i dont understand why they didnt just go to the method they use for 70.3 WC which has a set # of slots per gender.
I think this has been pretty well explained throughout this thread. Short answer, two day vs one day races(and numbers associated with that)
what I think I find most amazing, if we give kona as 2600 participants and the currently KQ accounting for ~1800, that means ~1/3 of the race is “non qualified” avenues- legacy/women to tri/fundraising/CEO challenge/insert whatever pathway IM wants to give out to an individual,etc. I know it’s never been a “true” world championship, but I think it surprises me every time I hear just how many non-KQ the number is in Kona each year. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t be there, not discrediting it at all, I always think in my head it’s only a “few people” but yet it’s basically greaater then even the percentage of women in Kona.
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What does your version of “true” even mean. Of course it’s a WC, it captures the best athletes to fill out the final podiums on Raceday. How does adding more people to the lower end affect those podiums? Its an irrational thought, like its different swimming in 10ft of water vs 100ft..
Even the hallowed Olympic Games has that first heat of Eric the Eagle’s, do they affect the medal winners too?
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So after the next two races, Arizona and Cozumel at least the younger 2nd place and 3 rd place women that didn’t make it can blame the older faster women women 40-60 that take all the allocation slot instead of the men.
people will blame and complain either way, good now the blame isn’t on the men….. or is it.
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I almost wonder if this system is going to come back and bite them when the spring races come back. Consider the following:
- The previous system was male dominated (mostly) because male demand for Kona slots outstripped female demand for Kona slots
- Most of the fast women were either in Kona or prepping/recovering for Kona for the fall races.
- Those same fast women, should they want to requalify for 2026, would likely target spring races.
What this means is that we might well have a groundswell of very fast women all targeting a small number of races. The last time this happened (2025 qualifying cycle), women got most of the performance pool slots in TX, and close to 50/50 in a bunch of other races.
If we get a perfect storm, we could see male demand fall while female demand surges in races like TX, Jacksonville, LP and Ottawa.
The result is that we could have a lot of fast women show up, chasing a fixed number of slots.
Comparing the two systems at Texas for a moment, and we see that other than 2024, the old way of allocating slots would have given women more slots.
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To be quite clear, it did work.
If you don’t think 30% of a “WC” is excessive, we’ll just agree to disagree on high performance. And again I note, they can do whatever the hell they want with whatever pathways they want to fill their race and call it a world championship. I just always am shocked when we are talking about 2600 person feild and qualifying only acccounts for less than 1900. As I said " a few people" here or there going through this or that pathway, I get. Sorry monty if it’s shocking to me that a WC has 30% participants there that didn’t “KQ”. But again it’s their race, their rules- just as easily they could decide top 3 and your in and fill 2600 that way *if they wanted and then only actually truly gave out a few handful of non-q spots.
And again I’m saying every person there deserves their spot. I’m not arguing that. Someone upthread said make it simple- top 3 and your in. Of course that’s true “performance” based metric, but IM can’t do that because they don’t have the capacity to do that AND invite all the other pathways that they do for their world championship. Thus why it’s always shocking to me that in 2025, 30% of the field is going to be from non-KQ pathways, I wonder if we’ll ever to to a point where it’s 10% or so (the “few people” I think it should be).
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A lot of words to not answer my question, how do those folks affect the top outcome of the podiums?
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May be the wrong question? Even Eddie the Eagle had to qualify himself or been nominaterd by the british association, with sorta kinda sports related rules. There is a process for the olympics and other world championships (and yes, there are exceptions, but they don’t span 30% of all atheletes).
Upthread, someone said make it simple- top 3 and your in. That sounds excellent, right? Except the math aint mathing for IM when you have to account for Kona being a limited field of ~2600 *currently.
40 races w/ 11 AG’s x 2 genders = 66 athletes per race x 40 = 2640
Which means IM could basically do a KQ that only qualifies athletes to Kona and that’s it. It would leave no room for legacy, fundraisers, whatever tri movements or challenges they want to align with. So instead of having ~2600 “qualified” spots, they are doing less than 1900 for the KQ process. Which leaves ~30% of the athletes at a WC who didn’t “qualify” from a performance stand point that we all assume is what sport is about.
And again I understand why they have the setup that they do. It’s their business, they can run it however the fuck they want to run it. Everyone there has “qualified” in one way or the other according to IM, so they *deserve to be there; I’m not shitting on that. I’m more shocked that ~30% of the entries are from the non-KQ pathway.
The whole fucking reason IM is in shit up to their knees is because they don’t have enough qualification spots to hand out to the 2 genders, thus they have to create this in fighting for these spots and X customer gets screwed vs someone else, etc you should know this monty.
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has anyone takes the last 2 north American races Florida and Cali and using the old system pre 2019 shown the difference in how the slots would have gone.
also can someone do that with zona and Cozumel, old system vs last system vs this system. the reason I think it’s important as we might be worrying about 2 people per race, vs just worrying about 2 other people per race… so when does this end and we just get back to racing and being healthy.
OK let me do some rough math off the top of my head.
Women’s participation is 16% over the first round of races. So after outright age group winners are allocated, the rest go to Performance pool
Assume a 50 slot race, 24 slots go to age group winners
Now we have 26 left for performance pool. 16% of 26 is 4 slots.
