Analysis

In my post on Why I am #50WomenToKona I mentioned that Kona WPROs raced more often than their male counterparts:

For Kona 2014, the average number of IMs of the male Pros is 2.8, while the female Pros had raced 3.4 IMs.

Some of the feedback I have received indicate that this not widely known, so this post adds some more detail.

First of all, a clear definition of what I mean by “number of IMs before Kona 2014”. Here are the conditions I have used for the averages used in my post:

• races on or after August 31st 2013 (the date of IM Japan, the start of Kona 2014 qualifying)
• races before October 11th 2014 (the date of the Kona race)
• Ironman-distance races (regardless of wether they are “official” Ironman races or races run by other organizations such as Challenge)
• races that an athlete started (so including finishes as well as DNFs – both are counting towards the “fatigue” an athlete has to deal with before Kona)

Some of these conditions can be fiddled with, but the overall result is still the same – WPRO have raced around 0.5 more IMs than their male counterparts. Here’s a quick comparison of different conditions:

	Male Average	Female average
IM-distance starts	2.87	3.44
Ironman starts	2.75	3.25
Ironman finishes	2.40	2.94
Ironman finishes up to August	2.40	2.92
Ironman results counting in KPR	2.28	2.79

Staying with my original definition of “IM-distance starts”, here is a look at the distribution of athletes for the number of races before Kona:

You can clearly see that the main cluster of male athletes has done two or three IMs, while most of the women have done three or four races.

Here is a detailed look at the athletes in each of the groups:

No of Races	Male	Female
1	Terenzo Bozzone Richie Cunningham Jan Frodeno Paul Matthews Andy Potts Timothy Reed	Catriona Morrison
2	Bart Aernouts Craig Alexander Igor Amorelli Kyle Buckingham Daniel Fontana Joe Gambles Ben Hoffman Jeremy Jurkiewicz Sebastian Kienle Timothy O’Donnell Filip Ospaly Ivan Rana Andrew Starykowicz Boris Stein Tim Van Berkel Frederik Van Lierde Cyril Viennot	Corinne Abraham Liz Blatchford Leanda Cave Daniela Ryf Caitlin Snow Kelly Williamson Heather Wurtele
3	Faris Al-Sultan Marko Albert Tyler Butterfield James Cunnama Victor Del Corral Bevan Docherty Nils Frommhold Elliot Holtham Pete Jacobs Christian Kramer Eneko Llanos Chris McDonald Luke McKenzie TJ Tollakson Maik Twelsiek Marino Vanhoenacker Michael Weiss	Simone Braendli Mirinda Carfrae Linsey Corbin Mary Beth Ellis Lucy Gossage Rachel Joyce Meredith Kessler Caroline Steffen Amanda Stevens Jodie Swallow Yvonne Van Vlerken
4	Paul Ambrose Romain Guillaume Marek Jaskolka David Plese Andreas Raelert Ronnie Schildknecht Axel Zeebroek	Natascha Badmann Gina Crawford Amber Ferreira Julia Gajer Sofie Goos Asa Lundstroem Elizabeth Lyles Kristin Moeller Kim Schwabenbauer Beth Shutt Michelle Vesterby Bree Wee
5	Christian Brader Justin Daerr Daniel Halksworth	Melanie Burke Katja Konschak Lisa Roberts
6		Sara Gross
7	Harry Wiltshire	Jackie Hering
8	Matthew Russell

Not all of this racing has been motivated by a desire to qualify for Kona – of course there are other reasons for racing such as trying to win an Ironman or to earn some prize money. Looking at those athletes with five or more races, I think that they were motivated more by trying to qualify than by making money: Only Sara Gross has made more than 20,000$ – she made 40,000$ by winning IM Brasil and IM Mt. Tremblant – but she to race Mt. Tremblant in order to qualify.

In summary, the data shows that women Pros raced more often than their male counterparts. The data also indicates that this is a result of the lower number of Kona slots for women and the resulting higher number of points needed to qualify.

