Ironman has announced a new system qualifying Pros for Kona. Some of the initial reactions were quite positive, but with the timing of the announcement I was sceptical: Typically the “low news” time around Christmas is best for news not intended to get much attention. So let’s unpack the announcement and discuss the changes the new system will bring .. even if posting this on Christmas Eve might result in not too many readers. (Happy Holidays to you if read this during the Christmas Days!)

Still no Equality in Kona … In Fact Hardly Any Change at All

When quickly reading the Ironman press release, the main point you notice that “slot allocations will be equal for both male and female professional athletes”. The “featured image” is a jubilant Michelle Vesterby, further enhancing the perception that this is great for female athletes. However, the sentence I quoted is preceded by the qualifier “base” and followed by “additional slots being distributed to events based on the number of professional starters”. Only when looking closer what this will mean for races and the gender distribution it becomes apparent that the overwhelming majority of these “additional slots” will be allocated to the male Pros, and that the breakdown of the Kona field will be very similar to what it is now (roughly 40 females and 60 males, see my post Estimating the Gender Distribution for Kona). The females will have to constitute about 38% of the total Pro field (the 2017 average was 33.9%) before they have a chance of snagging one of the floating slots.

From an equality perspective, probably the only advantage of the slot system is that increased female Pro participation can lead to more female Kona slots, whereas the KPR system fixed the number of slots. However, I don’t like that this pits the female Pros against the male Pros – if the women want more slots, they have to “take” them from the men. This is counter-productive for growing Pro racing and the sport as a whole.

Equality is also a glaring contradiction in the new Ironman system: While Kona won’t have equal Pro slots, the 70.3 Championships provides the same 85 slots for both the male and females. Ironman has to be applauded for equal slots at the 70.3 Champs, but their argument of “increasing the female field in Kona would dilute the field too much” is making less and less sense. It’s also hard to see why there are 85 Championship-worthy women on the 70.3 distance, but no more than 40 on the full distance.

From the equality viewpoint, the new system is a “meh” – hardly any change. It would be so easy to provide equal slots for male and females in Kona – just provide the same number of floating slots to males and females! They don’t even have to be assigned to the same races, you could showcase the female Pros in a couple of races by assigning two additional slots just to the females (of course offset by races with only additional slots for the men).

Less Racing Required To Qualify

When looking through the changes the new system would have made to the Kona 2017 field (see my post Determining the Kona 2017 With the New Slot System) one big advantage for athletes is obvious: One great result (resulting in a win in an Ironman) is enough for a Kona slot – the new system’s quick summary could be “win and you’re in”. In the KPR system, most male athletes had to race at least two IMs and most females three IMs or more to score enough points to secure a slot. This aspect is a great benefit especially to the female athletes – the KPR system forced them to race more often than the male Pros as they needed more points to qualify. Of course there is a drawback for the second tier athletes that were consistently racing well but not winning races: It’ll be a lot harder for them to make it to Kona now as qualifying with a third or fourth place needs a big element of luck (athletes finishing in front have to decline their slots).

In an indirect way, this also addresses the issue of female Pros returning after their pregnancy to racing: Often they couldn’t race a full season to collect points, for example in 2017 Rachel Joyce or Eva Wutti only started racing in March when more than the half of the season was already gone and most athletes were already way ahead of them. It took Rachel three full IMs to make up this deficit, while even a win and a second place were not enough for Eva. With the new system in place, their first good IM would have been enough to qualify them for Kona: Rachel won IM Boulder and Eva won IM Austria.

The new system is also good as a lot of athletes secure their Kona slot early in the season (well before the current first cutoff at the end of July) and are then able to plan their season without having to focus on scoring more points to qualify. This probably won’t matter to the very best athletes – they didn’t have to worry too much about qualifying anyways. But overall a lot more athletes can be rested and in top shape on the Kona start line, probably making the race in Kona even tighter and more exciting than it already is.

Overall, the fact that less racing gets you to Kona addresses a big deficiency of the KPR system and gets a “thumbs up”.

Decreased Weight of Kona and 70.3s

Under the new system, only the Top 3 finishers in Kona will secure an AQ slot for the following year (validation still required). Under the KPR system, you could pretty much secure your slot after a Top 10 finish in Kona by racing another late season Ironman (some popular choices in November or December were Arizona, Cozumel or Western Australia). On the back of Kona fitness, a Top 6 finish was achievable in the usually relatively small fields. This will no longer be enough to qualify – even after a Kona Top 10 a win will still be needed.

