My last post triggered some discussion on the TriTalk forum’s thread on the WTC Announcement.

A few people came up with other ideas for “guesstimating” the number of eligible athletes. One example was user Stengun who wrote the following:

I recently attended the Ironman Lanzarote "Special Achievement" Ceremony. For those of you who don’t know: They give a special award/medal for anyone that’s completed 5 Lanzas or more. I did go this year, and felt quite excited by it. However I left feeling a bit average and not very special by end. This was because of the numbers of people receiving this award. I assumed it would be me and hand full of others. But it was not. There must have been 40+ people all receiving this, and not just people with 5 Lanza finishes, there where plenty with 10+ and the one guy had 18! Remember this is just Lanza finishes. So almost everyone would most likely have other finishes at other event (as do I). I understand some events like Lanza have a very loyal following and that could skew the numbers a bit. But I’d estimate, there’s an equally loyal following at the other big and long standing events.

With similar qualifications as in my first post, this is certainly something I can look into! Here then is a list of the long standing Ironmen and the number of athletes who have raced in all six years that I have age group data for:

• IM Canada: 50 athletes
• IM Coeur d’Alene: 17 athletes
• IM Lake Placid: 28 athletes
• IM Wisconsin: 26 athletes
• IM Lanzarote: 28 athletes (This number seems to be consistent with Stengun’s observation.)
• IM France: 8 athletes
• IM UK: 23 athletes
• IM Switzerland: 4 athletes
• IM Austria: 17 athletes
• IM Western Australia: 23 athletes

This is a total of 224 athletes from 10 races. Trying to remove Kona qualifiers (again, using the crude 10-Hour-barrier as outlined in the first post) reduces this number to 207.

Then there are at least 6 more “long-standing” IMs (Arizona, Florida, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Germany, maybe Louisville) – which would give a total number of 331 athletes that have consistently race their “home race” in the last six years without having raced Kona.

It is a bit hard to estimate how many of these have completed 12 or more races overall. I’m guessing that not all of these would have raced the required number of “other” races (either at home or in another race), but that this number can be balanced by those athletes who have missed a year here or there but have done other races a few more times.

So this would give a slightly higher number than when estimating by “at least 8 races”. (That number was 273 which is in the same ballpark.)  If I had to give a number, I’d put it at around 300. But based on all this analysis, I’m very certain that the number can’t be close to “a thousand” that people have been throwing around.

Changes to the lottery system

The guys at IMTalk scored a real scoop this week. The day after the Kona race they interviewed Andrew Messick, the new CEO of WTC, the company who owns the Ironman brand and runs most of the Ironman races. In the interview (listen to the full interview here, the announcement regarding the lottery starts at 22:50) he announced that

“We’re changing how our lottery works. For athletes who have done 12 or more Ironman over their career – and who are still racing – we are going to guarantee that they have a chance to race Kona.

Andrew also announced that when you’ve entered the lottery and get not picked, you will get an extra chance when you enter the next lottery. In my opinion, these are very smart moves on their part, again encouraging people to continue to participate in Ironman races (or the lottery) and choosing one of their races instead of a Challenge or Rev3 race. (On a more personal note, this may give me a chance to get to Kona, but I would still have to finish 10 more IMs.)

Analyzing the data

This change in the lottery system prompted Thomas Peoples to send me an email with the following issue:

I’m interested to see how many people have completed more than 12 IM races for this new lottery system.

I don’t really have all the required data to do a proper analysis:

• As I focused on PROs, I don’t have the agegroup results for all races (for about probably about 1/3 of races I only have PRO results).
• My results only go back to 2005.
• It is tricky to properly match results from different races, for example there are differences in spelling or the handling of special characters (technically “synonyms”). (Are Andi Boecherer and Andreas BÖCHERER the same athletes?) Especially on the female side, athletes change their names after marrying (two notable examples are Bella Comerford/Bayliss and Marilyn McDonald/MacDonald).
• One other issue is “homonyms” – different athletes with the same name. For example, there are probably more than one “Peter Brown” or “David Smith”.

But even with these caveats, I did some analysis. I have 55 athletes that with my limited data have 12 or more races. When I look for athletes that have 8 or more races (as I only have age group data for 2/3 of the races), I get 339 athletes.

This number has to be reduced by subtracting the athletes that have already participated in Kona. As I currently don’t have age group results for Kona, I have resorted to looking at the finishing time for the athletes and remove the “fast” athletes. If I define “fast” as having at least one result of under 10 hours (probably allowing them to be in the mix for a Kona slot) and remove all of these athletes, I’m still coming up with 273 athletes.

With all the uncertainties mentioned, my guess is that the number of athletes eligible for an automatic slot is about 250.

How is WTC going to handle this?

It will be interesting to see how WTC is going to handle these issues. At least based on their public facing data, they do not have a “unified customer view” across all their different races. (Although it would be quite valuable information for them – how many “repeat customers” do they have?) Therefore, I assume that when you try to claim your “12 IM slot” you will have to submit a list of your IMs which they would manually cross-check against results in paper, HTML, PDF or maybe even in a database. They would also need to have a way to make sure that these athletes have not been on the IM Hawaii start list (or finished?). One can only hope that WTC has the necessary data available and that they diligently check the claims before assigning a “12 IM slot”. I would be very interested in a “look behind the scenes” on how they plan to handle this issue.