Three weeks ago, there was a discussion about the start gap between MPRO and WPRO when Angela Naeth received a drafting penalty at 70.3 Oceanside (see my analysis on Oceanside). This weekend, the discussion flared up again after the 70.3 in New Orleans when Lauren Goss posted the following tweet:

Here’s a closer look at how the New Orleans race unfolded for the Professional Men (blue) and women (red):

You can see that the start gap was at five minutes (as compared to three minutes for Oceanside). Clearly, the front of the women were riding with a number of Pro Men who had a slower swim. 

I’ve made the following recommendations after Oceanside:

1. Increase the gap between MPRO and WPRO to at least nine minutes. (Logistically, ten minutes might be simpler and would be even safer.)
2. Any MPRO that is overtaken by a WPRO has to sit up until being cleanly passed and after that keep at least a 20 meter gap, even is that impacts his own race.

From Lauren’s description, it seems obvious that the men that she and Jennifer Spieldenner rode up to were interfering with the women’s race and did not observe my recommendation #2. As for the first suggestion, here’s how the race would have looked with a ten minute gap:

Similar to Oceanside, having a ten minute gap would have avoided any overlap between MPRO and FPRO fields. It would be great to see the recommendations taken up in future races. Even without resorting to more drastic measures such as DQ’ing MPRO that get overtaken by the leading woman, a ten-minute gap would allow the women to have a much cleaner race than what we are often seeing with a smaller gap.

Drafting Penalty for Angela Naeth at Oceanside

At Oceanside 70.3 the Pro Women caught up to the Pro men. Alicia Kaye (who eventually finished fourth) describes the situation in her blog post on Oceanside:

[A] pack of pro men came by me [at around mile 30] .. From this point on, I had a pack of pro men around me until T2.  It was extremely frustrating and it clearly affected the women’s race. On some occasions the pro men around me were not doing strong passes, causing me to sit up and put on the breaks to get a 12m gap in between us within 25 seconds.  Multiple pro men ‘slotted in’, in front of me when I was spaced at 12m.

Riding in this group, she saw how fellow Pro Angela Naeth received a drafting penalty:

As we entered Camp Pendleton everyone in the pack moved to the right to get fluids at the aid station. I moved left to make a pass since I was not using the aid station.  Angela grabbed a bottle then moved left but wasn’t proceeding past the people on the right.  I yelled for her to move and she moved forward immediately; I needed to get by her within 25 seconds and the clock was ticking!  I pushed hard to get passed her and shortly after I heard the referee give her a blue card for drafting.

Here’s how Angela describes the situation in her blog post:

At mile 30, as I was making a pass on the two gals I just caught,  I was told I received a blue card for drafting (not giving enough time for a pass albeit we (a few male pros) were on a hill and just past an aid station!).

Obviously, it is never right to draft or not doing a pass in the allotted time, but things get tricky when a lot of athletes are in close proximity. Alicia and Angela were clearly frustrated by the situation. Here’s Alicia’s view:

I was not the only one who experienced this, I watched it happen to other female pros when they were trying to get through the pro mens pack on the hills. This should not be happening! It is also possible the a pro women could gain an unfair advantage by riding with a pack of pro men, but what I saw was pro women trying to get away and pro men getting in the way. The pro women deserve a clean and fair race, and quite simply the pro mens and pro womens race should not be interacting at all.

Despite her five-minute penalty, Angela eventually ran her way into fifth place. After the race, she was already looking for ways to address the problem:

Visualizing MPRO and FPRO mixing at Oceanside

Looking a bit closer at the wave start in Oceanside, there were just three minutes between the MPRO wave and the FPRO wave. To visualize the impact of the small gap, here is a look at how the PRO fields overlapped in Oceanside:

The graph shows for various points during the race how far back each of the athletes was from the front of the race. You can clearly see how the front of the women’s field (red lines) move into the men’s field (blue lines). Here is some additional data:

• At the end of the swim, the first women had overtaken seven of the 34 MPROs. The last male was overtaken by 22 of the 26 FPROs.
• At the end of the bike, the first women had overtaken 11 of the 34 MPROs. The last male was overtaken by 24 of the 26 FPROs.

The data clearly supports the anecdotal evidence by Alicia and Angela of a pretty large overlap of the MPRO and FPRO fields.

