Analysis

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!

Late last year, I’ve looked at data concerning the depth of the women’s field and comparing that to the depth of the men’s field. (If you haven’t read it yet, please check out my post “Women’s Field as Deep as Men’s?“.) I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that I wasn’t finding any noticeable difference in recent year’s. My first interest into triathlon was in the late 80’s when Paula Newby-Fraser was such a dominating force in the sport that she seemed to win almost at will and if there was only an Erin Baker on a good day who was able to challenge her.

This led me to have a look at some older data – maybe the depth of the women’s field has improved over time? I wasn’t able to produce the same type of graphs that I used in my previous post as I just don’t have the data. However, I was able to find a list of the top 10 finishers on Slowtwitch (Top Ironman Hawaii Finishers Archive) that I used as my basis for a similar analysis. As a measure for the depth of the field I am using the Top 10 degradation, defined as the cumulative time the Top 10 finishers were behind the winner in each year (for example, in 2014 the Top10 men were 1h24min behind the winner, while the women were 2h01min behind). In order to reflect the different winning times for men and women, I’m calculating the percentage of this sum of the winner’s time (still using 2014 data, 17% for the men, 22.4% for the women). Please note that this measure doesn’t reflect the different field sizes (that lead to increased time differences) – meaning that a similar depth of field would have a larger Top 10 degradation for the women.

Here’s the graph showing the development of the Top10 degradation in Kona over the years for the men (blue line) and women (red line):

In order to give context to the time periods, I’ve added some of the biggest Kona winners. Here’s my interpretation of this data:

• Dave Scott was dominating Kona early on, his six wins were between 1980 and 1988. He was head and shoulders above most of the other Kona athletes and the degradation is at the highest level we have for the men.
  At this time, the degradation for the women is actually lower than for the men – but this is probably more a sign that even the women’s  top racers were still finding their way in this new sport.
• This changes with the start of winning streak by Paula Newby-Fraser (her first Kona win was in 1986, her eighth and last was in 1996), she was dominating at similar levels to Dave Scott.
• After Dave and Paula, Mark Allen and Natascha Badmann both won six Kona crowns, but they didn’t dominate the fields as much. (This probably makes their winning streaks even more impressive as they managed to win a lot of close races.)
  In the early 2000s, the Top10 degradation numbers were pretty much the same between the men and women.
• This changed for a while when Chrissie Wellington won her four Kona titles. In 2009 her third win displayed a domination over the rest of the field comparable to what Paula showed.
• In the last few years, the Top 10 degradation between men and women is back at very similar numbers.

My conclusion of this data: In the early years of our sport, it took some time to develop a decent depth of the field. The men’s field improved first (until the late 80s – at the end of the Dave Scott era), and the women’s field took about ten years longer (until the late 90s – the Natascha Badmann era). Certainly, things have changed a lot since the days of Paula Newby-Fraser – it now takes an absolutely dominating figure such as Chrissie Wellington to „disrupt“ the numbers. Chrissie pushed the women’s field another big step forward, and these days the Top10 degradation indicates no different depth between the men’s and women’s field.

This is an excerpt from my free 2014 TriRating Report which has a lot more information and data on the 2014 season. You can still download it for free!

Men’s Top 10

Rank	Name	Nation	Rating	Last Race	# Races
1	Sebastian Kienle	GER	08:12:57	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	9
2	Nils Frommhold	GER	08:14:10	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	4
3	Frederik Van Lierde	BEL	08:19:33	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	14
4	Dirk Bockel	LUX	08:21:49	Challenge Roth on 2014-07-20	11
5	Eneko Llanos	ESP	08:22:10	IM Fortaleza on 2014-11-09	20
6	Craig Alexander	AUS	08:23:13	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	12
7	Timo Bracht	GER	08:23:54	IM Mallorca on 2014-09-27	23
8	Clemente Alonso McKernan	ESP	08:25:34	IM Cozumel on 2014-11-30	11
9	Bart Aernouts	BEL	08:25:34	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	6
10	Jordan Rapp	USA	08:26:02	IM Arizona on 2014-11-16	13

There were a lot of changes and shifts in my Top 10 ratings in 2014.

Clearly, Sebastian Kienle had a dream year on the Ironman distance, winning in Frankfurt and in Kona. His only disappointment was the 70.3 World Champs – but of course that doesn’t influence his IM rating which he improved by almost 10 minutes! He is my new #1 rated athlete.

There is only a small difference from Sebi to #2 Nils Frommhold. After having to take most of 2013 off with an injury, Nils won IM South Africa, placed second in Roth and had a great first race in Kona, finishing 6th. He hasn’t had a “bad” Ironman race yet, and it’ll be interesting to see if he can improve further while staying healthy.

