#111: Will Ironman go back to a one-day World Championship?

With the women all mixed up in the men's race. God, I hope not. Some speculation.

issue #111: Oct. 30, 2024

All-sporters, after covering dozens of events and managing to never get sick, my luck finally ran out and I came home from Kona with a bad cold. So, I’m a day behind and you’re getting the regular weekly Wednesday newsletter a little later in the day. (For the special edition from the race, check out Sunday’s email that went out from Hawaii.)

Lauren Vallee also wins our Men’s Kona prediction contest! Lauren - email me or I’ll email you for your amazing collection of prizes from around my house.

And, I tried to send this out on Sunday but apparently it only went to some people:

Our next Book Club book will be ‘The Norwegian Method,’ by Brad Culp — and Brad will be joining us for a Q&A next week on Nov. 7 at 3:30 p.m. PT/6:30 p.m. ET. Feel free to share your thoughts on the book as you finish it up in the Chat. Zoom link and info will be going out to all paying subscribers in this Sunday’s email.

Now, the big question coming out of the Ironman world championships…

- Kelly

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What I think is going to happen to Kona & Nice

Let me start by saying: What follows in today’s newsletter are my best guesses and tea leaf interpretations. This is based on conversations I’ve had over the last six weeks, reading between the lines of public decisions and the messaging around both world championships events, and listening to speeches made in Kona, Nice, and in various media outlets. I’m a big believer that you can tell what people care about by what they choose to do and say.

The most common question I’ve been getting lately is: Now that we’ve had one men’s and one women’s race in each location, what’s going to happen under the new Ironman CEO? What should happen? So here’s where I currently believe things to be at — and, while I think I’m right (my “pre-annoyance,” as we call it at Feisty, is pretty good at predicting when something annoying is coming), I could be wrong.

The official answer is very much that Ironman will listen to its customers and athletes, and that no changes have been made or announced.

The likelihood of Ironman breaking its four-year contract

I left Nice with the very distinct sense that we would likely not be finishing out the original four-year rotation plan of alternating men and women in Kona and Nice, each with their own championship races, through 2026.

I was not the only one who left France with that impression.

This was based on the oft-repeated perception that 1,400 athletes in Nice was simply not enough to financially make a world championship event work. (Whether or not you should be able to make a 1,400-person event financially sustainable is a different question.) And there was a general sense that after two years of the split Ironman world championships, it’s been tough logistically and operationally on all levels of staff. I get that.

I actually felt like 1,400 athletes was not terrible given the known challenges going into qualifying enough women to this year’s start line: nearly all of the full qualifying races in N. America fell right around Women’s Kona last year, N. America remains the largest base for female participation and European female participation remains exceptionally low, and fixing long-term barriers to growth takes at least more than two years — but I was alarmed by the number of people in decision-making roles who seem to think systemic sexism should have simply been solved by now. WE GAVE THE WOMEN THEIR OWN RACE, WHY DON’T THEY PARTICIPATE IN EQUAL NUMBERS TO MEN YET?! Come on, girls, overcome centuries of inequality already, god!

There were also a number of comments and speeches made by officials, mayors, sports directors in Nice that made it sound like negotiations were actively going on behind the scenes. (And made it sound like Nice really wants to stay in the game.)

In some ways, it seems unlikely any changes would be made for 2025, given athletes have already qualified and started to make plans (ie. Men continue to Nice in 2025 and Women to Kona). Tim predicted that changes will come for 2026. I don’t know.

There are ~900 fewer spots for the 2025 women’s world championship right now

But, if you look at the 2025 Ironman World Championship qualifying slots, you will notice that right now there are a lot fewer spots for next year’s women’s race than for the men’s race.

Add up the slots at all the qualifying races and you get 1,520 spots for next year’s Women’s Kona and 2,415 for Men’s Nice. That’s 895 fewer spots for the women’s race. Even though they’re separate races in different locations.*

Last year, in an effort to resolve some of the logistical and math qualifying issues for Women’s Nice, Ironman moved some of the women’s qualifying spots to certain 70.3s and gave the age-group Ironman World Championship podiums automatic qualification to the next year’s world championship — which I thought made a lot of sense at the time. My understanding now is that Ironman has not yet decided if they are going to continue these things for 2025. If they don’t add those back, then the large discrepancy will remain.

