That’s an interesting idea. Do you know how many legacy athletes IM has and how many races they do a year to keep the Kona dream alive? I wonder if they’d be less prone to keep their racing career alive if they could check off Kona next year.
It would be interesting to see how quickly Kona sells out compared to Roth.
If they did go with that kind of continual presence in Kona with a rotating WC, I think the smart move would be to make the AWA program connected to a “Kona non-WC qualifier”.
Maybe they simply call it the AWA Ironman World Championship, and it’s for the top male and female ranked AWA athletes. Out of curiosity, I pulled the 2023 Ironman AWA tables (no 70.3 list) and I was pretty surprised at the results:
Ironman was either massively drinking the gender equity coolaid, or took a huge gamble betting on hosting a 2500 athlete strong World Champs from a pool of 8200 racers. In either case it doesn’t look good.
source: Category Age Group Rankings