Sure that’s the nature of the beast. But does the cost go up 10%, 25%, 50%, or at all if we are talking 5000 athletes vs 2500? I think we have to consider that. Maybe it doesn’t change at all for somewhere like Nice but how many other locations are like that (in a big city with lots of accommodations)? And aren’t we talking about talking rotating the WC vs staying in one location? What other locations would be similar to Nice for accommodations? Honestly asking here cause I don’t know.
I wish I had been able to log into the forum closer to Nice and be part of that conversation but only recently got back in. Just another opinion here but it surprises me how many people seem to like the idea of having 5000 athletes at a venue. From my perspective that does nothing but take away from my experience as an athlete. Lodging is more challenging and more expensive. Rental cars are harder to find. Restaurants are more crowded. Volunteers are harder to round up for 2 separate days. Having been in Kona in 2022 I saw how this absolutely doesn’t work there. While i see the need to give men and women their own days i don’t see the appeal of having this many people at the same venue at the same time. Clearly i am in the minority here because 70.3 Worlds has never held any appeal for me and they seem to consistently manage to get very full men’s and women’s fields for a 2-day event. But to me at this point I would rather just sign up for a regular Ironman at a cool venue and pay half the price and not deal with the extra people and being forced to go in age group waves where i always seem to get stuck near the end and swimming around people and you need to give me more of a reason to sign up for a WC race than just having to qualify to be there. One thing i see no solution to unless we go back about 15 years is having the women not always feel a little secondary. If we are on a different day we are not followed as closely. When it was the same day the age group women were always tagged onto the end. Just feels almost inevitable no matter what we do. Again i have no solutions or ideas on what should be done and understand why it is probably impossible to go back to how things used to be. I mean I’m old enough to have raced Kona when we all started at the same time. Mostly just not understanding the appeal of 5000 athletes in the same place for 2 separate days of racing. And also heard from some of the Ironman crew who worked Kona in 2022 and said they would absolutely never put themselves through that again. It was just way too much.
I think you’d be fine for hotels/airbnb for 5000 athletes for any reasonably large city or any tourist space. Just going down the list of existing race locations…
All of which are major metro areas currently hosting an IM race, or have enough background tourism that hosting 5000 people is a drop in the bucket. You could probably add other areas like San Sebastian, Marbella, Tallinn, Sacramento, etc that would do just fine in a pinch
Nevermind there are also a number of major metro areas that are close enough to an existing race that you could move the infrastructure to the nearby metro and be fine if it was hosting a one-time WC - Jones Beach to NY, Rockford to Chicago, Tremblant to Montreal, Lahti to Helsinki, etc.
Can you please just then merge this thread with the other recent thread on this topic where two women posted their experiences racing both Nice and Kona WC so we have women with experiences in both races all in one place?
Thank you.
As fas as the big island goes, they could do both genders on the same day, but put one at the 70.3 swim location and have them start the bike south. Put the other at the usual Kona pier heading north on the bike. Run could be converged or not. Rotate men / women each year.
It would complicate transition and add logistics for 2 swims. But you’d get one road closure for one day without having men impact the women’s race. Also it could handle more people not limited by pier size.
There’s also more lodging up where the Hawaii 70.3 starts.
I think in general our culture of volunteerism is dwindling as we get more reliant on our devices. We lost a local promoter here right after the pandemic and anytime we volunteered (we got a free race out of it) my wife and I were like 2 of 4 volunteers. I’m kinda done with accepting a free race if it means we can keep a local promoter. We’re going to start volunteering more for races to support those who allow us all to race.
If this thread is widening out to include opinion on when and where, then it should widen out to include all options. As a one and done Kona finisher (at my level you finish then wonder where you came) I was of the opinion that the experience in Kona was unique and holding the race anywhere else was not the same. But I have come to another conclusion regarding a Wold Championship.
All of the original Olympics were held in a common arena. But the modern games have been held successfully around the world. I would suggest that should also be considered for the IM World Championships.
We now do it with the 70.3 event and no ne complains.
It’s time to take the show on the road.
ps There’s nothing to stop having a legacy event in Kona.
