The ITU endorses very few international LC events each year. It is clearly interested in Short Course draft legal racing above anything else. My thoughts are that the ITU needs to either get out of Long Course all together or create a meaningful calendar of events.
The LC events struggle to pull AG athletes from countries other then the event hosting them and even the pros don’t place a huge priority on the LC long course worlds or any other ITU LC event.
Do you think ITU should get out of LC racing all together and leave it to the likes of WTC, Challenge and REV 3? IS the current system fine? or Should they launch a larger global series to take on 70.3 and IM races?
Why would the IOC recognized world governing body yield to a privately owned event promoter? Besides the qualifying system for WTC championships is heavily slanted towards the US and a few other select countries. The ITU is more democratic each country gets the same number of slot (with a few extra to the host which rotates)
I like the equality in the qualifying however the events attract very few international athletes. When the race was held in Perth a few years ago it was basically an Aussie only event.
The ITU is not creating an international meaningful series so why do they bother with the current situation where there is a World Cahmp, European Champs, We Hei Long Course and that’s it. Occassionally other events pop up but its not really a global series.
Why does the IAAF have a marathon & XC championship?
Why does FINA have 10K open water swimming championship?
Why does the UCI sanction Tours, BMX & mountain biking?
It’s what International Federations do. An IF, especially if the sport is in the Olympics, needs to show it governs the sport on global scale. No IF is going to relinguish part of its authority to a commercial entity. There is no way in hell, ITU will ever defer to WTC.
Why would the IOC recognized world governing body yield to a privately owned event promoter? Besides the qualifying system for WTC championships is heavily slanted towards the US and a few other select countries. The ITU is more democratic each country gets the same number of slot (with a few extra to the host which rotates)
Giving each nation the same number of slots is somewhat undemocratic if you consider some type of representation by triathlete population.
I’ve always voiced that WTC has way too many US based slots, but if you want to bring ‘relative representation’ perhaps 40% of the slots should be US based, 35% Europe, 20% split between Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, South Africa and 5% for the rest of the world, if you add up how many triathletes are registered in the US vs elsewhere…just sayin…
In this view, perhaps the WTC is actually being more fair than ITU
I’ve always voiced that WTC has way too many US based slots, but if you want to bring ‘relative representation’ perhaps 40% of the slots should be US based, 35% Europe, 20% split between Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, South Africa and 5% for the rest of the world, if you add up how many triathletes are registered in the US vs elsewhere…just sayin…
Wouldn’t it be better to base it on quality of athletes rather than the quantity to get a better field. Base it on the previous year’s top males up to 30min and any women under 9 hours (weed out the slowies) and allocated as a percentage for say 80% of the total spots with the remaining 20% available to all comers spread evenly throughout the rest of the nations. Something like:
Australia 26.6%
Germant 26.6%
Luxemburg, Switzerland, South Africa and Great Britain 6.7% each
20% evenly amongst all remaining countries and hard luck stories
I mean, this is a world championship after all and we know that recent past performance is the best indicator of recent future performance so surely this would provide the best possible field. Proportional representation just allows more mediocrity.
