because it’s hard. Whats the value in a WC that any finisher can attend? Then it just becomes another race.
Virtually all masters world championship in most sports don’t have particularly difficult entry requirements. Often, they don’t have any requirements at all besides signing up.
Just go ahead and look it up. Cycling, Swimming, Running. Then check out track, rowing, kayaking, see how hard it is.
Ironman is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
The difference is the title and that the best show up.
I do agree that some people value the selection process. But it’s worth remembering that once you get outside of elite sports, the concept itself of a world championship is blurrier.
But the idea of a lottery-based or legacy-based Kona is for the case where Kona gets separated by the World championship. Kona then becomes like the Boston, London, or NY marathon. Highly popular races that keep selling out despite not being a WC. And then the WC is held somewhere else or rotates and it’s still a pretty popular race.
I think there’s an additional idea for a 1 day Kona that is interesting and a merge of some of the ideas that have been thrown in this thread.
You could significantly restrict the slots for the AG world championship.
Something like 1 slot per AG per race. That’s it.
100% equal slots for men and women.
And then the rest of the race is filled with a lottery/legacy system with a hefty price fee.
At that point the starting order could be something like this:
Because it’s less waves they could supposedly spread the first 4 apart quite a bit.
Because the slots for the elite AG are so few it becomes easier to manage, maybe even less drafting than today.
They might even have the rest of AG in a separate transition area in the hotel parking lot and drastically increase the size of the race. This one is not awarding WC anyways.
I don’t know if I like this idea but it’s one option, tackles a number of issues:
I didn’t realize so few women were excepting their spots to Kona for that reason
How many spots short of selling out was Kona the last time for the women?
The point is they are using too easy to qualify as an excuse for it’s too expensive to go. If the costs were half as much, they’d also likely go.
So, yes there are some people who feel obligated to dig deep into their pockets and spend money because they got something very scarce and rare. But as I said as long as you have to qualify and see in the top 30ish (male) in most cases (other than 65-70AG, etc) the slot is still very rare and will be gobbled up.
Now women is a somewhat different story, as nearly one in every two or three women who complete an Ironman have an opportunity to go to the WC. The issue there is there just aren’t as many women available, who are interested in full distance, and can pay for an Ironman to fill out every race year after year. BUT, if IM “waters down” the women’s race and still fills up a race of 1300-2000 attendees as long as it’s in the same location as the men’s race it’s a huge win over the previous number of women.
I’d simply add that IM, if anything, needs to water down the men’s field even more and push the older male AGs into the womens day and fill that race even more.
There were over 1000 more male racers in Taupo, for instance, than female ones. That disparity is even greater at the IM distance. If IM doesn’t have enough women interested in racing an event, they should strategically target those empty slots with interested males. It’s an insanely wasteful strategy for a popular BBQ restaurant to say they are going to keep 20% of their tables empty and turn away their male customers (who are standing in line outside the door) because not enough female ones turned up interested in Brisket.
The simple strategy would be allocate slots to females first, then roll down any untaken ones to the males at that roll down ceremony.
My understanding is the women Pros could still start 10ish minutes behind the male Pros, but the gap to the AG needs to be 30ish minutes so there’s no interference. Also, they need their own dedicated cameras and split screen coverage with males.
Which was the strategy they did the last and only time Kona had the 2 day event. My boss at the tri shop, he was in one of the AG’s that raced on the “women’s” day (day 1). I asked him what he thought about it- he actually liked it cus it meant he could actually watch the pro men on day 2 up close.
But again I think that strategy can work only if the 2 races are “close” together. You don’t want to be the only dudes in the “women’s” race and on the island if it’s truly during the “women’s” race timeline. There will be more “WTF are you here for” vibes. If the races are close together and the whole island is together it’ll work imo. (again I think week apart is the max time line to have the whole ecosystem together, anything longer is going to “split” it up too much).
“nearly one in every two or three women who complete an Ironman have an opportunity to go to the WC.”
I’d like to see your math on that, please, @Lurker4.
In 2023 there were 2174 women finishers in Kona (vs.1384 in Nice in 2024) compared to 2491 men finishers in Kona in 2024. So maybe they could have started an additional 300 or so women. What’s interesting is for the 2 day event in 2022 they started 2600 people Thursday and again on Saturday, so it is possible to do a one day race with 2600 starters.
2600 with the pier racking, if they used the carpark or something, it might be possible to add more maybe dependent on wave starts, drafting etc but in theory the idea that all bikes have to be only on the pier isn’t quite true, it would be possible to shift a bunch to the carpark maybe.
If it has to be 1 day then maxing the number of athletes and spreading them out might work, coupled with either an even later final finish or just make the cut off for most AG same as Roth 15 hrs or shorter. Would be pretty cool to have a 930 am start at Kona, sleep in and chill out
We’re talking about changing the cutoffs again, no idea why. The issue is the morning, not the night.
