5 Freezing Cold Takes for the 2025 Women’s IRONMAN World Championship

Kat Matthews at the IRONMAN World Championship Kona press conference. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Time to dust off the tarot cards, magic 8-ball, and Miss Cleo hotline: it’s IRONMAN World Championship week and we’re back with our patented freezing cold takes. Let’s recap how we did back in Nice:

• Picked Kristian Blummenfelt for the win. Wrong.
• Picked Rudy Von Berg, Gustav Iden, and Magnus Ditlev as the best shot at derailing Blummenfelt. Mostly wrong.
• Picked Jonas Schomburg over Marten Van Riel. Wrong.
• Said Sam Laidlow would be a major impact on the race, but ultimately fade away. Right.
• Picked Sam Long to bike and run his way into a paycheck. Right.

Evidently, mediocrity is my middle name when it comes to these.

That said, the final single-gender edition of Kona is here, and it’s shaping up to be one hell of a show. Laura Philipp will attempt to become the first back-to-back women’s champion since Daniela Ryf in 2017-2018. Of course, Lucy Charles-Barclay was the last woman to win on this course, and she’s prepared to lay it all out there to earn back-to-back Kona titles. And then there’s so, so many other women who have legitimate chances at top finishes.

Here’s my predictions for the race. As always, crow is a dish best served cold, so feel free to make fun of my picks in the forum.

This is Kat Matthews Time to Shine

Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Over the last three seasons, no athlete has been more consistent at full-distance race performance than Matthews. As long as she finishes a race, she’s on the podium. And, ever since her return from the horrific car-versus-bike incident in the Woodlands in 2022 while gearing up for Kona, her record is pretty damn good: three straight wins at IRONMAN Texas; runner-up in Nice last year after a long battle with eventual champion Philipp; another runner-up at IRONMAN Hamburg this year.

On paper, Matthews is the top contender with the best run (all apologies to Tamara Jewett, who narrowly outranks her in the PTO Run Rankings). She should be somewhat well-positioned coming out of the water, likely within the front chase pack as it’s likely Lucy Charles-Barclay will be off the front. The question mark is where Matthews will be on the bike. The current forecast for Saturday’s race is for a warm, breezy day, with temperatures in the mid-80s and sustained winds out of the east at 12 MPH, gusting to 30 MPH. In theory, that should benefit the best riders in the field.

But, as we detailed in our gallery of Matthews’ bike, she’s done a lot of work on that ride over the last 12 months. And I also somewhat expect the duo of Charles-Barclay and Taylor Knibb to try to pull a Sam Laidlow and win this race on the bike. That can work; it can also lead to late-race heroics (a la Lionel Sanders being caught by Patrick Lange with four miles left to run in 2017); it can also lead to spectacular meltdowns (see: Laidlow here last year). I think this is the year where Matthews moves up one step on the podium to take her first IRONMAN world title, to go alongside her Pro Series championship.

The Other Key Candidates: Philipp, Charles-Barclay, Sodaro and Løvseth

It’s obviously hard to ignore three other IRONMAN world champions in the field. Let’s start with the defending champion, as Philipp has put together a relatively quiet 2025 campaign with eyes on defending her title. She’s won all three races that she’s started in 2025, with two of those full-distance races. Philipp won a drag race against Matthews and Løvseth in Hamburg, then backed it up with a nearly 20 minute victory in Roth, going 8:18 in the process. She possesses probably the strongest bike-run combination for full distance racing at the moment.

Laura Philipp. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

The question, as always, is the swim, and whether she has to burn too many matches to be in contention for the win. She reminds me of another great German athlete in that regard: Sebastian Kienle. Of course, Kienle did take a win in Kona after emerging from the water four minutes down from the lead. It will take a similar “limit your losses” type of approach, especially with Knibb in the field, for Philipp to be in winning contention. I have her as a podium lock.

Lucy Charles-Barclay. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Charles-Barclay, in my opinion, is the most likely candidate to make a Laidlow-esque strategy work on Saturday. We know she’s going to be at the front of the swim. The question is, simply, how much of a gap there will be, and how quickly she wants to build the bike gap and not be seen again. Given the current expected weather, I would suspect that Charles-Barclay will be steady in that approach, looking to wait until the wind truly kicks up before unleashing hell. But, she has to build a gap; Charles-Barclay has only run under three hours for a full distance race three times in her career. One of those was on her way to victory in 2023 here, though, in course-record time. I think she’s first on the run, but eventually caught by Philipp and Matthews as they duel for victory, but comes home third.