Also, 70.3s don’t play any role in Kona qualifying at all (unless you win the 70.3 Champs). This is also a good development, sometimes lots of 70.3 points made it relatively easy to qualify for Kona. Altogether, another positive change.

Number of Qualifiers Tied To Number of Pro Races

As each of the Pro races creates at least one slot for the male and female racers, the number of athletes in Kona and the 70.3 Champs can’t be any lower than the number of Pro races. Currently, this will make it quite hard to reduce the number of male athletes in Kona – even though a lot of Pros would have preferred smaller fields to allow for a “cleaner” race. Fewer Kona Pros would only be possible with a reduced number of Pro races. So far Ironman has not indicated that they want to shrink the Pro calendar, and there are good arguments for an expansion in the Asian market. Still, the overall reduction in Ironman prize money (6% less in 2017 as compared to 2016) could also indicate fewer races in the future – we’ll probably have to wait for Ironman to indicate what their plans are going to be.

Tying the number of races to the number of qualifiers leads to the huge number of 170 Pro athletes for the 70.3 Championships, almost twice the number of Pros in Kona. The actual number of athletes on the start line will likely be lower. For example, this year’s 70.3 Champs in Chattanooga had more about 55 male and female qualifiers who accepted their slots, but only 33 males and 36 females actually racing.

Overall, “one race, one slot” isn’t much of a problem for Kona qualifying but creates a huge field for the 70.3 Champs. Unless a lot of athletes decide not to race, this is likely a “breaking point”, leading either to fewer Pro 70.3s or to 70.3s that offer a Pro category and prize money but no Kona slots.

Overall Assessment

To me, the benefit of the old KPR system was that it provided a lot of analysis opportunity for data geeks like me. So far I haven’t heard anyone who is sorry to see the KPR to disappear. The slot system is definitely an improvement by removing a lot of the criticisms of the KPR, but the way it is proposed for now it still falls short of providing equality in Kona.

This post has a closer look at how qualifying for Kona would have turned out if the new Kona Pro Qualifying System had been in place. Of course athletes would have adapted to the new system, probably choosing different races, but going through a few examples gives a good indication of how the new system will work and how it might change the Kona field and racing during the season.

Slot Assignment Examples

Ironman New Zealand

As discussed in my previous post on the Gender Distribution for Kona, New Zealand is a likely candidate for a race with an extra two slots. First, let’s determine how the slots get assigned to the male and female fields:

• Number of Starters: 17 female, 23 male
• Base slot calculation: 1.7 female, 2.3 male (calculated as fraction of starters times total number of slots)
• First round of slots: 1 female, 2 male (based on the integer part of the base slots)
• Remainder: 0.7 female, 0.3 male (fractional part of the base slots)
• As the female remainder is larger than the male, the remaining slot is assigned to the females.

We end up two slots for both the males and the females.

Here are the top finishers in New Zealand and who would have received the qualifying slots:

• Male Winner: Braden Curry
• Male Second: Cameron Brown
• Female Winner: Jocelyn McCauley (already qualified by winning IM Mallorca earlier, slot rolling down)
• Female Second: Laura Siddall
• Female Third: Meredith Kessler (already qualified by winning IM Arizona earlier, slot rolling down)
• Female Fourth: Annabel Luxford

Ironman Germany

As a regional Championship, Germany receives two base slots for each gender plus another two floating slots. The floating slots would be determined as follows:

• Number of Starters: 18 female, 50 male
• Base slot calculation: 1.6 female, 4.4 male (calculated as fraction of starters times total number of slots)
• First round of slots: 2 female, 4 male (based on the integer part of the base slots and the number of base slots)
• No more slots to assign

As for all of the Regionals in 2017, the females would have only been racing for their two base slots while the males would have four slots, two base slots plus both the floating slots.

Here’s the resulting slot assignment:

• Male Winner: Sebastian Kienle (Automatic Qualifier as previous Kona winner, slot rolling down)
• Male Second: Andi Boecherer
• Male Third: Patrik Nilsson (already qualified as winner of IM Barcelona, slot rolling down)
• Male Fourth: James Cunnama
• Male Fifth: Ivan Tutukin
• Male Sixth: Patrick Lange (AQ as third in previous Kona race, slot rolling down)
• Male Seventh: Marko Albert
• Female Winner: Sarah Crowley (already qualified as winner of IM Cairns, slot rolling down)
• Female Second: Lucy Charles (already qualified as winner of IM Lanzarote, slot rolling down)
• Female Third: Alexandra Tondeur
• Female Fourth: Liz Lyles (already qualified as winner of IM Wisconsin, slot rolling down)
• Female Fifth: Michaela Herlbauer (already qualified as second at IM Texas, slot rolling down)
• Female Sixth: Sonja Tajsich (already qualified as second at IM Brasil, slot rolling down)
• Female Seventh: Dimity-Lee Duke

As you can see, there are a number of athletes who raced in Frankfurt as they still needed the points to qualify under the existing KPR system. If the new system had been in place, they might have decided not to race but instead to focus on their Kona prep.