Last year’s Kona champion Frederick Van Lierde wasn’t able to build on his great 2013 season – but still managed to climb into #3 while improving his rating with a solid 2nd place in Frankfurt (just missing the 8-hour barrier) and finishing 8th in Kona. His Kona result will probably be a disappointment for him – he was in a good position on the run in second place, but ran out of steam in the Energy Lab. I don’t think we’ve seen his best Kona race yet!

Dirk Bockel (#4), Eneko Llanos (#5), Bart Aernouts (joint #8) and Jordan Rapp (#10) will have mixed feelings about their 2014 season. All of them had some good results, but they probably were aiming even higher. Dirk won in Melbourne, but struggled with injuries and missed Kona. Eneko focused on Kona but DNF’d, Bart was shooting for a Kona podium but was too far back after the bike, and Jordan had to re-focus his racing efforts.

Craig Alexander (#6) had practically ended his IM racing career after Kona 2013, then raced Melbourne and put in another focused effort to prepare for Kona, finishing a respectable 13th. This was probably the end of a fantastic IM career, I don’t expect to see him back on an IM start line.

Timo Bracht (#7) decided to skip Kona this year and fulfilled a career goal by finally winning Challenge Roth. He continued to race a lot after that (Copenhagen, Mallorca) and seemed to be a bit flat.

Clemente Alonso (joint #8) had a fantastic fall racing season: Second in Copenhagen, winning Barcelona, second in Arizona and third in Cozumel. He’s already safe for Kona 2015 – he’ll probably need some extended recovery, but will still have some time for a focused Kona preparation.

Women’s Top 10

Rank	Name	Nation	Rating	Last Race	# Races
1	Mirinda Carfrae	AUS	08:56:08	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	11
2	Daniela Ryf	SUI	09:06:26	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	3
3	Rachel Joyce	GBR	09:07:01	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	15
4	Caroline Steffen	SUI	09:10:02	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	18
5	Yvonne Van Vlerken	NED	09:13:42	IM Western Australia on 2014-12-07	15
6	Eva Wutti	AUT	09:14:44	IM Barcelona on 2014-10-05	3
7	Jodie Swallow	GBR	09:14:59	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	6
8	Mary Beth Ellis	USA	09:17:08	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	13
9	Liz Blatchford	GBR	09:17:12	IM Western Australia on 2014-12-07	6
10	Julia Gajer	GER	09:17:22	IM Hawaii on 2014-10-11	8

Mirinda Carfrae continues to be the clear #1 female athlete. She had another phenomenal Ironman-year: Winning Roth in the fastest time of the year and then defending her Kona title with an epic come-from-behind run, improving her rating by almost 13 minutes! She’s leading by ten minutes, but can she have another year like this?

“Rookie of the year” is another obvious choice: Daniela Ryf. With her wins in Switzerland and Copenhagen and her second place in Kona she enters my ranking in #2, sneaking past a number of more established athletes. It seems as if she’ll continue on the path she took this year, but it’ll be hard to improve on winning the 70.3 champs and finishing second in Kona.

Rachel Joyce (#3), Caroline Steffen (#4) and Yvonne Van Vlerken (#5) all had a good season with solid results, but they are still looking for a great Kona race. Rachel wasn’t satisfied with her third place in Kona, Caroline was outright disappointed finishing fifth, and Yvonne even DNF’d. Still, I expect all of them to race strong in 2015, and their preparation will focus on beating Rinnie in Kona.

With Eva Wutti there is another new athlete in #6. She is however, a bit of “hit or miss”, either finishing sub-9 or not finishing at all. (Her three finishes are 8:37, 8:51 and 8:49.) I hope that she gets more stable and manages to be in the mix in the big races with strong fields.

Jodie Swallow in #7 finally managed to have long-distance results in line with her talent, work ethic and racing spirit. While she came up short of great results in South Africa (3rd) and Germany (7th), her season finished strong with a second place in 70.3 World Championships, a fourth place in Kona and also a third place in Bahrain. She proved she can be in the mix in the big races, and will be a strong podium contender in 2015.

Mary Beth Ellis (#8) continues to race on a high level, but she seems to be missing the “winning spark” that she had at the start of her long-distance career. Maybe she was still struggling after her injury late last season? She’ll work hard to win some more races in 2015.

After a stellar first season of IM racing culminating in a podium finish in Kona, Liz Blatchford (#9) solidified her position as one of the top IM racers. Similarly, Julia Gajer (#10) had a successful first Kona campaign, finishing in 6th place. Both will be strong contenders in their 2015 races and will look for a podium finish in Kona.