All the qualifying races for Kona 2014 have been run, and we have the final KPR ranking that decides who of the Professional athletes will get a slot. There is still some uncertainty whether all athletes accept their slot, and there may still be some rolldown – both from August athletes and maybe also from July athletes that decide not to race after all.

Women

Most of the slots were already clear after Mont Tremblant (Amber Ferreira, Sara Gross, Melnaie Burke, Beth Shutt). The final slots were decided in Copenhagen (Daniela Ryf, Sofie Goos) and Louisville (Jackie Arendt):

In addition to these seven athletes, Leanda Cave validated her automatic qualifier slot by winning in Sweden.

Mareen Hufe narrowly missed the last slot (by 5 points!), she has to hope for a rolldown:

Update Aug 27th: It looks as if all athletes accepted their slots and that there will be no rolldown for the women.

Men

The race for Kona went down to the wire as well, with Harry Wiltshire (2nd in Japan after racing Sweden a week before) and Chris McDonald (winner in Louisville) snatching slots in the last races:

Timo Bracht will very likely decline his slot, so Domenico should also make it to Kona.

Update Aug 26th: Domenico Passuello tweeted that he has now been offered a slot. It is unclear who declined a slot, Timo is the obvious guess.

Update Aug 27th: Justin Daerr is now marked as a qualifier as well. This means that both Timo and Victor must have declined their slots.

Update Aug 29th: Ronnie Schildknecht is also marked as a qualifier. At this time, it is not apparent who has declined his slot, all athletes still have their “Q”s. The slot was opened because Dirk Bockel (one of the July qualifiers) declined his slot after all. Dirk had to decline because of a hip injury.

Update Aug 30th: Rolldown has been finalized and the official list was announced. Please refer to my Kona Startlist for the full list and ongoing updates.

Update Aug 31st: Apparently, the WTC press release was not the last word: Cameron Brown decided to decline his slot after all, allowing Andreas Raelert to make it to Kona at the very last minute. (I’ve asked WTC about it, they said that athletes have until Aug 31 – today – to complete registration and there could still be changes.) 

The next athletes have to hope for a rolldown:

When WTC announced the changes to the KPR for 2015, a number of questions were left open (for examples please refer to my post on the number of Pro races). In the last week, Ironman has quietly updated their 2015 Pro schedule and a few open questions have been answered:

• The announcement included that there would be a fifth Regional Championship. It is now clear that this will be the African Championship in South Africa. (Update Aug 20th: Strangely, the Ironman website has now reverted to show South Africa as just a P-2000 race, with price money TBD. New Update Sep 4th: There were a number of announcements today that South Africa would be a P-4000 race and the African Regional Championship. I would assume that the information slipped out a bit early and was quickly retracted for a while.)
• The announcement announced changes to the North American Ironman races but did not contain any statements whether there would be changes in other regions. When asked, WTC told me that regions outside of North America and Europe would be „Status Quo“. In fact, all races in Africa, Asia and Pacific keep their Pro status.
• WTC said that they would be „[s]ome changes and refocusing of money and points strategically in EMEA region“ and there was some speculation about changes for European races. However, the published race calendar does not have any changes for the European races.

I am a bit surprised by these non-changes and the way they were made public without any press release. As there are no changes outside of North America for 2015, the new schedule – with a fewer number of races in North America – puts North American athletes at a clear disadvantage. I think that we can still expect some changes in Europe for 2016, but apparently the time for making these changes for 2015 qualifying has been running out.

For now, we will have 33 Pro races in the 2015 Kona qualifying (up one race from 32 races in 2014, mainly because there are going to be five new races). Unless there are going to be more changes (such as new races or races loosing Pro status), that number will go down to 30 races for 2016.