Thanks for asking. Admittedly, I’m struggling to answer because I have seen so much harm come from barriers that it appears self-evident and, simultaneously, I don’t want to patronize.
I have seen more women amateur triathletes and cyclists be harmed by barriers to access to top tier racing, than they are helped by whatever benefits such gates are often said to confer.
Barriers have outsized impact in these cases:
where fields are the smallest and farthest apart (womens cycling & triathlon)
for under-resourced athletes (athletes in financial hardship or who have never had means)
for elite talent transfers from other sports (often peak racing age, with no in-sport traction, but full ability to compete safely and win)
In all those cases I find that to be a uniquely strong argument against unnecessary barrier to entry and would default to openness unless obviously imprudent.
Countless times I have seen athletes
Benefit from racing side by side with world class athletes.
Miss out on opportunities to compete with people they could genuinely compete with and win against, because the right set of criteria hadn’t been met yet.
Not meet the criteria because the can’t afford to go to the right race, or can’t afford to get there in a way that affords them a chance of competing on an even footing with well-established well-resourced pros.
And again in each of those cases, the benefits and detriments are larger for less-resourced people and for the people for whom some external hardship has befallen.
Hardship happens. It’s often harder than it sounds. Barriers and limitations to access that are just “oh I have to travel to this race now” for Person A, might be “Well, there goes my chance at ever competing at world champs” for Person B, even though they’re equally qualified and competitive. More openness to pro race access should be the default especially on the women’s side unless there is some cost of being too open that I’m not seeing.
We might be talking about 2 different things here Doc. Ironman basically defaults to eliminating all barriers for it’s pros once your a pro; only closed races in their system is the championship level by qualification; but once your a pro in IM’s eyes, you can race as many world class fields as you want to. Ironman basically is doing exactly what you want them to do- full access to the world’s best. Only ITU “tiers” it’s system to not being an “open access” race.
So I’m kinda confused on what your talking about barriers within non-draft racing? There are FAR MORE women who skip ITU all together and race non-draft that will benefit directly from the open access policy that IM events allow for their pros. Unless your talking about the criteria to reach pro status which is an individual federation decision? Until IM becomes it’s own governing body, how each federation decides elite status will range from super difficult for some federations and as simply as asking/applying for it in other federations.
This site lambasted Danielle Lewis for doing a GoFundMe at the time as an amateur she already had sponsors, least that’s how it appeared when she was talking about funding her upcoming rookie pro season whilst wearing a kit with BassPro emblazoned across her chest.
But what are the barriers you speak of? It is an individual sport. Robert Kallin said he’d rather keep his day job than build himself into a brand.
When the sport is for an individual, it is their duty to their role to resource themself through sponsorship. Here you are saying it’s not their responsibility. These are all 1099 prize money people. They’re essentially just contractors that need to prospect on their own. They want to be professional, they need to act professional.
But man a lot of your posts on all this just miss the point. Professional, elite, whatever the word. It is how the person conducts themself and what I read from you is are excuses and it’s extremely perplexing.
Sorry I don’t speak from a place of expertise, but looking at the study, I don’t see how you come to your conclusions, and I think you read it wrong.
You say you have to be “top 5% of high school baseball players to eventually make a 6-figure salaray playing baseball”. The chart shows you have to be 4,9% of your class in NCAA college to be drafted in MLB. But you also have to be 8.8% of high school to just go to NCAA. That amounts to 0,43% chance of going from high school to being drafted. But as you probably know, the MLB draft is endless, and as the study acknowledges, only a fraction of draftees only make it to the big leagues. The article links to a stat of 10 to 20% of draftees who make it ti the big leagues. So that amounts to more or less 0,04 to 0,09% of high school players make it to the big leagues. Which I assume is your equivalent of “make a 6 figure salary”.
I’ll admit those percentages are still way higher than what I expected, but we’re talking more in the vicinity of 1 in 1000 or 2000 make it, not 1 in 20.
Moreover, it seems you chose to share the least complete “dataset of many like it over the years”. The study is done for one single year (2024-2025), is focused mainly on college. There is no data for professionals in swimming, track and field, which was the whole point of the discussion. So we can compare proportion from high school to NCAA but that doesn’t mean much as NCAA is (mostly) amateurs and mostly for American kids.
Finally, you write that :
Your study in link does NOT show that. You picked baseball as an example as this was your best bet, but if you look at basketball and football, which were the other sports I believed you mentioned in your first posts, there is a HIGHER percentage of high school swimmers who make it to the NCAA than in those sports (8.5% compared to 3.6% and 8.1%). And track and field is in the middle at 5.4%.
This data does not support the idea it is easier to make it as a pro in team sports than individual sports. (those numbers for male. For female there are even more % for swimming and track and field)
That is your opinion. That comment about the t-shirt goes back to my first comment that some of us triathletes like to make ourselves feel bigger and better that other sports with s!*t like this.
It is physiologically more demanding for sure, but once again, that’s not all there is to it.