Ironman Hawaii 2016 – Male Pro Predictions

This is an excerpt of the data in my 2016 Kona Rating Report. (Find out more in this info post, you can download the report here).

Male Race Participants

Here are my predictions for the male Kona field.

One important disclaimer: This is a statistical analysis, but “past performance is not an indicator of future performance” – at least not down to the last few important seconds or minute or two. The results for an “experiment of one” (such as the Kona 2016 race) are usually different to averages: People have a great day or a crappy one, some weird things may happen (such as a mechanical or a penalty) or athletes may decide to “go for it” and blow up on the run. So my data is just an indication of what may happen and the race still has to be raced. In addition, the focus shouldn’t be on absolute times but on the comparison between different athletes – e.g. not that my expected swim time for Frodo is exactly 49:56 (the actual time can be influcenced by a lot of factors) but that he should be about three and a half minutes faster than Sebi. Also the data shows how close the racing in Kona is expected to be – there are less ten minutes between for example 8th seeded Andi Boecherer and 33rd seeded Fabio Carvalho. Ten minutes is easily the difference between a good day and a bad day. At least for me, the data and predictions make it easier during the race to spot things that are different from what’s normal for each of the athletes and make following the coverage more interesting.

Heatmap

Here is another way of looking at the data in the table: Instead of showing predicted times I have converted them into zero to five starts for each of the legs and overall and showing them as a “heat map”. A darker red corresponds to more stars, white is equal to no stars.