Chelsea Sodaro. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Then there’s Sodaro. For someone who finished on the podium in Nice last year, Sodaro sure seems to have the least chatter of the IRONMAN world champions. Part of that has to do with the somewhat scattershot results Sodaro has had since her Kona win in 2022; she’s won a single full distance race since, in New Zealand last year. In fact, that was Sodaro’s last win, period — it’s been almost 18 months between times she’s been on the top step. Still, there’s something to be said for knowing how to be gritty, and Sodaro at her best puts in gritty, “I will outwork and outlast you” performances. I think she’ll wind up fourth, but if any of the preceding three ladies have a rough day at the office, Sodaro will be there to clean up.

Solveig Løvseth. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Last, but certainly not least, is the debut of Løvseth. Traditional Kona lore suggests that it would be impossible for her to win. But, of course, tradition gets thrown out the window when we’re talking about Norwegian athletes moving from short-to-long course racing. Løvseth won twice this year, using a dueling, blunt-force trauma approach of hammering the bike and run. Like Philipp, she’s going to give up time in the water, and it’s always a question of just how large the deficit will be. I think the wind will prove to be to her benefit come Saturday. I think she’ll wind up paying the Kona dues come the Energy Lab, but still hold for fifth place.

Taylor Knibb: Feast or Famine

Taylor Knibb. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Knibb has the unfortunate distinction of being my pick for “Most Likely to Suffer a Spectacular Implosion” on Saturday. She is, in my opinion, the greatest wildcard in the field. Knibb’s the greatest 70.3 athlete on the planet; we can debate whether she or Ashleigh Gentle is the best T100 distance athlete. If this were the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship, we’d be writing about how it’s Knibb’s race to lose and everyone else is playing catch up.

But it’s not. It’s full-distance racing. And Knibb is yet to win at this distance.

Now, yes, she’s only raced a full-distance IRONMAN twice, and she’s finished fourth and second, respectively. But let’s look through those performances. Here in Kona, in 2023, Knibb swam in the first chase pack, giving up roughly two minutes to Charles-Barclay. She then had the second fastest ride, again ceding time to Charles-Barclay. And then, on the run, Knibb suffered immensely during the second half, running anywhere from eight to 18 minutes slower than the best runners in the field. At IRONMAN Texas this year, it was more of the same — she led a swim field that was relatively weak, then had the fastest ride of the day to earn a 7+ minute lead at T2. And then she ran fifteen minutes slower than Matthews did.

That’s just not going to get it done in Kona. It leaves us with two options for Knibb to maximize results: either she’s improved her marathon and just hasn’t shown it yet, or she needs to hammer the bike and hope to extended a large enough lead to use a three hour run to win. Given the forecast for blustery conditions, and seeing Knibb’s equipment choices for Saturday, I’m inclined to believe we’re looking at door number two. It feels very much like Laidlow’s all-or-nothing approach last year. Knibb’s own racing history at this distance would lead me to think it is much more likely to be the latter than the former. I’m putting the over/under on Knibb’s finishing position at 5.5. And I’m taking the over.

The Most Likely to Make Me Look Foolish: Lisa Perterer

The Austrian arrives here having finished behind some of the big names we’ve already mentioned: third in Texas behind Matthews and Knibb, then second in Lake Placid behind Løvseth. Unlike Knibb, Perterer has shown us that she can run the near-requisite sub three hour marathon, and she did so on the extremely difficult run course in Lake Placid. Perhaps the biggest knock on her resume is that she has just one middle distance victory to her name, and that was over a year ago at 70.3 Cozumel.

Still, combing through Perterer’s results, she seems to thrive on challenging conditions and courses. And it looks like Mother Nature may be showing her teeth a little bit on Saturday. That plays into the hands of those athletes who relish hard days at the office. I expect Perterer to have a top-10 day, but her ceiling is winning this race and disrupting everything else I’ve written here.

Quick Hits Paycheck Predictions

Jackie Hering. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Alright. We’ve accounted for who I expect to land seven of the fifteen paychecks on offer. Here are the other eight athletes I expect to have to cash a check, in no particular order:

• Marta Sanchez
• Marjolaine Pierré
• Skye Moench
• Stephanie Clutterbuck
• Jackie Hering
• Lotte Wilms
• India Lee
• Tamara Jewett

You can see if my predictions come true at all on Saturday, via proseries.ironman.com, DAZN, YouTube, Outside TV exclusively for the U.S. and Canada, L’Équipe in France, HR TV and ARD TV Live in Germany, ESPN (within Disney+) for viewers in the Caribbean and Latin America, iQIYI in China, SuperSport in South Africa, and RTVE Play in Spain, with race coverage beginning at 6 AM local time.

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