Originally published at: IRONMAN Revamps Kona Qualification System to Increase Women’s Performance Pool Numbers - Slowtwitch News
Age-group competitor Julie Worth competes at the 2025 IRONMAN World Championship in Kona. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon
It all seemed like it should work. When IRONMAN announced its new Kona Qualification system in early July, the concept of a performance-based qualifying system based on both age-group winners along with “athletes, who on a relative basis within their gender and age group, are most competitive” seemed to make sense. Just over a third of the way into the 2026 qualification process for Kona, though, IRONMAN has decided to change the system to ensure more women earn qualifying slots in the “performance pool” of those most competitive athletes.
As a quick primer, the system announced in July offered an automatic slot to the winner of each age group, with the ability for that slot to roll down to the top three. If none of the podium finishers took the slot, it would be placed in the “performance pool” slots. Those performance pool slots included all the remaining qualifying slots from the race and were handed out based on an athletes’ competitiveness based on how close they were to a “Kona Standardized” time.
Slowtwitch forum users will be all too familiar with the issues that IRONMAN acknowledged today in its release talking about the changes to the Kona qualification system. IRONMAN notes that “approximately 96% of performance pool slots are going to men, and 4% to women.”
Based on IRONMAN’s testing of the new system, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the performance pool slots should have been going to women. That, combined with the age-group winners slots, would have ensured that roughly 30 to 35 percent of the Kona slots would have gone to women. All of that hasn’t been working out. According to IRONMAN, for the first third of the qualifying races:
- Men have represented 84.4% of overall finishers, while women have represented 15.6% of finishers.
- Based on first-offer acceptance, women were offered ~24% of slots and accepted 20.3% of slots overall.
- Approximately 15% of women’s Automatic Qualifying Slots have rolled to the performance pool (i.e. have not been accepted by women’s podium athletes). By comparison, only 3% of men’s Automatic Qualifying Slots rolled to the performance pool.
- These results have reduced the actual slots women are receiving and negatively skewing actual slot allocation from events.
Initially IRONMAN seemed ready to let the system play itself out. Officials felt that part of the reason all this was happening was because, based on global rankings, roughly 60 percent of the top age-group women were racing in Kona (vs about 20 percent of the top age-group men who were in Nice), so most of those women were likely to enter races either later in 2025 or in 2026, so the system would catch up. They also note that since performance pool slots were combined, since more women passed on slots those slots were more likely to go to a man because there are about four times as many men competing.
With so many people up in arms about the qualifying process right now, though, IRONMAN isn’t going to wait to see if things play out.
New System
IRONMAN has announced that, starting with IRONMAN Arizona this weekend, it will be making the following changes:
Performance Pool Split by Gender: Performance pool slots will now be awarded separately for men andwomen. Men and women will have their own performance pools, and the number of slots in each gender’s pool will match eligible age group starter representation in that race, thus preserving our performance-based allocation principles while supporting distribution across men and women
Automatic Qualifying (Age Group Winner) Slots Remain within Gender: Winner slots that previously rolled within the podium of the respective age group prior to moving into the overall performance pool, will now roll down within the respective gender’s performance pool.
Provide Retroactive Winner Slots to Performance Pool: For IRONMAN races already completed in the 2026 qualifying cycle, we will retroactively apply these changes and offer slots to any athlete – women and men – who would have earned a slot had these changes been implemented initially. This means the 24 women’s Automatic Qualifying slots and 8 men’s Automatic Qualifying slots that rolled into the combined performance pool so far this season will be retroactively offered to the men and women who would have earned these slots. In addition, we will retroactively allocate performance pool slots from past races to athletes who would have qualified if the performance pools had been split between men and women from the beginning (44 slots will be retroactively awarded to women). Retroactive slot allocation will be made automatically in the coming days to eligible athletes. If the slot is not taken, it will continue to be offered to the next highest-ranked athlete within the respective gender.
We’ll have more analysis of today’s announcement for you later today. In a conversation with IRONMAN CEO Scott DeRue earlier, he said:
“We did not design the system initially, or now, to manufacture an outcome around age distribution or gender distribution or anything of that sort. We’re really trying to design a principled system that is rooted in the performance-based philosophy that ensures that every athlete, regardless of age, regardless of gender, has an equal opportunity to qualify based on their performance. And that’s what’s motivating these changes here as well.”
“We don’t have a particular goal around gender distribution or age group distribution or anything of that sort that we’re trying to design the system to achieve,” DeRue continued. “We’re really grounding it in the principles of this performance-based philosophy and what we think is ensuring an equal opportunity to qualify. And so we feel pretty good about that in terms of these changes being aligned with that philosophy and approach.”
DeRue also said that IRONMAN will continue to monitor the Kona Qualifying system and will make additional changes it as needed.