#117: The Ironman survey

Because why not during World Champs week.

Dec 11, 2024

issue #117: Dec. 11, 2024

Sorry to all of you who got the newsletter twice last week. There were some Substack (the platform I use) issues and then some me arguing with their engineer that it wasn’t user error issues. But, hopefully it works this week without the arguing.

We’ll have one last normal newsletter next week. Then probably just a ‘best of’ for Christmas travel week, and then it’s already 2025 and a lot of things planned for the 2025 year, so I feel like I may need a nap.

But still a big week to go here first!

- Kelly

Let’s talk about data & sampling

When you conduct opinion polling — especially if you’re going to use those opinions to justify or make decisions — how you get the sample of people you poll matters. ie. If you want to have an idea of who’s going to win an election, you need to ask a representative group of people who are going to vote in that election. If you only ask certain types of people or you only ask people in certain places, you’re going to think the overall general opinion and sentiment is different than it actually is.

Or put in a triathlon context: If you ask a group of 55-year-old age-group men v. a group of pro women whether the women’s world championship should be it’s own race or if it should be mixed in with the men, you’ll statistically get two very different answers on the whole. (And, yet, which group’s answer should matter more to that question…)

Now, why are we doing a crash course in polling and sampling? Because last week Ironman sent a survey on the future of the Ironman World Championships to an assortment of people. What assortment? Good question.

The Ironman survey

Friday afternoon, I got the survey as a respected member of the media (which I was going to keep to myself but then it very much became news). This concerned me because 1. I reached out to different people and couldn’t tell which media members had gotten it, and 2. The Triathlon Media is overwhelmingly one demographic: older and male.

It turns out the survey then also went out to Ironman’s whole pro athlete list and to some odd selection of age-groupers.

Know how I know this? Because pro women started messaging me ‘What the hell is this, are they taking away women’s spots, are they going to take away our race? Are they going back to a one-day world championship?’

And that is how the pros largely found out this possibility was on the table.

(Look, pro athletes tend to be very focused on the workout at hand and a little bit blinders on. So, you can understand how many of them weren’t paying a ton of attention to rumors about Kona. Most of the women also thought the question of having their own world championship, like every other sport, was settled and done; that’s why they talked so much about it in 2022 and 2023, but this year in Nice they talked instead about the specifics of the race, because they thought the fundamental underlying ‘do they deserve their own race’ wasn’t up for debate anymore. )

Of course, I understand why Ironman has a vague desire to find out what triathletes feel about whether we all go back to Kona, rotate around the world, have a men’s and women’s race, or smoosh them together. I also understand that what happened is some Ironman executives were only talking to lots of 55-year-old age-group men and so they thought “everyone” agrees we should go back to one day in Kona, and then they very abruptly realized actually a LOT of people don’t agree with that. (Sampling problem.) And now they don’t know what to think, so here we are.

But here are my issues with the survey as it was sent out:

The questions first asked you to rate a number of options from very likely to very unlikely to attend: A two-day race in Kona, a two-day race split Kona & Nice (as it is now), a two-day race that rotates around the world, a one-day race in Kona, a one-day race that rotates. It then went through a series of forced choices: Would you pick A or B, B or C, A or C, B or D, etc etc. This is fine. But as the options got more and more in-the-weeds they assumed a level of knowledge of the situation that if you weren’t super in-the-weeds would have made no sense. Some people who took it told me they couldn’t figure out what was being asked. Others told me it felt like Ironman had already decided what they were going to do (which I don’t think is true) and that they were just asking the same thing five different ways.
One question asked: Would you rather have spots allocated proportional to participation or 50-50 between women and men? And, like, look, I don’t know how to say this nice but: EQUALITY ISN’T DECIDED VIA A SURVEYMONKEY.
But this is my main problem: Who you ask that of is going to change the answers. And right now triathlon is largely male. So, basically, we’re asking a bunch of men what they think should happen to the women’s race. Sure, I get that there are other issues built into the structure of the world championship, but whatever is decided the impact of that decision is going to fall disproportionately on the women’s race. And overwhelmingly, women want their own championship race, so why then do the men get such an outsized say in what the women get.
(Similarly, if your goal is to grow who does triathlon, why would you only ask people who are already in triathlon what they think. Which is maybe the biggest problem of the survey: What was the goal?)

There were other details and issues with why the sampling was super problematic if you’re going to use it to draw broad conclusions. But mostly, it felt very much like Ironman was grasping in the dark.

There’s a scene in Veep (greatest show ever) where she, as the Vice President, asks her staff: “Remind me what I think again.” This felt like that: “Please, tell us what we stand for.”

Your super short to-the-point 70.3 Worlds preview

Since we talked about 70.3 Worlds a couple of weeks ago and there are plenty of other previews out there, we’ll keep this short and what you need to know.

Last year’s 1 & 2 in Finland. Photo: IRONMAN

Women’s race

I mean Taylor Knibb is going to win, right? Probably. Right?

Though that is what we all said about Daniela and about Chrissie and then someone comes along and beats them. Taylor has to be the favorite to out-bike and then simply stay away. Ashleigh Gentle and Julie Derron will do their damn best to run her down. And Kat Matthews will be in there in the mix, turning herself inside out (and probably coming away with the IM Pro Series title).

Men’s race

Both more up-in-the-air in terms of who will win on the day and in terms of who will take the IM Pro Series title.

My pick for on-the-day win is Hayden Wilde, Jelle Geens or Leo Bergere. I think, especially in the men’s race, we’ve seen that when the short-course draft-legal athletes move into mid-distance racing they can dominate. I think it’s mostly because the front swim speed then makes the pack dynamics stay so relevant and we get such large groups coming out of T1 together (and there is no Lucy Charles-Barclay string it out or Taylor Knibb riding away).

