Expanding this line of thinking, perhaps they should be using the 50th percentile or even 75th percentile in an age group for the coefficients. You wouldn’t want to go too low as you’d start getting people that had fluky bad days, but this would be more representative of the people getting the final slots at a race.
At Muskoka 70.3 2022 they had slots for St. George worlds 2022 and for Finland worlds 2023
That was in the old system, and if you took a slot to one race you were out of the pool and the combined slots went to the next person.
So I would guess that they have ranked slots of 2025 in age group and performance based age graded list and if you take a slot from either list you are out of the pool. My guess is they do 2025 first and get all those athletes who take 2025 slots crossed out of the 2026 ranked list but if you decline a 2025 age group ranked slot you can take a 2026 age graded slot, but you can only get one slot from doing one qualifying race (you can’t do one race and qual for both years)
This chat has been carrying on, with concrete examples, in the Kalmar Copenhagen thread. And some useful discussion risks being lost there.
So I come here to offer some observations.
IRONMAN have adopted and communicated a formula for their Kona Standard which is easy enough to understand and replicate on available data. It may have mathematical weaknesses, as pointed out above by clever people, but its transparency and utility to generate an ordered list, for those that have mastered multiplication and sorting, is a strength.
As with all changes there are ‘winners and losers’: its perceived merits may depend on the {rose} tint of the subjective lens.
That every AG div #1 (or podium sub) gains a slot all but ensures a floor to female participation of 25%. It’ll be clear by the end of the year what the actual M/W split is likely to be: I shall guess 33%.
Undeniably, the quality of the field will rise: there will be less slower in AG Div athletes. Worth considering if the time limit can be shortened to, say, 16 hours: Kona styles itself as a ‘World Championships’ not ‘just another’ (even more expensive) participation race.
Time limit shortening would allow greater separation in particular between WPros and the first AG Div start and between divs (two minutes more). In mixed field ‘World Championship’, the infiltration of the lead amateur men into the WPro front end of race (top 10) is a poor look. But I guess the older Legacy programme athletes (assume that remains a ‘thing’) throw a spanner in that idea.
In practice, the ‘app’ provides a Kona Standard factored order on their phone for interested participants/supporters ‘at the end of the day’. I suggest there is merit in having it generated and published online faster. Its presentation would be improved by listing every AG Div #1 first (ie top 20/21/22) and then the non-winners in Kona Standard factored order.
How about maintaining/publishing it in near real time (an hour delay say)? Every athlete’s splits are being shared in real time: these can and do generate an AG Div lead order and equally as easily generate a Kona Standard factored lead list, acknowledging that the wave start complicates. But the slow swimmer/excellent biker then runner will be ‘down’ early on anyway.
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There’s no need to shorten the cut off. They can accomplish the PRO/AG split simply by adjusting the AG start order. They know the relative speed of each AG. Having a few not fastest AGs start right after the WPRO creates the additional separation between the fields without having to add a larger gap or shorten the race time.
As for publishing the list ideally it would be live updated in the app the same as the overall AG rank. They could simply have a separate category for the WC standard and have it sorted by the adjusted times with the adjusted time displayed. The pdf is a nice stop gap but shouldn’t be the end game.
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Right, you would think so so and yet M55-59 started DFL in 2024.
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In 2019, there was 20 or 25 min of separation between fpro and the first age group wave. It worked really well. No need to lengthen it anymore.
Had Ironman made public which scores it threw out in each AG? If not, we can’t exactly call it transparent.
Right, you would think so so and yet M55-59 started DFL in 2024.
And is last again in Nice WC 2025
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Am i missing sthg or the age graded file is no longer available in the IM app?
Vichy 70.3 → missing
Tallin 70.3 -->missing
Zell am See 70.3–> missing
Not very convenient for those wondering whether they made the cut
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From the Kalmar/Copenhagen thread
The IMWC is two competitions wrapped into one.
There’s a ‘proper’ championship for the best in the world at long (full) distance. That’s the ‘Pro’ race and comprises athletes who really are top tier, not just pseudo-pros whose fed have given them a piece of paper on criteria or none. They are (almost completely) aged 23-44.
Then there is a ‘masters’ competition divided into 5 year divisions. Oddly (and I compare this to virtually all other sports) triathlon allows athletes in the 18-39 bracket to pretend to themselves and others they are racing a world champs. Nearly all sports who run ‘masters’ championships start the age groups at 40 (some 35, do the swimmers feel the need to go younger, market forces).
Of course because triathlon is young and its long distance has been ‘taken over’ by a commercial entity IRONMAN - to the massive benefit of athletes and the sport - a facet of its business model requires that the younger men and women be offered the carrot of a ‘world championships’ for which they have to qualify.
So your “most competitive” is entirely applicable to those athletes old enough to race as ‘masters’ (ie 40+) and the management of a scarce resource (a space on the pier) needs to recognise that.
