November 2014

In October, WTC announced the rules for Pros that want to qualify for Kona 2015 – the system known as „Kona Pro Ranking” or KPR for short. The official rules can be found on the Ironman website. Compared to 2014, there have been a few changes:

1. There will be automatic qualifiers for the winners of the five Regional Championships.
   The Asia-Pacific (Melbourne in March) and the European (Frankfurt in July) championships are unchanged. The North American Championship has moved from Mt. Tremblant in August to Texas in May. There will be two additional Regional Championships, one for for Africa (Nelson Mandela Bay/South Africa in March) and another one for Latin America (Florianopolis/Brasil in May).
2. There won’t be automatic qualifiers for the 70.3 champions (Daniela Ryf and Javier Gomez for 2014) or the HyVee champions (Hunter Kemper and Helle Frederiksen)
3. The automatic slot for Kona champions are still in the rules, but validation now requires a „competitive finish as determined by Ironman“.
4. There will still be five results that count for the total score, but now only up to three IMs count.

Changes to the race calendar (fewer races in North America with Pro divisions and KPR points) have been announced, but the changes for 2015 Kona qualifying are pretty small. (For example, the number of full distance IMs is basically unchanged from 2014 to 2015.)

A lot of details are unchanged from 2014, most notably:

1. The points schemes per race are unchanged (P-8000 for Kona, P-4000 for Regional Championships, P-2000 for other IMs).
2. The number of points slots are unchanged (50 slots for men and 35 for women).
3. The dates for assigning slots are unchanged (end of July for the majority of slots, and end of August for the final slots).

Over the next days, I will have a closer look at the impact of the changes. If you’re interested in the KPR, please consider purchasing the 2015 KPR Observer: For 29$ you will receive an „Initial Information Package“ (describing the KPR in detail and my 2015 cutoff estimates) and at least six updates as the season progresses (some more info on the Graph View and Table View can be found here). (If you act soon and purchase before the Observer’s release around mid-November, you can get it for it’s pre-release price of 24$.)

The last few days I’ve been busy setting up the 2015 KPR Observer. I still have a few more todos on my list, in the meantime you can still benefit from the reduced pre-order price of 24$!

In order to give you a better idea of the value that I’ll provide with the KPR Observer updates during the season, here’s a look at two documents with different views on the KPR Rankings: the Graphical View for an overview, and the KPR Table for all the details. Together with my commentary on recent developments and a look at the upcoming races, they make following the KPR very easy and will safe you a ton of time!

Graphical View

The graphical view shows a lot of information on a single page. Here is an example of the Men’s Standing in early July (of course, there is a similar page for women’s qualifying):

Here’s what you can see on this page:

• Automatic Qualifiers (blue)
  All the „potential“ Automatic Qualifiers are listed, with my assessment of whether they’ll validate and take their slot.
• Projected Cutoff
  Based on my projections, I give a projection for the July cutoff (and later for the August cutoff as well).
• Safe (green)
  Based on the cutoff, the athletes that have a safe Kona slot are listed. Some names are in UPPERCASE, these are new in the category. (For example, Jan Frodeno had just finished third in Frankfurt, thereby fulfilling the requirement of racing at least one IM and also scoring enough points.)
• Bubble (yellow)
  Athletes that are within a few hundred points of the projected cutoff. If they score a couple hundred more points, they should be able to move into safe territory, but without any points might  come up just short. (In fact, all athletes on the bubble made it to Kona after scoring some more points.)
• Close (orange)
  These athletes are within a thousand points of the cutoff, but do not have enough points for a slot at this point.
• Potential (brown)
  These athletes are even further back, but are on the start list for one of the remaining IMs, and could secure a slot with a good performance. (For example, Kyle Buckingham got a slot by winning IM Lake Placid.)
• Not interested (red)
  These athletes may be placed well in the rankings, but have said that they are not interested in a Kona slot. Therefore, they probably won’t validate their slot or further improve their score.

On the bottom there is some background information how far the season has progressed (date, last race, number of completed IMs etc.).

KPR Table

The KPR Table shows similar information, but goes into much more details. Again, here is a look at the men’s standings in early July:

The Table is delivered as Excel spreadsheets (one for the men and one for the women, plus another sheet showing the Points schemes). Some details on the columns in this sheet:

• Rank
  For the ranking, I am not counting Automatic Qualifiers (marked “AQ”) and those not interested in a slot (denoted by a “-“), so #40 (for the men) will actually be the last one in a position to receive a July slot.
• Validated
  This column indicates whether an athlete has already fulfilled the minimum requirement of finishing at least on IM outside of Kona to be eligible for a Kona slot.
• Races
  In this column I show how many races an athlete already has on his scorecard and which score would drop off the scorecard once another good result is added.
• Kona
  This is my assessment of the athlete’s chances to get a Kona slot, going from a green up arrow showing a safe slot down to a red down arrow meaning that a Kona slot is very unlikely.
• Comments
  Some more information about the athlete, e.g. known race plans.
• Races1-5, Points1-5
  Shows where the athlete scored how many points (only those races that are part of the athlete’s total).

If you purchase the KPR Observer, you’ll receive this information at least six times (and more likely, ten times) as the season progresses, therefore aways staying up to date on recent developments. You still have a few day left to benefit from it’s reduced pre-release price of 24$ at https://gum.co/2015KPR.