I appreciate the efforts of the folks thus far trying to bring some data to this.
I went ahead and scraped all of the data for all of the participants in the 2026 Kona qualifying races that have happened so far (did not include 70.3 Hawaii).
HERE IS THE COMPLETE AGGREGATE DATA FOR EACH RACE AND AG:
NOTE – This is just the people who were OFFERED slots, not who took them. Please let me know if you see any errors and I will do my best to fix them.
Please also send me ideas of new KQ systems to investigate. So far in this and the other thread I have seen:
- Re-weight performance pool slots on a for each race (rather than comparing to Kona times — working on this one now)
- Separate women’s and men’s performance pool + podium slots like with 70.3 worlds (AKA equal representation)
- Top 3 in each age group get offered a slot
- Time cut-off of some kind (would need a clearer way to do this)
- Distributing number of slots equally across all races
- Distributing number of slots proportionally based on number of entrants for that race
Idk who the @SlowtwitchSupport mods are here (@Bryancd ??) but I’d be happy to write up my findings from these in a full post.
(My bias – *In my day job I work as a data journalist for one of the bigger news outlets here in the U.S. I’m a M25-29 Ironman and I’d love to go to Kona someday, but I’m currently about 4 hours too slow and my chances of qualifying in 30-39 about about 0.)
(Note: I noticed an error with the gender percentages that I went ahead and fixed)*