Ideas for a Clean WPRO Race

There have been a few suggestions on how this situation could be avoided:

1. Any MPRO who is overtaken by an FPRO should be taken out of the race.
2. Increase the time difference between the two fields so that an overlap can be avoided.

Implementing suggestion #1 in Oceanside would have resulted in 11 DQs into T2 (and another two on the run) – obviously that is a large part go the male field and probably a bit unreasonable to implement. Also, if an MPRO has the bad luck of a flat early in the bike, that would mean the end of his race – even if he could complete the race and still get a few KPR points.

Increasing the gap between the MPRO and FPRO so that there is no overlap at least until the end of the bike is also not an option – for Oceanside even a gap of 30 minutes wouldn’t be enough.

However, a mixture between both options can be a viable solution: There are two MPROs that trail the rest of the field by 16 and 26 minutes in T2. Clearly, these two are no longer „racing“ for a specific place finish – even if they are forced to “sit up“ when passed by a WPRO it wouldn’t change their final position. After a pass, they should be a clear separation – at least of the „Challenge Distance“ of 20 meters to any FPRO.

If in addition the start gap is increased from three minutes to nine minutes, we only have one male being overtaken by the WPRO race leader shortly before T2:

To sum up, here are my suggestions for a clean WPRO race:

1. Increase the gap between MPRO and WPRO to at least nine minutes. (Logistically, ten minutes might be simpler and would be even safer.)
2. Any MPRO that is overtaken by a WPRO has to sit up until being cleanly passed and after that keep at least a 20 meter gap, even is that impacts his own race.

An increased gap would also allow the race organizers to deal with another complaint as noted by Alicia: “Pro women must be allowed equal swim warm up time as the pro men.“ (The women Pros were not allowed a warm-up swim prior to the race in Oceanside.)

I hope that organizers address these issues for future 70.3s and also think about potential problems when planning the start of upcoming Ironman races: There were massive issues about „clean races for WPROs“ in Brasil and Frankfurt because of fast AG men mixing with the WPRO. Both races are important Regional Championships this year and it would be a shame to see Kona slots being influenced by issues that could be mitigated by separate starts with decent gaps.

All measures should help to make the women’s race as clean and fair as the men’s race – as it should be!

In my day job as an IT consultant and programmer, one of the tricky things that we are dealing with is side effects – making a change on one side that has some unforeseen consequence at another point. Thinking through potential side effects is an important part of implementing changes. Another example of side effects is in medicine, where the intended effects of a drug have to be weighed against other, possibly adverse effects.

When discussing the inequality of Kona slots (50 for the men, 35 for the women), one also has to think of effects beyond the simple difference of slots. Most everyone comes up with the immediate consequence that women require more points than the men – in 2014 it was roughly 4.900 vs. 3.500 points that were required for a July slot, and of course that also required more racing by female Kona athletes than for the male Kona qualifiers.

However, there is another side effect of the inequality: It pushes female Pros into the bigger point races. Basically, it doesn’t make sense for most athletes that want to make it to Kona to race in a P-2000 race: Even winning two of these won’t be enough for a Kona slot. (The exception would be those athletes that already have a good chunk of points, e.g. after finishing well in Kona or from 70.3 champs. For example, Meredith Kessler raced and won Ironman Arizona in November and Ironman New Zealand in March – a strategy that only made sense because she had 2.185 points from 70.3 champs and another 1.500 from 70.3 Auckland).

You can see this push into bigger races on two sides:

• Most P-2000 races will have a relatively small female field. For example, IM New Zealand only had seven females on the start line, even though it paid ten deep.
• The Regional Championships will have stronger female fields. For example, Melbourne and South Africa have almost the same number of male and female starters (Melbourne: 21m/19f, South Africa: 48m/32f)

This means that neither the distribution in New Zealand nor in Melbourne should be considered the norm. Field sizes are not determined solely by the different numbers of Pros overall, but are also heavily influenced by the different roles that the races play in athlete’s plans to qualify for Kona.