Indeed. Take it (140.6 WC) around the world and leave a legacy age grouper race in Kona. Everyone is cool with a rotating 70.3 Worlds, a rotating ITU Worlds (or whatever we call it), a rotating Olympic games race (every 4 years). There championships take on their own life that is not linked to a place. People go because of the competition and the people/competitors, not the location.
Heck even the Tour de France keeps changing every year, it goes outside France all the time (this year in Italy) and this year it ended in a different place in a different format.
It’s good to see yet another opinion on the race. They don’t have to be all aligned with each other nor aligned with my own personal view. The view will differ whether you’re French, European or e.g. American (and suddenly complain there’re no lifts but only stairs everywhere).
I personally liked almost everything about the race last year, apart from paying 1500 USD for it and my own mediocre performance on the day.
The reason it works for 70.3 because 70.3 doesn’t have the history of a full Ironman. 70.3 came along in the mid to late 2000’s right? So it’s 15-20 years old and they started rotating it after a few years in Clearwater and then Vegas. It doesn’t have the history tied to the location that Ironman does.
The reason it works for 70.3 is the competition and the people. Same reason for ITU worlds, Olympic Games, UCI World’s, FIFA World Cup, Superbowl etc etc all rotating venue and keep in mind that 140.6 “worlds” moved from Oahu to Kona in the first place.
If triathlon was not bigger than Kona the first round of IM’s in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada (Penticton), Germany (Roth) would have never worked out in the first place. They would have died out because no one cared about the competition, but these races grew and thrived without being in Kona in the first place!!! Then we have full IM’s all around the world.
The sport is OK without a championship in Kona. We’re holding ourselves back thinking we need to be stuck in the past. The only thing certain about the past is IT IS FINISHED. We can repeat the past and hope to re create the same thing, but the ship has sailed. The sport is too big globally for what Kona can support. Nostalgia in me wants my Kona race from 2006 (and my legs from 2006), but all of that has past. Time to move into the future.
Your original words were “people are cool with 70.3 worlds rotating”. I pointed out why you can’t compare 70.3 worlds and Kona. They are not the same in the view of the majority of triathletes.
Your other points have validity but it’s not as an easy decision as you seem to make it. Theres a lot more to consider than just “hey 70.3 does it, so let’s do it for 140.6”.
From talking to people, if you’ve raced Kona, you are okay with it moving. If you’ve never raced Kona, you are angry with it moving, because of the history. Watching it on TV for years in Kona motivated so many people to try to get there. I’m not interested in trying to get to Nice and I have raced Kona. I do think it would be interesting to make Kona a normal 140.6 at this point so people could have that piece of history. I’m also okay with the World Championship moving around, but I’m not interested in Nice at all so i really hope it moves from there soon.
While I agree with your point that there is more emotion “attached to Kona” as history has shown soon as you move the Brooklyn Dodgers to LA people get used to it. Yes, there may be some short term noise and pain, but generally people get used to the “new thing”.
Right now the reason Nice is not working so well is because people can wait out a year for Kona. If you make them wait 5 years or give them no certainty, a bunch of people for sure will quit the sport, but we’ll have new ones coming in. The sport is largely here to stay. We can lose the people who love Kona and onboard a larger group of people who are new and will just shrug their shoulders during our Brooklyn to LA move “moment” and then get on with life in the new format.
These types of things are organic over time. A bunch of people who were around 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 years ago always want it to be the same way as when they were around. That’s the way things roll. People always feel their era “was the best” and everyone who comes after them is messing it up. Fortunately my first tris were 40 years ago, so I got to watch every 5 years people complaining about “the new version” and how screwed up it is compared to 5 years ago and guess what…it just changes. Some things better, some things worse, but if it was constantly getting worse the sport would be dead not and it is isn’t.
So I say, “trust that things will evolve and shake out”. You may not like it initially, but as long as it does not die, work with the new thing to make it flourish
I race Nice 4 years after racing in Kona and the first thing I said after crossing the line was “this was waaaay better”. As it turns out, I qual’d for Kona at rolldown, then I went to Kona that fall and crossed the finish line there and said, “Yeah, Nice was definitely better”.
