I’ve put some more work into TTR – Thorsten’s Triathlon Rating. With IM Florida I added a third course (and six more races from 2005 to 2010) and I also managed to include female pros.
The amount of data is getting quite impressive by now:
- 3 courses (IM Hawaii, IM Arizona and IM Florida)
- 19 races (6 times each for Hawaii and Florida, 7 races for Arizona)
- 632 athletes (412 male and 220 female)
- 1,513 individual results
One thing that I have to think of now is to make sure that I’m working on high quality data – I was able to catch a few obvious problems, but I have to do some more systematic work on that.
An interesting little tidbit: The athlete with the most results in my database is Petr Vabrousek with 14 results! He’s also way ahead of the next athletes, who “only” have 9 races (Christophe Bastie, Michael Lovato, Heather Gollnick and Tamara Kozulina).
Adding IM Florida and new male TOP10
Adding IM Florida did not require any changes in the methodology. So the changes in the TOP10 are a reflection of the Florida results:
- As was to be expected, IM Florida is another fast course, in fact it is even faster than Arizona (course rating: 25:53, compared to 20:38 for Arizona and 3:57 for Hawaii)
- Dirk Bockel moved a few spots down with his 8:21 in Florida 2010 (which was adjusted to an 8:44).
- Raynard Tissink fell out of the top 10 – his two great Kona results were joined by a not-too-stellar 8:40 in Florida 2009. He was replaced by Rasmus Henning.
Here is the new (male) TOP10 list:
Rank Name Rating # Races 1 McCormack, Chris 08:20:57 5 2 Alexander, Craig 08:20:58 4 3 Raelert, Andreas 08:24:05 3 4 Llanos, Eneko 08:29:15 5 5 Al-Sultan, Faris 08:29:40 6 6 Bockel, Dirk 08:34:04 3 7 Bracht, Timo 08:34:58 6 8 Vanhoenacker, Marino 08:35:47 5 9 Henning, Rasmus 08:35:58 3 10 Potts, Andy 08:36:37 3
Macca is still in the #1 spot, but it’s getting very close between him and Crowie.
Adding female Pros: Women’s TOP10
The main challenge this time was adding the females into the mix. I wanted the male results to be pretty stable and not change much when the women were added into the mix. It was clear that there would be some small changes in the course ratings and adjustments for the race, but I wanted these to be pretty small. In order to achieve this, I had to play a bit around with the calculations until I settled on a slightly changed algorithm. (The change is a bit technical: The adjustments are calculated as a percentage of race time instead of absolute change in seconds. In order to show a course rating as a time, that percentage has to be changed back to a time by applying it to a 9 hour race.)
With this new results and updated algorithm, here are the women’s TOP10:
Rank Name Rating Last Race # Races Total Rank 1 Wellington, Chrissie 09:01:40 IM Arizona on 2010-11-21 4 54 2 Carfrae, Mirinda 09:07:51 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 2 67 3 Van Vlerken, Yvonne 09:28:09 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 2 114 4 Jones, Michellie 09:29:42 IM Arizona on 2008-04-13 4 119 5 Steffen, Caroline 09:32:19 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 2 133 6 Berasategui, Virginia 09:33:21 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 4 136 7 McGlone, Samantha 09:34:09 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 4 141 8 Thuerig, Karin 09:35:33 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 2 146 9 Preston, Rebecca 09:35:55 IM Hawaii on 2007-10-13 2 148 10 Lawn, Joanna 09:38:58 IM Hawaii on 2010-10-09 6 153
The first two spots are not a surprise – Chrissie and Rinnie are currently the top athletes. What is interesting is the large gap to the next spots – more than 20 minutes! For me, Michellie in #4 was a bit of a surprise – her last race was in 2008 and to me I did not really think of her as an active athlete that might show up in the ratings.
Another interesting thing is the Total Rank that shows how the females would rank in all athletes (i.e. male and female). Chrissie, for example would be ranked #54 – which means that there are 53 males that have a better rating than she has. Even if some of her great results from Roth are not in the database yet, it’s hard to see her crack the Top10 in Hawaii or the male ratings.