Author Archive | Thorsten

Course Conditions

This year’s race in Port Elizabeth started with a shortened swim, apparently the conditions were unsafe on parts of the course, especially for the weaker agegroupers. (Ironman South Africa is a normally single large loop swim.) I wasn’t on site so I can’t have an informed opinion on whether it would have been possible to have a full swim at least for the Pros. It’ll be interesting to hear comments from the leading swimmers on that. The official swim distance was 1.6k, and the times seem very slow for that – probably a result of the hard conditions. Even if the swim were half the normal distance, the times would still be slow. (Josh swam just under 25 minutes so that would have been 50 minutes – he was seeded to swim under 48 minutes in Port Elizabeth.)

Even though the bike course has changed significantly to previous years, the times were comparable to earlier years. The run was very fast, it was roughly five minutes quicker than in earlier years. This might be influenced by the shortened swim, but in all likelihood the course was a bit short. We’ll have to wait a bit for GPS tracks to be posted in the next few days. (It seems that the run was about 1k short, corresponding to roughly 4 minutes of run time.)

Of course the shortened swim invalidates all time comparisons to other years or races. Nonetheless I have calculated how the athletes times stacked up to what could have been expected from them, resulting in the “Diff to expected” columns and the coloring of the numbers (green=faster than expected, red = slower than expected). The background colors show the fastest athletes in each of the legs.

Male Race Results

Once again, Josh Amberger was leading after the swim, but with the shortened course he only had 30 seconds on the field and was quickly caught by a large group. Andreas Dreitz needed the first of two bike loops to bridge up to the lead group, but once he did the group got smaller and smaller. In the final 20k of the bike Ben Hoffman built a gap of 90 seconds to a small group of four athletes.

Once on the run, Ben was extending his lead bit by bit – in the end he ran a 2:39 marathon and won by almost six minutes over Nils Frommhold who was the best runner of the chase group. Third and fourth place went to Michael Weiss and Eneko Llanos who caught most of the chase group with solid marathons. As they were already qualified, the next two spots were also Kona qualifying places, these went to Maurice Clavel and Andreas Dreitz. Josh Amberger ran a solid sub-3 marathon but that was only good enough for seventh place, just short of a Kona slot.

Female Race Results

When Lucy Charles-Barclay exited the swim, she was in the lead, but Lauren Brandon had been able to stay on her feet. They stayed in the lead for the first half of the bike, until German Anja Ippach had closed her four minute gap after the swim. Anja continued to ride strong in the second half of the bike and started the run with a three minute lead over Lucy and Lauren. By then the rest of the field was more than fifteen minutes back. Once on the run it was obvious that Lucy was the strongest runner of the three leading ladies, and towards the end of the first of four run loops she was able to take the lead. By then Gurutze Frades and Annah Watkinson were starting to close the gap to the front, in the end they were able to run fantastic 2:52 and 2:55 marathons and stormed onto the podium, also snagging the two available Kona slots on the female side. Lauren Brandon was able to post a new run PR, but that was only good for fourth, while Anja Ippach struggled towards the end and fell back into fifth place.

Kona Qualifying

The following athletes were able to validate their Automatic Qualifier slots by finishing IM South Africa:

• Lucy Charles-Barclay
• Bart Aernouts
• David McNamee

As Michael Weiss and Eneko Llanos were already qualified before the race, these athletes received a Kona slot (pending official results and acceptance at Monday’s award ceremony):

• Gurutze Frades
• Annah Watkinson
• Ben Hoffman
• Nils Frommhold
• Maurice Clavel
• Andreas Dreitz

Updates:

• April 6th: The following athletes have not signed in for the Pro Meeting and are unlikely to race on Sunday: Peru Alfaro and Philipp Lamberty. Johann Ackerman, Marcus Liebelt, Urs Müller and Angela Naeth haven’t even been on the sign-in sheets, so they probably have withdrawn earlier. I have crossed off these athletes in the tables below.
  This would make it 30 male and 12 female Pros racing, resulting in four male slots and 2 female slots. 
• March 27th: Jan van Berkel announced that he has pinched a nerve and has to cancel his trip to South Africa. Speedy recovery!
• March 28th: Evert Scheltinga also won’t be racing.

Previous Winners

Last Race Results

Here’s the link to the analysis of last year’s results.

Male Top 3

Female Top 3

Course Records

There have been a couple of course changes over the years, especially on the bike. Nonetheless, the following are the fastest times in South Africa:

Course Rating

The Course Rating for IM South Africa is 03:26.

Race Adjustments for IM South Africa

Kona slots and Prize Money

IM South Africa has 2m+2f +2u Pro Kona slot(s). Looking at the bib list, it is like that the female Pros will get two Kona slots, while the males will get four. (Final assignment is based on the number of Pros starting the race.) It has a total prize purse of 150.000 US$, paying 10 deep.

Estimated Time Plan and Race Coverage

The following table shows the time plan for the race start and the estimated times for the first athlete in the transition zones or across the finish line. The estimates are based on the start time and my time estimates, these times can change based on how fast or slow the race ends up:

Port Elizabeth is on South Africa Standard Time, 2 hours ahead of UTC. Here are the conversions to a few other time zones:

• +8 hours: Melbourne (AEST, DST ends on April 7th), race starts 2:30pm
• – 1 hour: United Kingdom (BST), race starts at 5:30am
• no difference: Central Europe (CEST), race starts at 6:30am
• – 6 hours: US East Coast (EDT), race starts at 12:30am
• – 9 hours: US West Coast (PDT), race starts at 9:30pm on Saturday

The race will be available on Ironman NOW through Facebook Watch.

Male Race Participants

The strength of the field is 74% of a typical Kona field.

Female Race Participants

The strength of the field is 20% of a typical Kona field.

Winning Odds

Male Race Participants

• Bart Aernouts: 39% (2-1)
• Nils Frommhold: 20% (4-1)
• Ben Hoffman: 11% (8-1)
• David McNamee: 10% (9-1)
• James Cunnama: 6% (17-1)
• Patrik Nilsson: 5% (21-1)
• Tim Don: 3% (32-1)
• Michael Weiss: 2% (48-1)

Female Race Participants

• Lucy Charles-Barclay: 76% (1-1)
• Mareen Hufe: 13% (7-1)
• Angela Naeth: 5% (17-1)
• Anja Ippach: 2% (44-1)
• Gurutze Frades Larralde: 2% (61-1)