It’s just a website error , this is worlds 70.3 registration for Spain that says taupo.
I think the thing that is missing here is there is not any female I’ve talked to pro or age group, wants to go race with the men again. All the women want a separate race
WTC typically shits on the women when push comes to shove. We can go back to when they changes the date of 70.3 Worlds 4 weeks before the event and now they seem poised to do it again.
Women though have things stacked against them to accept slots. If I coach a M/F couple who are trying to KQ the man will accept his slot 9/10 times no matter what the damage is to family life, work, relationship etc. The woman will accept maybe 5.5-6.5/10 times because they now know that the family will suffer, the kids won’t get to do their activities, there will be extra stress on the relationship, the dude will be jealous that he didn’t KQ etc.
If WTC really wants to make a non Kona WC viable they need to commit to the 2d schedule and cut the cord with Kona. Otherwise they will hamstring themselves and anything other than Kona will continue to fail.
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When we use the term “cut the cord with Kona” in this thread are we saying just for the WC or no more full ironman races at all in Kona?
Like if the cord were cut would a normal IM still exist there that you could sign up for without qualifying?
I guess that would depend on demand , it could go both ways the people that love Kona will still go there .
Or it could well be Penticton 2 where a famous location crashed after the label was gone . In this case not ironman but the label world champ. And it’s not like many people care to race the 70.3 race in Kona .
So yes there would likely and in my mind should be a Kona race but the question would be for how long will it be sustainable.
And would people still pay big bucks if it was not a world champ
It should still be part of the world champ rotation but from a sustainable point of view Kona is pretty close to be the worst place for the world champs and if you have the most races in a region that’s furthest away from Kona at some stage one should ask does it really make sense to go to the location that is hardest to get to for most people every year.
I think most people (I do) take for granted that a Kona race would keep happening even if the WC is moved elsewhere.
The questions are when, is it AG only, how do you qualify, and would interest decrease over time.
If you believe that Kona has a vibe/heritage that is independent to its WC status then you’d be inclined to think it wouldn’t dwindle at all.
Also, an AG-only race would strengthen the concept of an AG record which would be lost in a traveling/rotating WC.
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Well, I guess the only way to reconcile this statement with the reality is that the women that don’t want separate race don’t talk to you. And there are plenty of them
i agree but at the same time we have to admit that so far non of the women in sport for ironman initiatives have had a great impact as the male to female ratio has been fairly steady over the last 20 years . as you say females take a different approach and its hard to change that regardless what ironman does.
so its not easy for ironman to find the right balance if non of the initiatives really move the needle at the same time i do think it would be a great mistake by ironman to give it not another chance and dont follow through on the 4 year nice trial.
Here’s what doesn’t make sense. If you go to the current slot allocation page, the total women slots for Kona are only 1400. Someone can check my math but that’s way too low as the race can take upwards of 2500. What am I missing?
Thanks for pulling this up.
This data is importants because it essentially rolls up repeat customers annually
What I see is 8230 women who do more than one Ironman brand triathlon a year.
Keeping in mind the societal barriers that keep women from doing this sport (ex, I can ride my bike through a township in South Africa and be totally safe, I can swim at a secluded lake in Canada and be totally safe, I can run on a hotel treadmill where there is no one but me and feel totally safe…my sister likely won’t take these risks…there are many more…she probably would not even ride solo in Snow Canyon in Utah on her own.
The discussion from males in thread makes it sound like it is Ironman’s fault to make it more welcoming for women to do Ironman racing. If Ironman makes it easier for women inside the sport, maybe it compensates for some aspect for what is going on in society at large outside the sport, and us males lose something along the way.
But putting that societal discussion aside, 8230 repeat customers is plenty of customers to have a 1500 person world’s race off of. Maybe because of a few years of the worlds race the repeat customer totl goes up to 12000 then 15000.
Right now we are too early to understand the impacts. In my time my women classmates were some of the first fighter pilots, infantry soldiers, and future ship Captains in the Canadian Armed forces. A few years before my class was the first class of women at Royal Military College of Canada. There were and are huge societal barriers towards women being professional soldiers then (and now), but the armed forces just decided that there would be X% of slots devoted to the best women we could find and the system would train them to be the top guns. Finally this year literally 35 years later one of the women cadets who was a few years behind me is Chief of Defenec Staff. Coming from there to here was not smooth, the job is NOT DONE YET, but it did take work from supportive men around the early cohort of women to enable the path, while 80% of male servicemen resisted.