Qualified Under the Slot System

Here are a couple of athletes that would have received a Kona slot under the new system but didn’t qualify under the points-based system. I’ve tried to group them into categories to show commonalities:

• IM Winners but not enough additional good results to get a KPR slot
  Catherine Faux (winner IM Vichy), Darbi Roberts (winner IM Wales), Danielle Mack (winner IM Taiwan), Eva Wutti (winner IM Austria), Daniela Saemmler (winner IM Hamburg), Fredrik Croneborg (winner IM Malaysia), Jeff Symonds (Second at IM Chattanooga, but winner Marino Vanhoenacker likely declining his slot)
• Getting a relatively “high” rolldown slot
  Jordan Monnink (third at IM Mont Tremblant), Victor Del Corral (fifth at IM France), Kelly Williamson (fourth at IM Boulder)

Not Qualified Under the Slot System

Of course there are also athletes that were good at collecting points for the KPR but wouldn’t have qualified with the new slot system:

• Podium results, but no wins
  Jesse Thomas (third IM Lanzarote, second in two 70.3s) Lauren Brandon (second IM Cozumel, sixth IM Texas), Markus Fachbach (second IM Mallorca, third IM Hamburg), Cameron Wurf (tons of races, including a second at IM Sweden), Mareen Hufe (second places at IM Malaysia and IM Western Australia)
• Good Kona, but no wins during the season
  Boris Stein (secured his slot with a sixth at IM South Africa after a seventh in Kona), Ivan Rana (after a ninth in Kona a fifteenth place in Austria and a few 70.3 points were good enough), Anja Beranek (got her slot after her fourth place in Kona with an eighth place at IM Germany), Asa Lundstroem (was safe for Kona after a fourth place at IM Western Australia and an eighth place in Hawaii), Camilla Pedersen (after an eleventh in Kona and a third at IM Cozumel a few 70.3 points were enough for her slot)
• Many 70.3 points, but no IM wins
  Ruedi Wild (he scored almost 3.000 points just by racing 70.3s)

Additional Observations

There are a few more things I noticed when I simulated the 2017 qualifying season:

• Much earlier decisions for declines
  With the KPR declines only happened after the qualifying periods (end of July and end of August). With the slot-based system the decision whether to accept or decline a slot has to be made the day after the race. For example, IM Chattanooga winner Marino Vanhoenacker would have needed to decide in September 2016 instead of August 2017.
• No provisions for “late rolldown” if racing in Kona is not possible
  Meredith Kessler won IM Arizona in November 2016, she declined her slot in July 2017 as she got pregnant in February. (Baby boy “MAK” has been born by now.) Another example is Will Clarke who suffered a shoulder injury in August. Both were not able to race in Kona and declined their slots who then rolled down to the next athletes. Under the new system, once a slot has been accepted (which Meredith would have in November and Will in April), the slots wouldn’t have rolled down when they were forced to decline.
  (This will also impact the size of the Pro field in the 70.3 Championships. Even though there are about 85 slots for each gender, the number of actual starters is likely to be much lower.)
• Late season racing still allows for Kona even if not initially planned
  When Daniela Sammler planned her season, she focused on IM Hamburg in August, even if that meant she wouldn’t be able to race Kona (to have a chance to qualify she would have needed more points before Hamburg). Under the new system, her win in Hamburg meant that she could have raced Kona instead of ending her season at IM Barcelona.
• Much less racing needed for a slot
  Especially the women had to do a lot of racing to secure the points required for a Kona slot. Laura Siddall needed to race IM Australia (which she won) even after her third place at IM Malaysia and second place at IM New Zealand to get the required points. Rachel Joyce (coming back from her pregnancy) won IM Boulder (which would have secured her slot under the new system) but then had to also race IM Canada and IM Mont Tremblant, likely ruining her chances to have a good race in Kona. Another example is Eva Wutti: Her win at IM Austria (also coming back from a pregnancy break) would have secured a slot, but with the KPR system even a second place IM Hamburg wasn’t enough for a KPR Kona slot.

