Towards a better method of slot allocation

Triathlon Forum
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Triathlonish’s take on the WC news for me thinking

"That spots at a world championship aren’t handed out equally to men and women, that whether or not you get one is based on how many other people slower than you decided to do an Ironman that day. "

Let’s be real - the proportional method that we’re going back isn’t fair to women at the pointy end. If you’re a competitive age grouper, you’re going to have to pretty much win your division or maybe come 2nd. You might be elite, but you’re out of a WC spot because there are fewer non-elites who happen to be in your category.

So this got me thinking if there was a better way to allocate slots - one which didn’t depend on participation rates, but instead was based on something closer to sporting merit.

The idea - allocate slots based on time proportional to the winner in your age group.

How it works - everyone’s finish time is calculated and given a score relative to the winner’s time. E.g. I’m 15% slower than the winner of your age group despite coming 2nd in my AG but you’re 8% slower and 5th. Now simply allocate slots to finishers to the fastest finishers relative to the AG winner. Whoever has the lowest score gets highest priority, regardless of age or gender. All you’d need is another row in the app to show this. Winners of each AG obviously have the lowest score in the AG so there’s always at least one slot per age group offered.

When roll-down happens if there are 75 slots, calculate the 75 lowest scores and offer these first. E.g. if there are 75 people within 8.5% of their winner then offer spots to everyone within that time.

Roll-down would then be across age groups: after those people claim then expand to 9%, 10%, etc. as you need. Roll down wouldn’t happen within an age group, but to the next most deserving athlete across all groups. No more deep roll down lotteries or missing because the people in your AG showed up - you’d offer the slot across all age groups and go in order relative vs the AG winner’s time. You can even still call people’s names, just have a different print out and ordering.

What this does is disarms the whole gender parity discussion and allows you to offer more slots to more deserving athletes, regardless of how much filler is in the AG, or whether there’s enough people in your group to warrant another slot.

Now the discussion is about competitive athletes as opposed to participating athletes - which is what you want in your WC anyway.

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So theoretically a Taylor Knibb kind of AG athlete could go to each race, and be the only one to ever qualify for Kona…

You make a lot of assumptions when going down this road and it may not always work out the way you think it should. There are a myriad of scenarios where someone else would think your system is not really fair either. It looks like everyone is going to get more slots going forward compared to the old one day Kona, so neither sex will be going backwards. If it shakes out to the 70/30 split I think it will eventually land on, then there will be lots of opportunities for everyone.

Now of course not as many as everyone gets to go with the split races and. venues, but enough to capture the very best to have great races in each AG within each gender…

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It’s an interesting theory, but in the real world who goes to Kona comes down in part to being able to afford to go.
Hawaii is expensive to get to, more so for athletes in Europe, Asia and Oceania than the US; more for those on the east coast than the west. The race itself is far more expensive than the race the athlete uses to qualify. Accommodation providers in Kona have a reputation for particularly rapacious behaviour over the race period.
Economically, slot takeup for Kona will always be biased towards US based athletes and will always be biased towards richer athletes. They still have to put in a smoking time, but the playing field isn’t level no matter how you calculate slot allocation.

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Your proposed method would likely have fewer females qualify as the depth is generally less. Have a look at a pre-COVID race with lots of slots and see how your methodology would have worked out.

Also from Kelly’s comments “If you’re a competitive age grouper, you’re going to have to pretty much win your division or maybe come 2nd.” - the older age groups could make the same argument. Two men in M7579 and only one slot.

No model is perfect but the reality is it’s historically been easier for females to qualify compared to men.

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Depth of field is generally greater in the men’s division. The race tends to be faster at the front. So you can make the claim that a 3rd place female finisher 30 minutes behind first had an easier path to that podium than the 3rd place male finisher 6 minutes behind first and the 20th place male was 30 minutes back.

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This is the weakness of this method yes. Someone who should be pro comes down and wrecks the age group. Not sure how you deal with it.