Ironman decided to go full equity on the women’s race slots, because money I guess, dunno. Women get overrepresented with the number of WC race slots they get before we went to rotating venues. Now they’re way over represented.
If Ironman wanted equality, it would take the number of male racers globally and then do it by percentages. What are we at? Roughly 70% male? I understand that Ironman wants to grow the sport, but I don’t think the women for tri 70.3 slots had any effect on growing the base of women who repeated as triathletes.
The solution is pretty obvious and very easy to implement. One day event with 2600 starters. Decide how many legacy slots you are going to allocate each year and subtract from 2600. To figure out the male/female split for the remaining slots look at the finish data from the past 3 years at all IM events and use that as the split. It won’t be equal but will be fair. For Ironman to recoup lost revenue from less entry fees they can double the entry fee. The entry fee for a competitor that brings his family is actually a pretty small percentage of his spend for the trip. There will also be some loss of revenue due to less entries buying less IM merchandise. They can tack that on also if they want to. With fewer entrants on the island compared to a two day event with 5200 slots the money spent on housing and car rentals should decrease a significant amount.
For the actual race start MPRO first, then 15 minutes later WPRO then 15 minutes later challenged athletes then every 5 minutes another group. I’d go legacy athletes then groups over 60, then whatever groups IM wanted. That would give at least 30 minutes between WPRO and fast male age groups. As far as coverage of the race, that’s up to IM to make sure it’s equitable between MPRO and WPRO.
As far as coverage of the race, that’s up to IM to make sure it’s equitable between MPRO and WPRO.
But just take the L on “equality” if the solution truly is 1 day race only works. Cus your never going to get equal coverage when all parties are on the same course at the same time, that’s pretty obvious. And that may be one hill that an race organization is willing to die on and accept they take it on the chin in that factor.
Your not going to be able to do a 1 day race and claim “equality” as well. In that instance, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
The reality is that people get excited about who is the fastest and who crosses the line first… If the men and women compete together like they have in the past the female Pro’s become the “novelty” race and the men,the highlight.
Coverage of the women is much better and the race much more exciting when they race without the guys and the female champion is the first to cross the line on the day.
That’s inevitable at this point. Ironman is still close to 80/20 men/women, and it’s impossible to make a cogent argument for “equal” meaning same numbers. “Equal” would have to be based on participation percentage as in the past. And yes, they take that hit and move on, the demographics of their brand are not likely to change.
I’m not talking about equality men and women across the board. I’m talking about within the pro’s of each having their “own day”. I think once they did that within the public image, they win the “equality” battle. Going back to a 1 day race loses that.
So yes I’m more talking about the “public image” of equality vs the actual true “equality” ability.
For many years the entire race in Kona was 1000-1500 racers.
It should not matter if a womens’ only race is 1100 people or 2500, 1100 is a perfectly viable number to run a race with (there are many IM brand races worldwide running on 500-750).
On the equality front, globally we have 50 percent of humans who are women and the fact that guys get to start lines of 70.3’s and 140.6’s more easily than women actually says a lot about society overall in terms of womens’ overall access to sport and recreation.
If IM wants its own stream to enable women doing more of 70.3 and 140.6 its all good as they are TAKING NOTHING AWAY FROM MEN.
So let’s end this, “women are only X percent of participants, men are way more”. Of course men are way more, but that does not mean that Ironman can’t have an entirely different framework for women in their sport from what men do when it comes to the framework of championships. Men as losing EXACTLY ZERO opportunity and it seems overall men have more slots annually in both 140.6 and 70.3 compared to 2017, so what’s all the complaining from the men about?
I would bet in the most competitive sport on planet earth (100m sprinting) there are more men participating in all levels of that sport, but Olympic finals have the same number of lanes for men and women regardless of depth of field for men vs women.
I think the entire issue though is that an 1100 person race for IM is not sustainable (race costs and requirements have really sky rocketed over the last decade, the “permits” required to put on a race these days is almost comical). IM as a race company likely gets the least amount of “free” services vs other race organizers. But that’s to be expected when your race entries are what they are, your going to have municipliates holding their hands out wanting a piece of the pie as well. So I don’t actually think IM has that many races going on with less than 1k athletes. Generally when that happens, that race is booted into the “discontinued” category.
That’s the entire issue, IM Nice Women’s race entries are scaring the shit out of IM’s PTB’s and making them rethink this whole 2 world champ locations per year idea.
No ‘they’ aren’t. The women I know who knocked back Kona have plenty of money, annual European holidays, turn up to squad in their new Tesla /BMW, discretionary spend is not a problem.
They are driven professional women however and both told me the same story. They felt embarrassed at going up taking a slot when the announcer was basically begging/giving them away.
You seem to struggle with the concept that scarcity creates demand.
An Olympic sport or a professional sport is not analogous to a paid participation sport owned by private equity for amateurs. The revenue streams are completely different. You keep making this comparison but it’s an entirely different business model.