I’m also working on another post summarizing the changes that the new system is likely to bring, likely to be published over the Christmas days.

(Photo: Ruedi Wild on the bike in Kona. Credit: Jay Prasuhn)

On December 20th, Ironman has announced a new system for Pros qualifying for Kona (Press Release on the Ironman website). Starting with qualifying for Kona 2019, the system will revert from the Kona Pro Ranking (KPR) back to a slot-based system. This post tries to estimate the resulting number of females and males that are likely to receive slots for Kona. It is the first one of a series that looks into the implications of the new system, more will be released over the next days.

Basic Slot Count

In the 2017 Kona qualifying season (i.e. races from September 2016 to August 2017) there have been 32 different Professional Ironman races, including Kona, five Regional Championships, 20 regular IMs with both male and female races and six single-gender IMs.

Let’s have a look at the base slots for the different race categories:

• Kona: Podium finishers (first, second and third) will get a slot for the next year (which still needs validation by finishing another Ironman race during the season)
  -> 3 slots per gender
• Regional Championships: Each of the Regionals gets two male and two female base slots (plus two more “floating” slots, see next section). There were five Regionals in the 2017 season, that number decreases to four in the 2018 season with Brasil no longer a Regional Championship, but might increase again in 2019.
  -> 2 slots per gender (5 times)
• Regular IMs: For each gender there were 23 regular IMs (P-2000 IMs in the KPR system).
  -> 23 base slots per gender

Summing up, the total number of base slots per gender is 36.

There will also be Automatic Qualifier slots for Kona winners for five years and for the 70.3 Champion from the previous season (all requiring validation). The actual number of AQ slots depends on how many different athletes have been able to win Kona in the last five years and if the 70.3 Champion decides to race Kona the year after. A rough estimate is two more AQ slots per gender (in addition to the current Kona champion).

Floating Slots for Regionals

Looking at the 2017 Regional Championships, here is how their two floating slots per race would have been assigned:

• Ironman South Africa: 26 females, 37 males -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Texas: 21 females, 35 males -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Brasil: 18 females, 29 males -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Cairns: 13 females, 27 females -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Frankfurt: 18 females, 50 males -> 2 male slots

With the 2017 participation numbers, all floating slots from the Regional Championships would have been assigned to the male Pros, i.e. places 1 to 4 of the MPROs would have received a Kona slot while only the first two finishers of the females. It was closest in South Africa, just one more female racing would have created an even split of slots.

Remaining Floating Slots

In order to reach the intended number of 100 Pros racing in Kona, there are another 14 slots that will be assigned as floating slots to the other races. Assuming that there are always going to be an even number of slots for a race, there are likely seven Ironman races with additional floating slots. The number of male and female Pros racing there will determine the distribution of these slots between male and female Pros.

To get an indication of how the final split between male and female Pros is going to end up, here is the distribution if the floating slots would have been assigned to the highest paying races in the 2017 season. Here are these races (including the combined single-gender races), their split of female and male athletes in 2017 and how the floating slots would have been assigned:

• Ironman Wisconsin / Chattanooga: 12 female, 25 male -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Arizona: 25 female, 45 male -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Cozumel: 19 female, 34 male -> 2 male slots
• Ironman New Zealand: 17 female, 23 male -> 1 female slot, 1 male slot
• Ironman Boulder: 10 female, 15 male -> 1 female slot, 1 male slot
• Ironman France: 6 female, 18 male -> 2 male slots
• Ironman Lake Placid / Canada: 17 female, 29 male -> 1 female slot, 1 male slot

Under these assumptions, the participation in four races with floating slots would have led to two male slots, the remaining three would have had an even split between male and female slots. Overall, three of the 14 floating slots would be assigned to the females and eleven to the male Pros. (While you can debate this selection of races, they are probably even slightly optimistic for the females. Among the 23 regular IMs, only 6 or roughly a quarter of all races had a strong enough female participation to lead to an even split of slots.)

Summary of Likely Slots Distribution

Here’s a summary of the likely distribution of Pro slots:

• 36 base slots for each gender
• 2 additional Automatic Qualifier slots for each gender
• 10 male floating slots from the Regional Championships
• 3 female and 11 male floating slots from the regular Ironman races

This would mean a total of 41 female slots and 59 male slots. In Kona 2017, there were 40 females and 58 male Pros on the start list. The proportion of male and female Pros would be pretty much unchanged between the old KPR system and the new slots-based system.