Yes, you count out defending champ Rico Bogen or a Kyle Smith at your peril — as T100 likes to remind us with the constant replay of the San Francisco sprint finish — but I just don’t see how they beat those other three without something going wrong.

For the IM Pro Series win, it’s probably Gregory Barnaby. Mathematically.

DailyTri has a fantasy game up. And ProTriNews is doing daily shows from Taupo — the Kat Matthews & Taylor Knibb episode is by far the best mostly because Taylor is in the Taylor form we all love to see.

There are also around 6,000 athletes racing this year (which is, uh, a lot) and I think it’s useful to look at the growth of the 70.3 World Champs as an indicator and model for how to build and change other World Champs events *cough*. I wrote about that evolution after the 2019 worlds race and it’s only more true now.

WATCH:

Women are at 7 a.m. Saturday (which is Friday in N. America 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT) — and as is the issue this year it’ll air only on Outside Watch in N. America, on Ironman Youtube & DAZN globally
Men are at 7 a.m. Sunday (Saturday in N. America 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT)

Best of the rest

Indian Wells 70.3: I think the only major other race this past weekend. And we’re seeing, as we have been seeing over and over, the short-course athletes change how mid-distance races are raced. Morgan Pearson won even with a flat and Matt McElroy was second. Claire Michel took the win (and the 2025 Worlds spot) in what she says was her last race ever but then made it sound like actually she’ll probably do some more races.

Results: Indian Wells 70.3

The -ish

Stuff from around our sports worth knowing about this week.

St. George 70.3 is done after next year — and it sounds very much like it was a local city council decision because of road closures and costs. Which is sorta nuts given how into it they were for how long; the tourism bureau used to fund all kinds of people to come to the race and promote the town. (FOX13)
A 57-year-old guy died during the swim of Indian Wells this past weekend. (Patch)
There’s a new XTERRA championship in Colombia next year. (XTERRA)
Supertri released a bunch of stats for 2024. They say they got 336 million video views (yes, I assume that means social video + Youtube + everything) and that over 6 million people watched the Toulouse race on EuroSport. (Supertri)
I will say this Supertri clip between Jonny Brownlee and Vince Luis did crack me up. (Instagram)
The PTN guys say the news of Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden splitting from their long-time coach is absolutely real (even though they made a joke post afterwards about it). (ProTriNews)
The Western States lottery draw was this weekend and it has legit gotten out-of-hand: There are now 68,724 lottery tickets for 260 spots. (There are 369 spots total, but some go to Golden Ticket winners of qualifying races, some go to sponsors, etc). This definitely totally seems like we should just keep doubling the number of tickets every year forever because what could possibly go wrong with this system in the long run. (Western States)
The California International Marathon (CIM) was this past weekend — and CJ Albertson did his fifth 2:10 marathon of the year for second, and Calli Hauger-Thackery ran 2:24:28 for a new women’s course record (and she had to really pick it up to hold off a fast-closing second place). But, really, the thing about CIM isn’t the very front pros, it’s that you can run a 2:58 and literally not be in the top 1,000 athletes out of 8,000. (A 2:50 made you the 75th woman.) (Twitter)
Hoka let go of a bunch of its older female athletes last week, which isn’t going over well in older female athlete circles (which are large fyi). I will say that for all that I love Hoka shoes and the Hoka PR crew, their athlete rep also famously dropped Chelsea Sodaro right before she won the Ironman World Champs, so. (Runner’s World)
Tara Dower, who set the FKT on the Appalachian Trail, signed a record-breaking deal (for utlrarunning) with Altra. (Outside Run)
Update on Race Ranger funding: Ali Brownlee is investing. (Instagram)
I’m semi-convinced that people have also gotten super terrible at analyzing and contextualizing data, because I’ve been reading a bunch of year-end trend reports and they’re all really reaching to prove that the numbers support whatever trend they’re trying to argue they support. For example, Strava’s year-end report says that ‘recovery was more important than ever’ and to prove this they cite the stat that “runners training for marathons added more rest and active recovery days…with 51% of days in the 16 weeks before the race being rest days.” DUDE. If over half of your days in a 16-week marathon build are straight rest days that’s not recovery, that’s failing to train appropriately. (It seems far more likely that people just didn’t upload some workouts to Strava, or some athletes only uploaded race day — which is common — and so that skewed the data, or potentially who was tracking marathons on Strava changed and there were more beginners.) Let’s use our brains here. (Strava)
Strava deleted 6.5 million suspicious uploads from leaderboards. (Canadian Running)
An update on Marianne Martin, the past Tour de France winner who was in a bad bike crash outside Boulder. (9News)
This guy fell about 200 feet off the side of a mountain during a trail race and survived. (Outside Run)
Did you know some couples do a run before their wedding?! New York Times with the cutting-edge trend story. (New York Times)
She RACES & FundHerTri UK did a survey of female triathletes to find out what were reasons and barriers to why they didn’t sign up for races (which is a fair use of surveying, to get a census collection of experiences). It’s mostly UK-focused but based on the comments we got on Feisty Tri some of the issues are certainly widespread. (She RACES/Instagram)
We also announced last week on both podcasts that the original triathlon shows, Ironwomen and If We Were Riding will be wrapping up after seven years. They both pre-date nearly (?) all triathlon podcasts and helped pave the way for that coverage, especially well before people were really covering women’s triathlon as it deserves. We’ll be coming back in the spring, after a short hiatus here, with some new content on women’s triathlon — but in the meantime send your thank you’s and love to the hosts. (Feisty Tri)

One last thing

Some of the classic things people Strava’d this year. (Though, I’ll say 5:37 for giving birth is definitely only recording part of the activity.)