OK fine, women who don’t win their age groups, are competing for 4 slots across age groups. This results in 12 age group winner slots, plus 4 performance slots, meaning 16 slots out of 50, or 32 percent. It gets Scott and his team to their target of 30-35 percent of slots going to women.
I THINK there is nothing to complain about on all sides and given they are going to retroactively apply this to women who just missed slots in the first third of the qual year, everyone should be happy!
I think this is a win for all parties. It’s slightly at the expense of fast men, but we’re already talking about women getting slightly more slot allocation than the participation rate anyway
Roughly they are locking in the slots for women. In a 50 slot race it is 12 for age group winners and 4 for performance pool because 16 percent of the performance pool 26 slots not going to age group winners has to go to women. It’s essentially going to always be 12 slots for age group winners and in 50 slot race with 16-20 percent women participation 4-5 more performance pool slots.
If I am counselling my women friends basically you have to be 4th in the women’s performance pool after they take away age group winners if you finished below first in your age group.
I also assume they change the KQ coefficients so that there is no derating relative to the fastest men age group (30-34) and its against the the fastest women’s age group (I don’t know which one that is in 140.6)
This is a pretty disappointing outcome. Predictable but disappointing. It “fixes” things that were not broken, and does nothing to address the things that actually are broken. At least the squeaky wheel culture warriors, and the folks parroting them, seem happy. I assume they are all well-meaning, just ignorant and/or mathematically disinclined. Optics over logic.
- Women were already significantly overrepresented (~16% of finishers, offered ~25% of slots). Now they will be even more overrepresented (will end up around 30-40% of slots depending on slot total and gender breakdown for the race). I haven’t crunched the numbers yet but I think this will push the women’s qual rate from 3.x% to 5.x% and drop the men’s qual rate from 2.x% to maybe 1.x% (someone please check me on those). It thumbs the scale even further toward women than the old system, which included the AG winners in the proportional calculation (a better approach IMO).
- It’s IM basically admitting that age grading doesn’t work. They aren’t standing behind their own system, or rather they are awkwardly only half standing behind it. “Well it doesn’t work to compare men vs women but we promise it still works to compare young vs old.” That makes no sense.
- This kills off any chance for a truly stacked female field to be properly rewarded. Or a normal female field to luck out when a weak men’s field turns out. The number of female slots now has a hard cap, too bad if you’re fast. Vice versa for the men.
Meanwhile the stuff that’s actually broken, which this doesn’t touch:
- Using the results from a single race as the yardstick for all races.
- No normalization or correction of the coefficients for things like Legacy that will skew results.
- Snowballing feedback loop effect will cause coefficients to drift further and further each year from “true” representative handicaps
- At least each gender is now insulated from this effect in the other gender, which is sorta good.
- This effect will tend to favor small AGs, which means within each gender it will get harder to qualify as a younger athlete and easier as an older athlete.
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Dev I shared this hours ago on ‘your’ main thread.
Leaving out the non full IM races KQ routes, there are 38 (have more been announced) IMs with KQ figures of 40, 55, 60, 75, 100, variously (the mean is 49 per race). Also assume an average W % finishing of 16% per IM’s spiel.
On this schema, 579 women (rolling down) will get a KQ of the total 1845. This is 31%.
The athletes who are getting shafted are @monty ‘s below:
And what about the young men, have they been addressed in this new system, or just ignored in the grouping of “men”.
and when the best women all roll up, give the men a shafting, metaphorically, in the performance pool, but still only get 3 of those slots (a ‘40’ KQ race).
I think this will probably quell the issues for a little while.
My point was that the very processes that are causing the imbalance in the old system may come home to roost in the new system. If all the fast women come back in the spring races, we may well find that they all target the same few races and would end up with fewer slots than if they had just let the thing play out
- Old pool: lots of men doing well so let’s guarantee a quota proportional to AG winners + overall participation
- New pool: lots of women doing well because the fast women came back? Now they’re stuck on the quota
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I agree with you, it is not a real WC. Rather, it is not just a WC.
IM as a private company with investors to please can’t run a solely meritocratic qualification process. For $ purposes, they have to include IM foundation (looks good in videos), IM legacy (great to retain customers), VIP guests (CEO and celebrities are good for views on social media), etc. It sounds like a lot of WC slots go to those non-competitive triathletes, but I’m sure they know what they’re doing business wise.
Call it “WC & friends”, or something like that.
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So by that logic the Olympics are also lower than a “real” world championship as you can qualify for the Olympics without actually qualifying.
Universality rules allow for 1 male and 1 female in T&F (athletics) as well as 1 swimmer to participate. Those athletes didn’t qualify by being the best of the best and are effectively participation athletes, does that some how diminish the greatness of the Olympics games for you?
My point was that the very processes that are causing the imbalance in the old system may come home to roost in the new system. If all the fast women come back in the spring races, we may well find that they all target the same few races and would end up with fewer slots than if they had just let the thing play out
I also think there is a high likelihood of this happening. But don’t worry, Ironman will just come up with a new method and retroactively give those fast women slots. 
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