I appreciate the creative thinking. As a woman racing in the 65-69 age group, there are generally only about three to seven people competing with me, and I’m not top of the heap. But, what if three of us, including the top athlete, who is a good friend of mine, agreed to race as a unit. Not sporting, but our finishes would be so close together we would all get slots.
This is very unlikely to happen, but you might recall years ago when pro prize purses were allocated in some races by how close the competitors came to the winner’s time, the athletes protested by slowing at the front to allow closer finishes.
In a recent interview Kat says she actually thought of the “every second counts” portion of the Pro Series and if any friends were close and should she slow down. At least she says she did. Twice her husband called BS on her
— disproportionately benefits old men and women that win very small age groups, but everyone likes the 70 yo finisher.
— fairly treats 40-59 men. You could argue they get fewer slots than what they represent as a portion of the field, but it’s close enough to be fair
— screws the impressive prime aged athlete (25 to 39) that finishes in top of field, but where AG is stacked. That seems to happen a lot to fast young women especially (finish 2nd in AG and overall, but only one slot for AG)
Best way to help the situation would be to remove more of the unearned spots from sponsors, IM Foundation, etc. I know that’s part of the business model.
I would say it “unfairly benefits” 40-59 yo men as those tend to be the largest AGs, but as mentioned above it generally doesn’t roll much due to the fact this AG generally has the money and time to travel.
My 2cents, I’ve been bit by the stacked AG as a 25-29male before. I was 4th in my AG, 5th OA, and due to field size they only had 3 slots. I appreciate it’s part of the game but it can be annoying at the almost pointy end as well.
If you remove the charity spots, then those slots usually go to the male age groups anyway, IIRC.
Part of what I was trying to do is move past the idea that somehow your athletic achievement is due how many slow people happened to show up that day. Just because there are fewer F40-44 at the back half of the field vs M40-44 doesn’t mean that (all else equal) that the athletes vying for WC slots are any less competitive or worthy.
We can debate that the M40 field is more competitive at the top end (it is, ok…) than the F40 field - but at least here we’re talking about sporting criteria for WC selection, as opposed to participation rates in the back half of the field.
Its easiest for something like Boston - post some qualifying times for each age and gender and then you can adjust accordingly. The times might be skewed to a degree to incent a certain age/gender mix, but at least there’s a quantifiable sporting criteria for everyone to follow. And more importantly - your achievement isn’t directly tied to mass participation numbers of people who happen to take up the sport, or not.
I like where you are getting at in terms of slots being based at athletic merit relative to peers at the top vs participation at the bottom. In my current age group 60-64, largely all the guys at the pointy end are the exact same people as when we were 40-44, 45-49, 50-54, 55-59, but the back of the field has totally been decimated to the point that at Puerto Rico 70.3 there were only 28 finishers in my age group (that’s probably my tiniest size of field I have ever raced in an Mdot race, granted the race had sub 1000 finishers) but the front is the front is the front and that’s really who the comparison should be with, not who adds to the size of field at the back.
The reality is that I got smoked by the top guy in my age group so likely with your method I would have not gotten a slot to worlds and it would go to another age group where the performances with tighter. And I think that would be fair.
This has actually happened. I know of two women in particular who would win their AG and often finish faster than the women pros and were often on the podium in Kona. They qualified for their pro card but didn’t want to race Pro. Or, as we’re seeing now in 40+ AGs, former pros are racing as age groupers and crushing everyone (see Jessica Jones Meyers as an example). Yes, these women can race in AG and do whatever they want. But it also doesn’t really allow any other women on the pointy side to capture their (also well deserved) opportunity for Kona.
If would be fair to say that no ex pro can race Kona as an age grouper (unless invited as a celebrity and not taking a qualifier spot).
It’s also reasonable to figure out a way to allocate slots that take the standard deviation of the average finish time in an AG.
But it’s a real pain to race that. If I know we have a few slots, I know where I need to be to qualify, or hope someone doesn’t show up, can’t afford it, already qualified, etc.
The truth is the slot allocation game is a marketing ploy for Ironman that for all its faults works really well to add value to scarcity and get people to spend money on something they might not otherwise.
It works so well, we have people really upset they are left out, when at any time they can just buy a plane ticket and go swim bike run in Kona for much less.
IM needs to be careful with how they play with that magic money machine.