“it’s no (sic) fair that someone with a 12 hour IM jumps to the top 3 in the entire race” - what are you on about? there’s no "jumping to the top in the entire race. The results arranged by time show who’s fastest overall and in each div. The factors are applied to create a performance table to inform KQ awards.
If youngsters (under 40) need a greater competitive challenge they need race regular IMs aiming to get good enough to earn a professional licence. And if ‘racing in Kona’ is so important to them, to get a whole lot better still and earn a pro KQ. As a sop (and historic precedent and business model) IRONMAN allow these amateur men and women in prime of competitive life a Kona outlet.
The age graded files are available for download on IM website (at least for Vichy 70.3, I did not check for the other mentioned races)
Indeed, this is super annoying. A mate of mine did Zell am See as M40 and came 2nd with the clear goal to get to Nice 70.3. Naturally we tried to get any info on whether his time would have been enough as there were several fast but older Age Groupers too. Luckily, we found out that the winner of the ZaS Age Group did Sweden a few weeks prior and qualified already for Nice, hence automatic 70.3 WC slot for my mate - but jeez, IM it can be done way easier…! Jönköping had Age Graded results in the App listed.
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I agree this is annoying. I had to use Excel to compute the performance pool rankings before going to the allocations ceremony.
It would be pretty straightforward to have the performance pool ranking almost live in the app… but I’m not sure the majority of IM and 70.3 participants care about that.
Pretty sure the top of the Vichy male pool is the chap who won IM Lanza about 10 years ago, good luck going up against him in your AG.
It is him. He won IM tremblant 2012, Lanza 2014, Alpe d’Huez 2019. He is top of the male performance pool and also won overall 
I finished 4th in his AG 
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Its also at least two other things:
- A reward for legacy athletes - to keep racers in the IM participation pipeline who wouldn’t otherwise qualify on time (however calculated)
- An inspirational story generator for NBC-type broadcasts (or however this will look like going forward)
These two functions are mostly unrelated to the proper championship and the master’s competition and can serve as advertising/retention for IM’s other races. They impact the competitions in so far as they’re occurring at the same time and place as the other races (and do take up spots on the pier). If the idea is to have “The best 2500 athletes” or some variant of this, there’s a sizable number who don’t meet this criteria on strict time/performance metrics.
You could probably distill those two, along with the pro competition, along with the age and gender competitions, down to:
“A masterclass in cultivating scarcity around a marketing and sales event used by a firm to generate a positive rate of return for investors.”
The more we distill it from a certain perspective, the less useful the definition is from one perspective (and very helpful from another).
Yes, obviously its that too.
My point though was that there are two types of athletes at the event:
- Athletes who qualified based on single-day sporting performance criteria
- Athletes who qualified based through other means
We can quibble about what the optimal sporting criteria may be or whether it should be the same for the pros as the age groupers who qualified (e.g. what does it mean that an M30 qualified when all the top athletes are in the MPro division?), but at least the M30 and the MPro share the same path - they were faster than others at a race, however you want to define categories, handicaps, or coefficients.
The others are in due to factors other than beating others at a competition. We can call it a WC, and that means different things whether its a pro WC or a master’s WC, or even the hybrid we have - but there are also people there who are competing because they met some other criteria.
Obviously I’m not saying one is easier or harder (If I qualify, getting my ticket will have been easier than the one-legged guy with cancer) - just that if we’re calling it a WC, there are those who fall outside what most would consider a WC-type entry (even considering the broadest definition). Even the Legacy program falls under this - I don’t think there’s other Masters WCs that permit entries based on longevity in the sport vs performance based metrics.
Likely correct, and we as a sport are ahead of the rest of masters sports and setting an example to be followed, not following…And I just thought of another WC I ran in where it was open to anyone, the 5k masters WC in Carlsbad. And it didnt matter one bit that me and others were running in the high 15’s or low 16’s, the fast guys were still up front doing the pointy end of AG competition.
So in your mind a Special Olympian isnt an Olympian or an Olympic Champion because that athlete wasn’t the fastest in the world if they didnt have fastest time between the comparable Olympic event.
XTerra also offers legacy slots (similar to IM) to their World Championships
Boston while not a WC is the premier qualifying race for Marathon the Quarter Century Club
Comrads has the Green Number Club
Many premier ultras have a stones style system including Western States, Hardrock and UTMB
Heck even the Olympics at the end of the day are somewhat of a participation award for some athletes. There are caps on how many athletes are allowed to compete in an event so often some of the best in the world are excluded (GB and German Tri are great examples). There are athletes who make it in simply bc they were the best of the worst or they were the only athlete in their country who was kind of sort of worthy of being an Olympian. At the end of they day they compete and are still Olympians without any asterisk.