Reading the comments on this forum, it seems to me many STers believe that having more participants at the world championship somehow diminishes the value of the event.
I really don’t see why that would be and I’m curious to hear people’s opinions and arguments to sustain them.
So, what do you think a “World championship” is?
In my mind a world championship needs to satisfy three main requirements:
- the winner is awarded the title of “World champion”
- the best athletes choose to attend the event
- there is a broad and representative participation of the entire “world”
I find that increasing the participants of the IM World Championship doesn’t impact points 1) and 2). Also, it not only doesn’t negatively affect 3) but, if anything, improves the representativeness of the field.
You could bring examples of world championships that have a selection process. However I would argue that the selection process is only made for organisational reasons (limited number of athletes can attend). Also, those processes need complicated systems to find a balance that makes sure conditions 2) and 3) aren’t affected.
If you could have unlimited participants, there would be nothing wrong with everybody attending. In fairness, an event where every single athlete from the entire world attends would be the idealised definition of a world championship.
Take the football (soccer) World Cup. Having a limited number of teams poses a big issue. If you only get the best teams you end up missing the representation of one or more continents. In the worst case scenario you would end up with teams only from Europe and South American. This would end up breaking condition 3).
Therefore, a qualification system is put in place so that each continent is guaranteed some teams.
This is not a perfect outcome since strong teams that could have a shot at a solid performance at the world cup miss the qualification all the time. Notably, Italy won the European championship while missing world cup qualification.
Would doubling or tripling the number of teams at the final phase of the world cup diminish its value? Of course not. In fact, you’d decrease the chance that strong teams are left out and give more opportunities to non Europe/SA teams to participate.
And let’s imagine the number of world teams has increased? Wouldn’t you think about increasing the number of teams participating in the final phase? Would it be so wrong?
Team sports have particularly strict qualification systems so they’re an extreme example.
Individual sports on the other hand don’t have nearly as hard requirements at all. Many sports would typically allow every country to sign up a generous number of athletes with the process delegated to national federation and the number of athletes mostly dependent on the capacity for that federation to finance athletes.
Of note, amateur world champions of the sports triathlon is composed of (running, cycling, swimming) don’t have particularly stringent qualification system. Nor does world Triathlon for their WC distances: it’s quite generous.
Let’s then take the case of the Olympic games - which are different still. They have particularly limited athlete numbers because of the many sports involved. Also, representation is a fundamental characteristic of the OG.
In many sports the main achievement for many is getting to the games in the first place because it’s so hard to qualify. In most sports everybody knows it’s harder to go to the OG than to a WC.
Furthermore, the Olympic committee has decided that to be truly representative there needs to be an equal split of men and women. Just like it would affect 3) if it missed athletes from Africa, it really isn’t representative of the world if there’s more men than women. The Olympic games aren’t fully there yet but they’re clearly getting there. Make no mistake, this brought tremendous changes that saw very strong resistance. One case to note is “Canoe” events which, unlike kayak or rowing, had been a male only sport for almost a century.
And keep in mind that the higher representation doesn’t diminish the value of the OG. In fact, in most sports, Olympic champion is the more important title vs World champion. There’s various reasons why this is but the point is simply that more representation hasn’t diminished that value of the title, nor of the participation at the Olympic games.
Let’s go back to Ironman triathlon. Why would increasing the number of athletes diminish the event? The fastest athletes will be there regardless of how many participants there are. In fact, bigger numbers can improve the competitiveness. It’s a well known fact that qualification is harder at some races than others (and some continents Vs others).
Having more qualifiers improves participation on many levels:
- athletes may qualify at whatever event is closest to them rather than travelling to whatever event is easiest to qualify at
- athletes can plan peak fitness at the world championship instead of at the qualifier event (and you can’t have many peaks with Ironman)
- athletes that would have slightly missed qualification because of poor/unfortunate event selection have more chances to qualify
- there could likely be more participants from different countries, backgrounds, culture, etc.
Does it matter if the tail of mid+end pack athletes is longer?
In my opinion it doesn’t. The only argument I’ve seen in this context is the annoyance for top athletes having to overcome slower athletes. This is a pretty weak one for a few reasons:
- it’s a completely separate issue of race start organisation and only happens in the case of wave starts with insufficient time gaps
- top athletes within the same age group still get equivalent conditions
- the annoyance of passing a lot of athletes is compensated by the advantage of having a long line of athletes you can legally draft off. This brings faster times, not slower. If anything it makes comparison between different AGs unfair.
What do you think? What’s a world championship?