at the end of the day its clear
the highest consensus seems to be there needs to be a 2 day race but not in 2 locations.
so if you want to stay in kona you have to try to find a way to have 2 days in kona or move a away completely.
i think the 2 locations is the worst of 2 worlds and i think that is prob the one thing most can agree on
and i think we have to accept fiancially ironman will not go to a 1 day event . i would ague that most would agree that ironman will not go back to 1 day,
so if we are brutally honest there is 2 options move the worlds around or find a way to stay in kona over 2 days
well the third find a rotation where we go every 4 years to kona .
Are you saying: “I think IM is going back to 1 day of racing in Kona in 2026 with 2500 athletes racing, women starting behind the men, max of 1500 men and 100 women”?
Why do you think that IM will go that direction? Just becos ‘Kona’? hot humid poor environment for endurance sport poor bike course expensive LD travel and acc’n hostile locals clear blue water with jellyfish and dolphins umekes
My prediction is 1 day in Kona because “Kona”. It doesn’t appear IM is ready to move on from Kona as their WC and the biggest race of the year. And I don’t think the town is willing to accept 2 days. Could the town change their mind in a year or two? Potentially.
The slot allocation for a 1 day Kona will be interesting. I think there are 2 options:
Normal slot allocation as previous years based on # of starters (typically ~80% male, ~20% female)
A new slot allocation to allow more women but less men (eg; 50/50 or 60/40 split)
Either option is going to upset athletes regardless. If I had to put money on it, I would guess they go with option 1.
i guess the one reason is that the only thing non triathletes know about triathlon is kona
and i think its undeniable that kona is the spiritual home of ironman .
if ironman thinks it has reached peak than this might be something they want to hold on
if on the other hand they think they can still grow the sport i cant see them going back to 1 day,
to add the mass start was a key part of ironman and they gave that up to make more money
I don’t think that IM would ever walk away from Kona, even for the WC. But this doesn’t mean that they’d need to go every year. I’ll argue that the “optimal” solution would be to rotate the WC on a 5 year cycle, and every 5th year it comes back to Kona so they can celebrate the big milestones (50 years, etc.). The rest of the time, its a weighted lottery that becomes a draw for the legacy system but is otherwise a normal IM race. Maybe you can convince the town to let you have a 2nd day every 5 years when its there for the WC, but not every year.
For years 1-4, every continent/region gets one year in the 5 year cycle. Host venues can either be semi-permanent or bid year to year.
As I’ve thought about this there is a very real danger. Such a long rotation will undoubtably bleed experience and interest from the local stakeholders over time.
Make no mistake, there are still a LOT of locals dependent on Ironman coming back year after year. If you essentially train them to start looking elsewhere for their business don’t be surprised if the people who were once dependent on you are no longer dependent on you.
The alleged goodwill factor from the loudest and most unreasonable locals won’t get any better as the multiyear shutdown during covid showed us.
The uncomfortable reality is there is likely too much hand wringing over the grumpy local situation. The majority of their gripes are literally directed at any and all tourists, IM is just a big single target. All across the state, there were surveys taken during covid that showed 70% (if I recall correctly) of residents did not want to open back up for tourism ever. That’s the larger issue.
The best case scenario of what you’re saying is that making some concessions will give cover for the political leadership to push through with changes that will be financially beneficial to (most of) the community. But skipping multiple years is a pretty big risk in detraining your best customer.
you could still hold a race the other years just not the world champs
than all the people that say that they dont care about the world champs but about the kona spirit they sill could race there.
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.
Maybe not legacy / AWA, but at least for the first decade, Kona would undoubtedly sell out as an age group race. Those folks would keep the local businesses going and engaged year after year. It wouldn’t be as big, since you wouldn’t have industry/media circus, but a sold out race is still 2200 people + their families.
With a weighted lottery / priority system, you could give legacy people guaranteed slots, then implement whatever prioritization system you want. Number of ballots equals the number of IM races you’ve done in the past 10 years or something.
lol that is exactly what triathlon needs another world championchip …
but yes from and ironman point you could have awa world champs as this would likely go well with anybody that cares to wear an awa swim hat …
i would say it should just be an ironman but maybe with the same program as kona.
The math doesn’t remotely workout for equality in this particular instance. I’m not against equality in the sport. If in the long term having equal slots at Kona/Nice and 70.3 WC brings in way more female participation that’s a win/win. My argument is the math is so overwhelmingly one sided that I can’t see it happening anytime in the near future (and likely ever). All we’ll get is an extremely watered down women’s field as they just have a much smaller pool of athletes. Economically it’s the same because the price is the same no matter your age group skill level but competitively it’s not close across the entire field.
I have supported 100% all the Ironman initiatives to try and increase the participation of women in the sport, including 50 Women for Kona, Women for Tri, a women’s only World Championship. I don’t think any of those efforts have yielded the desire results and at some point, Ironman needs to accept the sport is 80/20 men women and that’s unlikey going to change.
Although I think this data is valid on a percentage basis, I would only suggest AWA is a frequent flyer program and is only picking up people who do multiple events per year. There is a cohort of men and women who only do one or two races and are not picked up by AWA.
That list appears to include those athletes that completed half iron distance also though. So, the 150,000 plus number is not Ironman distance race athletes.