In addition, I would suggest to consider the side effects that an overall reduction of Kona athletes (even with an equal slot distribution) would have: Limiting the field size to 30 male and 30 female athletes (as has been suggested) would push the required number of points to around 5.000 and also force the male athletes to race more. A lot of athletes won’t be able to race Kona to their full potential as they will still be tired from qualifying. This can’t be in everyone’s interest so a reduction in the number of slots would also require changes to the KPR system if we want to have a great Kona race. Unless we have some good suggestions on how to achieve that, I don’t like the idea of reducing slots. But I don’t like unequal slots either, and that has already been discussed for a long time without seeing any change …

At the end of January Ironman has announced that they want to improve the online coverage of their major races. Here’s a more detailed look at some of the questions around this issue. (Thanks to Joe Skipper for providing additional information.)

Races to be Covered

According to the press release Ironman wants to cover the Ironman World Championships (Kona), 70.3 World Championships (this year in Zell am See, Austria) and the five regional Championships (Melbourne, South Africa, Texas, Brasil and Frankfurt).

The first race that will benefit from this enhanced coverage will be Ironman Melbourne on March 22nd. It is not clear if there will also be enhanced coverage for IM South Africa – it is also a Regional Championship but just one week after Melbourne, so there may not be enough time to learn from the „beta test“ (Ironman’s words) in Melbourne.

Improved Ironman Live

For the races indicated above, Ironman will produce “a hosted online show with extensive, in-depth coverage of the professional race“. My expectation is that this will be a similar setup to the coverage that we have seen from Kona – mainly a couple of commentators in a „studio” with live pictures from the course and some additional commentary. However, it is very good to hear that Ironman has learned from the mistake of the non-coverage of 70.3 Championships in Mont Tremblant.

GPS Tracking

The main change to the coverage will be that every Pro athlete will be required to wear a GPS tracking device on the bike and run. The GPS data will feed into a new athlete tracking platform (dubbed Ironfan). Athletes can also opt into transferring additional biometric data such as HR or power.

This data will be very interesting (can I have a live feed, please?) but I’m somewhat skeptical about the value this will bring for following the race:

• I don’t think too many athletes will be open to provide important data to their competitors.
• The current Athlete Tracker had major functional and stability problems. It will be a huge ask for the new platform to work better, more stable and with a much larger amount of data.
• Ironman has not been very good in using their data. For example, they have failed to provide really useful leaderboards. I’m not very optimistic that they will do better with the GPS data: They said that they will show this data “in an intuitive, map-driven design“. While that is certainly a cool way to look at it, distance between athletes has so far been expressed in time rather than shown on a map.

GPS Devices

In order to provide the GPS data, all athletes will have to carry a device supplied by Ironman. The size of the device may be a bit of a surprise to athletes, expecting something like a timing chip. In fact, the device is only slightly smaller than an iPhone 5, about the same weight but about three times as thick:

As far as I can tell, the size of the device makes sense: It is basically a complete smart phone with a GPS chip, a cell phone to transfer the data and a large battery.

To help athletes carry the device, Ironman will provide „specifically-designed pouches“. However, athletes can have their own race belt to carry the device. In addition, some athletes (for example Martin Jensen) have indicated that they are working with their clothing sponsor to integrate a carrying pocket into their race suit, similar to the pitches for radios that the cycling Pros have in their clothing.

At first, carrying the unit will be new, and there will be some grumbling from those athletes that haven’t prepared in time for them. But over time, I expect these issues to go away, especially when technology advances will make the units smaller.

For now, the GPS tracking will be limited to Pros in major races, but Andrew Messick said that they hope to „expand .. to all races and to age-group athletes in the future“.

My Assessment

In general, the introduction of GPS tracking and the enhanced race coverage has the potential to be a very good move by Ironman, one that can make following races online much more interesting and help Pros to raise their profile. It would be great to be able to follow races online at a level comparable or even better than what the ITU and Challenge have been doing.

I hope that Ironman will be able to deliver on this potential and I’m willing to give them some time to get things right. But too often, Ironman efforts have been half-hearted and ultimately disappointing. I’ll be anxiously watching for Ironman to get things right this time!