There’s also a lot of language on that 2025 qualification page about “proportionality.” And while I was at Men’s Kona this weekend, I kept getting dragged into conversations with real live walking Reddit threads, regurgitating 20-year-old arguments about what’s really “equal” and who deserves to be at a world championship and how back in the day when you could just mail in your entry form it used to be “hard.” (For the record, equal means equal; look it up in a dictionary.) I thought these arguments had died, but apparently they’ve been resurrected.

For reference, in 2023 the number of spots for men and women were about the same. In 2024, we had quite a few additional deferrals in Men’s Kona from the 2022 split and from Legacy athletes who had deferred from 2022. Plus, in 2024, we had the known issues qualifying women to this year’s Nice, which I’ve written about extensively here and here. Hence, the difference in starting numbers this year.

But actively choosing to hand out that many fewer spots to the women’s race is another thing entirely. And it simply doesn’t make a lot of sense — especially if they’re separate and distinct races that stand on their own. I’ve had a lot of questions about this discrepancy from athletes and I’ve run it by a number of people I respect in the sport and it doesn’t make sense unless 1. you’re laying the groundwork to go backwards or 2. you simply don’t believe women deserve to be there as much as the men do.

*I’ve added up all the slots listed a few times, and wanted to correct my original number slightly

Could a two-day Kona be in the future?

So I went into Men’s Kona with a fairly firm feeling that the stage was being set to stuff the women back into the men’s race. But I left Kona not sure.

Two years ago, I’d have said nope, Kona won’t tolerate two days of racing, it was too much. But I left the Big Island this time with a sense that Hawaii actually really doesn’t want to lose this race anymore than Ironman wants to leave. The governor of the state gave a speech at the opening banquet about how important Ironman is to Hawaii and how there’s 40 more years to be had here, and then the Hawaii Tourism Authority gave another speech like that in the closing ceremony (touting economic numbers).

It’s not that some kind of dignitary speech isn’t always made, but it was the level of official and degree of urging that I hadn’t seen before. If I was going to interpret local politics I’d guess there’s some negotiating going on, maybe some bluffing or hardball being played, and some pressure being put on the Mayor not to screw this up. (Like, knowing California politics really well, if the California governor showed up to your town and said publicly ‘we must keep this event’ then that means you better do whatever it takes to keep that event.) So that’s interesting. To me, at least.

Many many industry people have come up to me and said some variation of: It sounds like Ironman’s going to go back to one-day in Kona. They’ve come to this conclusion on their own, based on how things are being said about what’s important and what isn’t, how questions are being asked and framed, and how much Ironman has handcuffed itself to the Big Island (unless it’s willing to loosen those chains for a new generation).

The theme for this year was: A New Life — making something new out of our history and beginnings.

I don’t know entirely how to reconcile these facts, other than that it seems like decisions could tip either way. A fair point was made to me that the two-day 5,000-person Kona event in 2022 probably particularly broke the island coming after multiple pandemic years of no tourism and it might have been fine if it had come after a normal year. It’s also probably true that a two-day with 1,800 men & 1,800 women would have significantly less impact than what we tried to cram in with all the post-pandemic backlog in 2022 (and would also resolve some of these phantom worries about how hard it should be to qualify). I’m also not clear how much “the city” complained in 2022 and how much it was really just ten well-positioned people who called the mayor (because, as an expert in causing a scene locally, that’s how you do it). And while Kona has the triathlon history and it’s easier to create a sense of event in a small town takeover, it’s also true that younger age-groups are taking the Nice spots without them rolling down as much and the women universally did like Nice (despite Slowtwitch commenters insisting we’re all lying) and it’s still necessary to create other non-island locations for future growth and that the average age of Kona die-hards is creeping up. All those things are true.

