It could be worst! We could be stuck with the annual Collins Cup which no one really appreciates and we have PTO races where wildcards stretches down to someone ranked 150th in the world?
Next year’s races will be more competitive but that remains to be seen. And I also doubt they will ever build a broadcast product worth millions
don’t forget ironman was a pseudo organiser company for like 30 years.
Still is, to an extent. They use the licensing model in various countries all over the world.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but the argument does remind me of the quote attributed to Henry Ford, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’. I’m not convinced that ‘our races are 100 km long, not 70.3 miles’ is the best move for PTO to differentiate their product from their main competitor, Ironman.
But that ties back into the problem of PTO seemingly lacking a coherent strategic vision. From what I understand, their original goal was to create a viable product of professional triathlon as a spectator sport. They’ve now shifted to also organizing mass participation races and being a channel for oil sheikhs to advertise their oversized parking lots. The main issue with that is that all three have conflicting requirements.
Ha! Fair point. I think perhaps the people in favour of faster horses couldn’t even imagine Ford automobiles. I can imagine the difference between two different length triathlons easily enough.
To clarify my point a little, I’m not saying there’s any advantage to 100km vs 70.3 miles. Just that in selling the ‘product’ there might be an advantage in all of your races being the same length instead of one T100, one 83km race involving a big climb, one 67km trail race etc. You and I can in theory compare our times if you race T100 Vancouver and I do T100 London.
Just my opinion. I’m sure they have smarter people than me conducting some market research.
Yes, agree. Marathons are a standard distance and everyone knows there are fast ones and slow ones. Heck, even some tracks race faster than others.
All that said the marketing benefit of a standardized format doesn’t outweigh the benefit from breaking up that format if the course calls for it.
Personally, I think there’s something a little crossfitty to the idea that races could be drastically different with a surprise element to the competition.
Imagine one race on a circuit is a sprint, one has a 4k swim, another has a 100 mile bike, another throws in a marathon. It’s a complete test over the whole season.
In both Ironman and T100, one of the limitations is they are pretty predictable even if the podium doesn’t always look the same it features a pretty consistent story line.
How do things look if you start playing with the formats and force different strengths and weaknesses to show through.
From a broadcast spectacle it’s more interesting, even if as a sporting event it’s a little kitchy.
It would be unreal from a spectator/ broadcast perspective!
What about the age group or “mass participation” (isn’t that what SR called it?) side though? Would you sell more or less entries to that kind of series?
You can, but I’m not sure why you would 
Courses are different (regardless of being nominally 100k long for swim+bike+run, and not even that is true), the weather is different, transitions can be VERY different etc. Unless you’re talking about one age grouper being an hour faster than the other, in which case maybe…
You are absolutely right. I wouldn’t, I’m guessing that being a slow twitcher, you wouldn’t, but the six of us on here aren’t where they’ll make their money selling entries. That’s surely why they’re targeting influencers, celebrities etc.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about a 3-hour marathon either but 00s of people have it in their instagram bios. We all like to talk about our pbs and T100 does offer that… even if it’s totally nonsensical.
The Collins Cup was great and unique, it’s unfortunate that they got rid of it. It was a market differentiator. Now all the PTO is is just another “tour”. Which to me makes it kinda boring.
The foundation of commercial success is having either a novel product or a better version of the same product as your already existing competitors. Right now, the question what makes T100’s mass participation races different or better than those of Ironman, Challenge, etc. doesn’t have an obvious answer.
Going to have to respectfully disagree on that one. If the market is big enough then I don’t think you need to be novel or better. Hopefully the people at PepsiCo would agree.
Palm Pilot to iPhone