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You could do things like calculate based on the podium (average of top 3 in AG), so one outlier will have limited impact

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Say an ex pro shows up in m35-39 and goes 8:20. 2nd place goes 8:50. But M30-34 winner and second place go around 9 hours. The M30-34 second place is now more deserving than the second place M35-39 that went 8:50?

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That’s partly my point though. If we want to talk about fairness and competitiveness, then we should be sending the best athletes to Kona, on an age/gender graded basis.

Right now, we’re saying to the women who finished 3-5 in their age group - ‘you can’t go to Kona because you need to recruit more slow women in your age group’ which isn’t fair to them. If we move the qualification process away from participation and towards a measure of competitiveness, then the answer becomes (for all ages/genders) to become more competitive.

Maybe this does reward more men - we’d have to see. But at least by this methods it gives everyone the tools they need to succeed individually (get faster), rather than wait for socioeconomic trends to improve. Note that this isn’t just for women but the older age groups as well.

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At the beginning of August, I will start a 7,000+ kilometer bikepacking trip from Noosa to Langkawi to do Ironman Malaysia. That three month trip will (on the road) cost less than a one week trip to Kona for Ironman Worlds.

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I suspect that because of the cost, the 50-65 age groups roll far less than the 18-35 age groups. So if you assign roll down to the next most deserving athlete in any age group, the you eliminate the bias in each age groups caused by money.

You still have to have money to go to Kona, though…

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Something like this could work - though it probably expands the number of slots given to 75+ since everyone is on the podium.

Maybe you just exclude the overall top 3 or 5 age groupers from each genders in the analysis - they get the first slots. Then calculate where everyone sits against who’s left @stevej - this would cover the issue you raised as well

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First IM would have to agree that slot allocation should be based on performance not just representation.

They could allocate 200 slots and use them in the cases where there is a clear disconnect between the two models.

In 2 years, if I am a 52 year old woman that came second to Chrissie Wellington by 8 seconds and didn’t get a slot, I should be able to apply for one of the 200 “performance slots”, with clear guidelines for allocation.

Or some form of AMA and allocate some slots to thar mechanism…or…experiment with a small pool of slots and refine.

Overall, IM did good with their decision reading the general response on various social media

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Here is an alternative method:

Top 5 male and female finishers are assured of slots. No roll down. This is irrespective of age. So if the top 5 women are all 30-34, they all get in.

Then, do the regular slot allocation. Any top 5 athlete is treated as someone that has accepted a slot in the given AG, so those AGs don’t get extra.

This removes the frequent injustice of a 31 yo woman who finishes 3rd overall, and 3rd in the AG, and isn’t invited to Kona.

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Start by making the 25 - 40 one age group

No need for all the divisions they have.

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this is a good idea i had tried to discuss that with a women in tri ambassador, that also freelances for ironman, a few years ago where a real good female performace did not get a slot, there was 0 interest.
it was a a 9.31 ,beaten by a 9.28 and 9.28 got the only slot.

if you had some non proportional female slots for females that really deserve a slot that would be great .

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Although I like that in principle, because the participation numbers are so out of whack between men and women, this still ends up being very dilutive for the men since on a percentage basis, their odds of qualifying a way worse under this system. Maybe just guarantee top 3 and then do a proportional additional allocation. Of course for the 65-75 crowd this is also far more advantageous.

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I like this concept and I also like marcag’s idea of the 100% score being determined by the average of the top three (you could even go top 5, so some people will be 110% scores for example if they are genetic freaks relative to their peers and they are in ANYWAY so it won’t matter).

Or you can do top 2-5 average and I think you then have a perfect system. Your qual “points” are based on a 100 score that is the average of the rough podium minus the winner who would have been in ANYWAY in the previous system and in this system there still needs to be a mandatory “one slot per age group” (you should not have an age group with zero slot winners)

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But I think what you end up with is that 35-49 end up with 75 percent of slots due to depth of field. That’s my rough feeling.

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Agreed on that for sure. Even at 40-44 you could lump it in. Most of my friends when we were 40-44 we were just fine racing anyone who was 26. More experience, more time to train, more money and bodies not quite broken down yet (running almost as fast, swim and bike were as fast or faster than at 25 due to training and experience and time)

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