So, let’s say most reasonable people generally agree that the ideal outcome to build a sport for the future and for the now would be:

• a two-day event with women and men each getting their own world championship race (because that’s how every sport in existence works)

• that rotates globally for different terrain, conditions, athletes, and regions (again, because sports)

• with that rotation including Kona, Nice, take your pick on other historic courses (Cairns, Mont-Tremblant, etc)

• in the off years, there could be a regular one-day Ironman race in that location (because, seriously, they gotta lose IM France in world championship years; it dilutes the brand too much)

That’s the ideal. But, if you can’t achieve that ideal, what do you choose to sacrifice first: The women, some of the history, the rotation, the numbers? Right now, too many of the loudest people would immediately pick “the women.” And the reasonable people (and also the women) aren’t being listened to. It’s almost as if when we say ‘we’re going to listen to the athletes’ we don’t mean those athletes. Hence, my pre-annoyance.

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Photo: Donald Miralle/IRONMAN

A few last Kona odds & ends & ish

Yes, we have other non-Kona news, but this newsletter has gotten long, so we’ll have to wait until next week to get back to the sports outside of the Pacific Ocean!

• An age-grouper set a new Kona swim course record (45:43), which does kinda make sense that you have these former uber-swimmers who get bored and come over to tri. (Triathlete)

• Here are all the age-group world title winners. U.S., step it up! (Endurance Sportswire)

• The Pease brothers finished in just over 14 hours. (Instagram)

• JP’s story of finishing with Stage IV cancer was probably the most tear-inducing though. (Instagram)

• If you didn’t hear Patrick Lange talk about how his mom told him, before she died, to go out there and kick their ass one more time, it’s worth listening to and is the most personable I’ve seen him. (Triathlete)

• Cam Wurf’s 7th place after a season of pro cycling was really pretty impressive, and he was on Rich Roll a week ago. (Youtube)

• Yes, there was 100% more coverage and media around Men’s Kona than around Women’s Nice. That was partially the Kona factor and partially because men, kinda both, until it becomes one of those self-perpetuating motion machines. Like, for example, Strava and Ironman did a whole bunch of partnership posts around Men’s Kona — which could definitely have been done for Women’s Nice, too. (Instagram)

• You can also see Kristian Blummenfelt’s implosion marathon on Strava. (Strava)

• Here are the fastest run shoes at Men’s Kona and the fastest bikes, and some more hype on the new gear. (Triathlete/Youtube)

• Since everyone still seems very concerned about the pro men grabbing jugs of water and Coke and ice out of the coolers, to be clear: No, I’ve never heard of them running out of water or ice for age-groupers in Kona. Sure, maybe briefly, but they always restock and they have that whole system pretty down.

• I did finally get to swim with dolphins. The day before the race, we were maybe 200y from shore, right on the course in the bay, and got completely swarmed and surrounded by a couple of pods of dolphins, who were doing jumps and all talking under the water. Later, someone told me there had been a shark farther out (and someone showed me a picture of shark from earlier in the morning!) and the wild speculation was the dolphins were trying to protect the two dozen swimmers in the water. I don’t know if that’s really true, but I will say I kept thinking what if the dolphins were saying ‘get out humans!’

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The best of the rest of the races

• Supertri NEOM: Actually this upcoming weekend! And because it’s the final and because there’s quite a bit of money on the line, you’ll get all the big names: Georgia TB v. Cassandre Beaugrand v. Beth Potter, Hayden Wilde v. Alex Yee v. Vince Luis.

  • WATCH: Saturday, 6 a.m. ET on Supertri, TriathlonLive.tv, Eurosport

• T100 - Dubai: Start lists are out for the race in two weeks. Looks like Julie Derron got a wildcard, so did Youri Keulen — but not Jelle Geens (and I think Haley Chura turned hers down because of surgery after the Vegas crash). Since every contracted athletes *has* to be in Dubai, it should be some really good racing. Talking to some of the athletes in Kona who are trying to do both series, it’s has just been hard to be in the right shape for both kinds of races and also not get injured (only Kat Matthews has managed it), yet it’s also the most professionally they say they’ve been treated but also get the getting while the getting is good. Tricky times.

• IM Pro Series: Patrick Lange doesn’t intend to do any more races but he should be good for first in the standings. (The only person who can add a 5th score in the top five is Dr. Matt.) So that lends some needed credibility to the series.

• World Tri: Still has two World Cups left in the year (who knew) and then the 2025 WTCS starts in February (!) — the 2025 WTCS schedule was quietly announced.

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One last thing

Now that it’s become a bit of a tradition to do a post-win champion photo shoot, do you think the athletes think ahead about what they want theirs to look like?