I’ve had these same thoughts. My only additions (or tweaks) would be to have a participation cutoff where if your AG only has < 10 (or whatever number) of finishers your AG only gets 1 slot and the top 3-5 OA winners are automatically awarded a slot. Crazy that it is possible to get 2nd place OA and not get a slot.
Nah, how is that reasonable? Who wouldnt love to be out on the course with a 50 yo Jan or Daniela? Also many, heck I’d hazzard to say most, pro triathletes don’t actually get a chance to race Kona. There were close to what 100 pros at Texas, most of them will never sniff a pro Kona slot.
Well that’s why I say celebrity invite. They are celebs. The local pro that never placed higher than 20th at a race and is now crushing age groups is kind of a raw deal to give up a slot too. But ya, they are a paying customer too so I get it.
Probably could have a legacy pro program, like the legacy AG one.
Seriously? I’m a former pro, started racing AG again in F40-44 last year, and these comments about former pros in the AG ranks are starting to get to me. In my final few pro years, I was marginal at best, losing to several AGers at every race. I was the last pro in my final pro race. Since returning to racing age group, I’ve had a bunch of 2nd-4th places in the AG (and a very distant 22nd in Nice), so I’m hardly ripping it up and destroying fields out there-which is great, I love seeing how many strong, awesome women there are in my age group. I started racing pro as a 27 year old (after winning my AG at 70.3 worlds) and spent a dozen years running my body into the ground competing against the best, and now I’m motivated by a love of the sport and wanting to do what I wasn’t good enough to do as a pro (other than once, way back in the day)-compete in Kona. I was an ok locally but very mediocre in the grand stage of runners prior to taking up triathlon, so there’s nothing special about me as an athlete or my years as a pro that cloaks me in some magical invincibility (if anything, it’s the opposite, I’m pretty injury-prone). I also think there’s something to be said for someone that continues on in the sport for the love of it, long after prize money or overall podiums.
Really, any age grouper is lucky that Ironman lets us play on the biggest stage with the best talents in the world on the same day-something that I will never see as anything other than a huge, huge privilege that I’m lucky to be able to do in life, and I hope that I can be a positive voice that motivates women into the sport.
I agree with this - part of the issue here is that we have a world championship that’s decided by a private company. We can debate what the most fair or equitable way to divide these slots, but Ironman is going to go with what makes them money. And that’s totally fair - they’re going to design a WC process that they think benefits them. If this were a non-profit or an umbrella for national federations, we’d see different decisions.
They even called out the repeat customer factor - once you hit your WC goal, you’re more likely to drop out of the game. So part of what they are doing is absolutely monetizing scarcity across all their races. A one day race is harder to qualify for all involved.
The nice thing about all these methods is that Ironman could test any potential qualification method with the last ~10+ years of data really easily. We could even do a combination of methods. Use the current ranking system for half the slots, then allocate based on performance for more.
One thing that hinders any different method, though, is that showing up to awards and walking up to claim a spot you earned is really really cool. There’s a reason the tedious name calling procedure is still in use. Many people will say they want something different but then there will be complaints about how not getting to feel extra special by hearing their name while being given that slot is diluting the experience. Ironman is almost entirely about the experience for AG athletes.
Watching PTN post Texas interview with Knibb, I learned even the pro’s have to go through that process apparently. I had zero clue even the pro athletes had to attend the awards presentation to claim their spot.
I think the best option is to stick mostly with the current system, as it’s pretty simple to understand and gives people a general idea ahead of time of where they need to finish to qualify. But, they should have a small pool of wild-card slots at each race to allocate to people with outstanding performances but who missed out on a slot due to the allocation method. Maybe that’s too discretionary for IM or IM participants, but would address the handful of “injustices” that happen at each race.
Don’t think that the federations aren’t deeply concerned with making money. Think equality is their deciding factor in distributing slots across age groups or selling as many slots as possible is also part of the game?
I did say you’re also a paying customer, so I get it. But there is a reasonable case to be made that if you were ever granted multiple seasons of essentially free entries to Ironman, when you retire and want to race for fun, go out and do it and be happy with that finish, but access to limited world championship slots isn’t available to you. I don’t deeply care about it, but there is an element of fairness to consider when someone who was pro a couple years ago and is now smashing the AG by 1hr (not saying that’s you) doesn’t get to bag the Kona slot.
I think simplest is best. If they really want to go to field depth at the pointy end use the AWA points thing for each age group and just start rolling slots down from everyone who got 5,000 points (all AG winners) and go down from there.
