On the one hand I care that they get a decent amount of participants at the reboot event to give it another go and build from here. If the number is just under 1400, I care that it was a “good starting number”, but I don’t care if it was 1301, 1345, 1390 or what the precise number is.
It is a good start and I hope that the extended Davis family can bring things to a commercially viable volume (especially now that St. George is dead)
Just be honest with the numbers, is this asking too much?
I just smile when it went from 1700, which monty never answered, to 1500, to now who cares. I wish them luck, but when the expectations were started at 4500, well, …
Long course is dead, unless you are Ironman 70.3!! So, what are you betting the number will be next year, assuming the race happens?
I"m not really sure why you are hating so hard on Wildflower. It is one of the coolest events in the world! What Colleen and her family are trying to do is not an easy task and should be applauded for their efforts! As Dev mentioned, with no St. George next year I would expect them to atleast double their numbers. If they can secure collegiate Nationals for 2026 or come secure another USAT event, that will get them closer to the 4000-5000 number.
I don’t know about double, but almost 2300 St. George racers will be looking for an alternative. Being the same weekend and in the same relative geography, without question Wildflower 2026 will be a beneficiary of St. George dropping from the calendar.
The irony is Wildflower has everything that almost every race does not? What is it?
Well Wildflower does not get in the way of any medium or large community. The race gets airdropped into a place that no one is really at, the festival breaks out in a temporary “encampment” with almost no drain on a town. We get in almost no one’s way at Wildflower.
St. George got put adjacent to Wildflower to kill Wildflower drawing away pro field (and WF had its bad luck with drought years) and drawing age groupers away.
Eventually WF died.
But St. George killed itself by unwelcoming itself to a community that no longer wants to be inconvenienced and just as that is going on, WF revives itself.
It’s largely self contained, and roughly you gotta bring your food and shelter and tri gear, but in doing so, we all do our part to race without getting in the way of a town. It’s like the ulitmate “self sufficiency community event”.
So it’s almost like we’re back to 1989 at Lake San Antonio with no medium distance race in the South West US in that window !!!
The community was supportive of the race, the PGA came to town and wanted to run an event that same weekend and their $ was much larger without any inconveniences.
Agree on the community support. I volunteered at the World Championship held post Covid and the volunteer thank you dinner was astonishingly large and a lot of fun.