I happen to speak French, went to Nice for my honeymoon 16 years before racing there and 26 years after first visiting there, but I am an outsider there versus Kona, where I may pass as an island local, so I don’t think the speaking French part makes me blend in locally skewing my opinion. But I get that many in North America may have zero interest.
I’m personally not tied to Nice, just a 2 day event for men and women in the same place and if it can’t be Kona (which aparently it can’t be), then let’s move on.
Also I do get the “quest for Kona”. I first qualified exactly 20 years before racing there my first time (1986 vs 2006), declined my spot and then failed to qualify for the next 19 years. So I do get the “I gotta go do it”. But in hindsight if they killed Kona 5 years into that 20 year window, on the one hand I may have quit, on the other hand another person who is not me would step in and take slots to the new venue.
As long as Ironman has new customers, they are fine. They don’t need to care about one of us if they get one replacement !!! And 70.3 shows they keep getting new customers all over the world (in a way 70.3 series cannibalizes 140.6 anyway)
So, you run a business right. Let’s say you decide to move your HQ to the Yukon, your investors pull their funding, your employees quit, and none of your customers renew their contracts. What happens to you?
You are advocating for something that doesn’t follow the fundamentals of the ironman economy. Perhaps they shouldn’t have built up the lore, but the lore was set in stone even before the 2000s. Kona is what made Ironman and you’re asking for them to risk all of that, for what exactly? Kona is magic. What’s another magical place in the world that can match it? Fiji? Mykonos? Madagascar?
Corsica is pretty sick.
You’re talking to a guy who spent 7 months in a French Battalion (time of my life), so France could be great. Maybe Marseille? Dunno. But running 4 loops on the board walk sounds about as awful as running 3 loops around Tempe Town Lake. Great for your supporters to see you, but that’s a lot of cement and no undulation.
How are you defining “working well”? From IM’’s perspective, I think Nice 2023 was successful as they got the number of athletes high enough to make a profit (someone can correct me if I’m wrong on that). Did a lot of NA athletes turn Nice away because Kona was a year later? Yes absolutely. But someone filled their slot and that’s all that matters in IM’s eyes. Now the women’s race was a different story and not as successful. Is that because of Kona or is that because their is less women willing to travel to Europe or they just aren’t appealed by Nice?
Now let’s say you move IMWC out of Kona completely. Do we realistically think any of the above is going to change? Will more NA athletes be willing to go to Europe, Australia, etc for a IMWC? Or will it just be like when 70.3 worlds is overseas? Someone might say that it might over time but if you rotate the race, the appeal isn’t always going to be there for everyone each year(which is fine). Some years will interest NA athletes more than others.
In essence, I don’t think it will be any different than it is right now with Nice if they move the IMWC away from Kona. Your athlete distribution is just going to vary based on location (duh). We just hear more of the “don’t move away from Kona” because this site is NA based, Ironman is NA based, and most athletes are NA based. And Kona appeals more to the NA athlete than any other nationality.
Are you sure that Kona is what made Ironman? Or was it Oahu? Or was it the people who raced and the coverage brought home. Because if Kona made Ironman, all the other Ironmans that started in the mid 80’s around the world would not have materialized and gained traction. It was the competition and people.
Having said that, I agree, that the packaging of Ironman with the Kona visuals and lore on TV (NBC coverage) helped create the hype. But now we are way past network TV. No one watches an Ironman production on network TV, so a new story can be crafted.
We have not yet founds out if Ironman can survive in a No Kona format, because people just wait 2 years to return to Kona (particularly the die hard FOP people who want to go over and over again). But rotating 70.3 Worlds filling out 5000-6000 athletes every year shows athletes from around the world will go without a Kona carrot. Roth sellout every year shows athletes will go race the distance without a Kona carrot.
You mentioned in your post employees quitting, but I don’t see how that is relevant. Ironman employees are in Tampa and all around the world. Moving around where they sell product won’t change that. But if they don’t make money, yes, investors/board will come down hard. Also you mention “non of the customers renew”, but I have proof that thousands of customers qualify for and go to 70.3 Worlds each year in a rotating format, so there is proof that THEY DO RENEW !!!
As for 4 loops being boring, until you do one, you won’t know. It actually turns out to be very interesting but that is a personal thing.