That’s interesting, at Ironman Texas this weekend they said they had 70% men and 30% women participating.
I get that. But people are arguing saying they don’t see how they are going to get 1000 women to Kona 2026. They historically get 27-28% of women to Kona for a 1 day event (not 20%). 28% of 3000 is 840. Put 3-4 races with 50 extra slots dedicated to women and you are there.
Just added up the finishers as I was curious - 583F out of 2139 total (M&F) finishers - so that’s 27%. And incidentally, Texas and Cozumel are the only two races that give 75 slots to women. The rest are all less. So you’d expect to see a significant bump in participation in Texas if women were chasing those slots.
Put it another way, as we’ve all observed before, 13% of female finishers could get a Kona slot, while 6% of male finishers could get a Nice slot.
There’s a lot of difference in the M/F ratios depending on where you are racing. North America seems to have a higher percentage of women. I’ve done a couple of European Ironman races and the female participation seems to be a lot lower, at least in my experience. When I did Ironman Ireland in 2022 it was only 12% women.
Bring in the engineers and start building a new pier to double the size.
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Not the first or last time I have been called Talbot.
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Army core of engineers could get it done, and they already have a presence all across the islands. The funding is also there with all the various infrastructure programs. The need is there, by increasing the ability to dock more ships (I assume). But… environmental study and protests, and competitive graft nature of spending projects pulling as much money as possible to Oahu or Hawaii make it a long shot.
But I agree, Kona would be wise to go down that path. The entire downtown area needs some serious revitalization as well.
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Really? He is effectively a T100 employee. The PTN crew have outright stated their personal preference for Ironman. Their professional athlete connections have expressed the same preference. So that decision shouldn’t be surprising.
3000 athletes on course will be a mess. I’d actually welcome it being 50% men 50% women since having well over 2000 men on the course would be a giant mess. 50% men and 50% women would spread things out more. Having more legacy athletes would probably help spread things out as well.
This is also a good time for Ironman to invest in property in Kona and create a permanent presence. For example it would be awesome if they bought the Courtyard and car dealership and redeveloped them to optimize hosting the event but also turning them into an off season hub for Ironman training camps. I did a training camp there a few years ago and it was fantastic. They could have the space they need for the race and importantly be a true member of the Kona community vs an invading force every October.
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And yet Texas had 2000+ and was a two looped course. All this talk of being a mess is just conjecture. There will always be sections, whether the race is 3000 or 1000 people where a lot of bikes pile up. But surely you can stretch 5000 racers across 100+ miles of road. Obviously, they won’t be evenly distributed, but that’s 180,000 meters. Let’s just cut that in half and make it 90k, divide by 12m and you get 7500 bikes perfectly spaced out for the first 56 miles. Obviously, it doesn’t work like that as there will be packs bunching up, and big spaces elsewhere.
Couldn’t agree more. I get the sense they specifically don’t want to have these fixed assets on the ground. But could anyone tell the IM investors over the years it would been a mistake if 30 years ago they started buying up space in Kona?
As they’ve pointed out several times, they do have full time employees who live there. It would only help their situation to have a permanent presence. It just takes some big thinking. Basketball would never have gotten to where it is today if some cost cutting, afraid-to-invest management team decided the best way to play games was to rotate their pros around different colleges or high schools and use their facilities. That’s almost like what we do in triathlon.
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What nobody seems to read between the lines yet is the outcome of reducing the number of athletes in terms of their revenue.
Will we see the first >2000 € Kona slots already this year?
They increased it from ~1000 € in 2019 to >1600 € in 2023 so it is very likely to see sth similar
Ironman did a great job getting the professionals to announce the news. I think everyone that i follow has made an announcement about the decision.
For full transparency - I was for the split locations and the separate races!
When IM released their internal survey and promoted that several weeks ago, I had it in the back of my mind that, this is what might be coming down the road - so this does not come as a complete surprise to me!
Some will not be happy with what I am about to say here - but the facts from the survey of I believe 10,000 IM participants was that despite some serious initiatives, promotions and measures - the biggest of all being the Separate Races and Locations themselves, (full) IM participation for women has stayed stubbornly low (18%). Credit to IM is they did take a further deep dive into this while doing the survey and specifically asking women what the barriers and challenges were - and unsurprisingly the results coming back were that much of it was about Time. When someone would be taking that step up to racing and taking full IM races more seriously, is also right in the middle of women’s key child-bearing/rearing years, AND maybe the most important years of a personal development in ones career. My Wife is a Triathlon Coach - time available is the BIGGEST challenge she has not just with the women she coaches but all of her Clients who she Coaches in Triathlon! To take this sport to the next level, PARTICULARLY if you want to focus on full IM racing and improvement there, requires significant investments of TIME!
Clearly the anecdotal information that the community of Kailua-Kona was adamantly AGAINST a two day format and that, that was a complete-non-starter to any future negotiations, was in fact true and that IM will now have to try and wedge the whole of what they offer back into a one-day format.
I do feel sorry for the many women, both Professionals and Age-Group women, who have found the split venue, and/or the one day dedicated to them in Kona, much better - it was better. It was more fair! It did give the women the feature and focus they deserved! IM I’m sure, will try and tweak a few things for the one-day, but it will NEVER be as obvious and good as it was with a separate day or venue!
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Pretty sure it’s Ottawa?
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It doesn’t appear Ironman has their head buried in the sand anymore. I also think you’re making a bunch of assumptions about their plans. Why not give the new leadership a shot?
My gut feeling on this is that it will be very close to a 70/30 split. You will get the traditional 65/25 and then with the womens only programs it will bump up. And they will find more room, hell they could use some of the road out of town to line up a couple hundred bikes.
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100% Yes - they deeply surveyed and got direct feedback from participants (their customers)!
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I do want to let them have a shot at this - BUT there is only so much you can do with the time you have available in a day. That’s why I said, they will tweak this a bit, which they can, but it will NEVER be as good as letting the women have their own day (impossible we are told in Kona) or elsewhere - which participants voted via their entry enthusiasm and voiced in the survey, as not being what they wanted (see #1)
It’s a bit different in Kona - owing to the Championships nature of it and that people have qualified for it. There is way more parity in the Race Field as a whole than at another rank and file IRONMAM race!