I am registering for a fall 2025 ironman now as a male 40-44 AG. These races are qualifiers for Kona 2026.
I’m not certain I can qualify but I like numbers and this is more of an academic question than a am I fit enough question.
I’d like the communities thoughts on what the best method is to calculate qualifying Kona slot time for any given race in any given AG.
My criteria are the following. Let me know what you think
A) anything before 2023 isn’t worth looking at since the conditions for qualifying during the pandemic and before are way different now.
2023 is when the Nice/Kona split started and anything prior to the pandemic was a different slot allocation and entirely different business environment for registrations.
B) Nice years cannot be compared to Kona years as I’m fairly certain the completion level for the Kona race years are higher. I could be wrong here, feel free to disagree.
These two criteria mean that for fall 25 races there’s only really 2023 to use as a go by which seems like a really small data set.
Recall
Fall 2022 races were for men Nice 23
Fall 2023 races were for men Kona 24
Fall 2024 races were for men Nice 25
Obviously slot amounts vary by race but at the moment I don’t believe ironman has released the slot counts for fall 25 races yet so I can’t use that to judge either.
Placing is all that matters, time is subjective. So go look at any given race, look at the top 5 in an AG, look at those times. The problem with 2023 is that in 2022 a bunch of men qualified for Kona and where then given the option to defer to Kona 2024 when the switch to Nice occurred. Probably 80+% of them availed themselves to that option. So there were very few slots available in the fall of 2023 into 2024. In general, though, in most of the larger AG you will have upwards of 5 slots. Older and younger will have less.
Just to add to the complexity, IM WI 2022 had really bad conditions, high DNF rate and slow times. 2023 the field wasn’t super deep at 1000 finishers in pretty perfect conditions. You already had a lot of the top guys qualified for Kona 2024 with the rollovers that sat out Fall 2023 races, so the time gaps were pretty big in between places in some cases.
IM WI 2019 you had to be 9:41 to be top 5 in M40-44 just to show how different the depth of field can be. I suspect you’re going to see very deep fields next Fall since no one will be qualified for 2026 yet.
At the end of the day, a lot of it just comes down to luck with who shows up on the day in your age group.
Fall 2025 has the added complexity that we currently don’t know what’s going to happen post-2026. If it turns out that the 2027 solution is for the WC to rotate around the world, there’s a non-zero chance that this is the last dance in Kona for a while. If that’s the case, then you can expect 2023 on steroids - where every fast finisher comes out of the woodwork to grab the last slot.
Now, the rumour mill elsewhere on this site would tell you that the opposite is more than likely true (that 2027+ is back in Kona), but event he chance that this might be true might be enough to coax some of the faster finishers out of hiding…
In the 40-44 AG, I would say you should plan on 9:30 finish time or better for best chance. The closer to 9 hours, the better. Should be 4 to 5 slots available.
Yes in the end time means absolutely nothing, just placings. but you can get a feel for about how fast things are if you have enough inputs. but highest on that input list is "who’ are you racing against, not the time at the end of day.
And a BQ is not as cut and dried as it used to be either, you now have to guess how much you have to beat that qualifying time by to get in. think it has gotten to 6+ minutes lately. But you just dont know going in, so you have to drill it as hard as possible, ignoring the actual qualifying time standards…