All of this sounds very similar to what I am seeing on this thread, and I do realize our sport does not have 35 years, but we’re already at 8230 women athlete repeat customers. That’s more than the zero fighter pilots who were women when I was a young officer, in fact, Paula Newby Fraser won Kona in sub 9, the year some of my women classmates got their flight wings. So triathlon is way further along right now, and maybe all of us can work towards building OFF the 8230 as the springboard. We can’t change society that brings women (or not) into sport, but once women are here we can enable the transformation.
Many of these women are leaders in their network, they are mothers, mentors, role models back home, at the pool, at the local group run. The 8230 AWA women are a darn good group to spread the word around the world.
One of the ladies at my pool came back from Nice (she qualified at Lake Placid). She was rightfully really proud for conquoring the course. I made sure everyone at the pool knew we had a celebrity on the deck. Next thing you know a crowd of 5 other women are asking her all about it. That’s what we want. The next 5 could have a future Lucy Charles. We don’t know
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Well suammarized same thing I see in my network. I literally have to do the selling to the woman qualifier to “TAKE THE SLOT” The guys won’t think twice.
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i guess they are missing, that like you they seem to think about this very short term. and might panic about 2 million usd which in the bigger pic is not that big .
they might worry more about the loss than to think about how to increase female revenue. its kind of crazy that they seem not have made a decision yet to keep going with the 70.3 sots , people are organising their seasons now and have no idea what to do…
I’m sorry, I’ve ready your post 3X and I’m not sure what you are saying.
what iam trying to say is they seem to have no long term strategy on this
they have signed a 4 years contract with nice and they must have known this is not going to work from day one
and they seem to waver rather than haviing a straight line there is a lot yes we have a 4 year contract but with clauses rather than saying lets focus on making the best out of it
and they should have a finished qualification policy for 2025 by now and it seem that they have not. and if females cant plan it is harder for them to enter the race
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I would suggest that the longer the race the less general interest that women have in competing. I have said for years that quite simply womens priorities are different and many just have better things to do with their time and money than men do.
Here in OZ we have seen race festivals were the women actually outnumbered the men over the combined sprint and Oly distance races and lets not forget the popular Triathlon Pink series run by The Event Crew.
Triathlon Pink | Triathlon Pink Series
Those old enough would remember the womens only Danskin Tri Series in the USA which was massive back in the day. I have no idea what happened to that series.
As I said,there has been and currently is plenty of opportunity for women to race any distance,they just generally seem to prefer to stick to shorter races and there is nothing wrong with that. Not everything is going to attract interest equally between the genders.
Accessing that page gives figures of:
Women 1563 Men 2485
Do you think the Women should be 2000? Or even 2500?
The pier CAN take 2500 but 1500 is fine and will give the women their own race. Happy days.
You need to get a slot for IMWC 2025 in Nice @Bryancd and see how excellent the course is. But I guess ‘only race in USA (includes a colonial island in the middle of the Pacific)’ is a preference hard to break, but one you seem to wish to force on others, ‘for the good of the sport (men’s)’.
That is a wild mischaracterization of what I have said. I said it know non-US races are fantastic. What I chose to do is irrelevant to any discussion, I’m making a calculation that it may not be economically viable to maintain the current format. Thats just me doing back if the napkin math, it has zero to do with what I think is “fair”. The notion trying to “force” anyone to do something is laughable, it’s called a discussion in good faith.
And they have already shown that they can field an all women’s field of 2000, so there is precedent for awarding more slots.
It’s about 1560 if I did my math out right.
Which then shakes out with slots they have granted out at 70.3s, any rollover Legacy, Foundation / human interest entries, to get you to about 2000 entries.
They still have 70.3 slots? And if they gave out 2400 I bet they could get it, even if they rolled to “anyone here” levels. Still an entry fee
Literally says at the bottom that the total slot calculation is subject to change / awarding. So on the women’s side, yeah, it stands to reason that you’ll see 70.3s with Kona slots on the line. Same thing they did last year. And the year before that. But they generally didn’t announce those until closer to the spring, when they have a better idea of where they need to push registration (particularly in North America).
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That makes sense.