What Convinced IRONMAN and Challenge Roth to Move to a 20-Meter Pro Draft Zone
Earlier today we reported that IRONMAN announced it would be using a 20-meter draft zone for pros in 2026, and at about the same time Challenge Roth was also pushing out the news that it would also be moving to a 20-meter zone – albeit as a “controlled test to see if racing can be even fairer.”
So why did January 27, 2026 become the big “20-meter announcement” day? There was no-doubt some element of “we’re not going to be the second ones to announce this,” but, at the end of the day, IRONMAN made the call because of the data they saw in their last bout of testing. Challenge Roth, like Challenge Family and the Professional Triathletes Organisation before them, appear to be making the call based on the desires of pro athletes.
We chatted with IRONMAN’s head of officials, Jimmy Riccitello, on this issue in one of our podcasts – you can listen to that conversation through the link below.
During our conversation, Riccitello described the two different tests that IRONMAN did on the benefits of various draft-zone distances – specifically 12-, 16- and 20-meter zones. The testing was conducted by aerodynamic expert Marc Graveline. Our conversation with Riccitello came before there were any results from the most recent test that IRONMAN did in Tucson, Arizona, which included five pro men, including Lionel Sanders.
After that conversation, if you’d asked me what I thought would happen this year (as Eric Wynn did), I was confident that IRONMAN would do more testing, and also test the 20-meter draft zone at a few races before it made the call.
Why did I think IRONMAN wouldn’t pull the trigger right off the bat this season? I figured there were just too many complicating factors with their races. Having a 20-meter draft zone at a T100 race isn’t difficult – there are a maximum of 20 athletes in each race. Challenge Family events that offer a 20-meter draft zone (which is most of them), for the most part, don’t have the same numbers of athletes on the course that IRONMAN races do. While the pro fields are often large, spreading the entire field out isn’t as much of a … challenge (sorry, I just couldn’t resist), because there just aren’t as many people on the course.
The other complicating factor with the 20-meter draft zone is the interaction between pros and age group athletes, and also between slower pro men and faster pro women. In terms of age group athletes, they’ll still be working to a 12-meter draft zone and can “slingshot” through the draft zone. (They can ride up to the back of the bike ahead of them before they pass – pros have to pull out wide and then make the pass.) Pro men towards the back of the field who get caught by the pro women complicate things, too – if they get caught between a couple of pro women, suddenly the second pro woman is riding 24 meters behind the women ahead instead of 12 meters. Add a few more men to the mix and things get complicated.
Test Data
Why was I so wrong on my prediction? According to IRONMAN CEO Scott DeRue, it comes down to the data from the tests.
“There is a clear advantage at 12 (meters),” DeRue said. “That advantage gets greater as you go back in the train, so position two, three, four, and five … we thought that we would see lesser advantage at 16 versus 12, and we didn’t really. It was only until 20 where we started to see that advantage drop significantly, and that was really compelling in our findings.”
Based on those numbers, it was a no-brainer for DeRue – moving to a 20-meter draft zone “is in the best interests of the sport and our professional athletes.”
IRONMAN officials say that we’ll get to see the numbers that prove all those points. When remains unclear. There are a lot of variables at play with all this – size of athletes, speed, cross winds, etc. – so the powers that be no-doubt want the messaging to be as clear as possible. Especially since some age-group athletes are likely to want a 20-meter draft zone, too, which becomes a bit more complicated on a crowded IRONMAN course with, say, 2,000 to 3,600 athletes on it, as we saw at the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Marbella last year.
According to DeRue, the numbers also support keeping the age-group draft zone at 12 meters. The advantages seen at 12 and 16 meters are related to the speeds the pros are riding. Age group athletes, for the most part, aren’t riding at those speeds, so there’s no need to make the change.
IRONMAN’s release today also explains that we’ll likely see the “operational details related to the 20-meter draft zone” in the 2026 IRONMAN Competition Rules which are slated to come out next month and be put in to effect on March 1. That update will provide the details on how long an athlete will have to make the pass once they enter the draft zone (likely 45 seconds), and exactly how age-group athletes can interact with the pros. DeRue says they are aware of the issues that arise around that interaction, and will provide clarity within the rules to ensure the women’s races aren’t affected.
Pro Feedback
IRONMAN’s release, and their comments afterwards, make it clear that athlete feedback on this issue was an important factor, but ultimately the decision was data driven. IRONMAN’s testing seemingly backs up exactly what many pros keep telling us – there’s a real advantage to sitting in a group that’s riding 12-meters apart. During a podcast we recorded earlier today, we asked Austrian pro Lisa Perterer about that – she raced a number of T100 events last year, along with four full-distance IRONMAN races. She said you can feel a big difference between the 12- and 20-meter draft zones.
Challenge Roth’s announcement today celebrated the fact that the “test” being run this year is because they “listen to our athletes.” The announcement also addresses their reasoning for increasing the draft zone for pros, and not for age groupers.
The adjustment of the draft zone for 2026 is deliberately designed as a trial in the professional field. The aim is to understand, under real competition conditions, what effects a greater distance actually has on the fairness and dynamics of the race.
For the age group sector, the existing rule will remain unchanged for the time being.
We clearly see this adjustment as a test. In the professional field, we have very high, consistent speeds and a manageable starting field, which are ideal conditions for gaining insights.
With the age groupers, the average speeds are lower, the slipstream effects are smaller and the fields are much larger. Transferring the rule would require massive interventions in the race structure.
One of those “interventions” would be reducing the field size (roughly 3,400 individuals and 650 relay teams), which would mean “even fewer people would be able to experience the dream of Roth” and entry fees would have to be increased.
Despite all the issues with real estate on the course, the folks at Roth, like IRONMAN, made the call to move to a longer draft zone for pro racers today. IRONMAN has done the testing to back up its decision, and once the numbers came out, it made no sense to do further race-tests. Why mess around with the backlash of some races featuring a 20-meter draft zone and others with a 12-meter zone? And, if the folks at Roth got wind that something like this might be in the works, no-doubt they didn’t want to be the last to make the jump, either.
All of which means we’ll see a consistent, 20-meter draft zone at all the major pro events in 2026. That’s good news for the sport. Probably the best thing, though, is that IRONMAN’s announcement today made it clear that its decision derives from the numbers. Yes, there was pressure from pros, but in the end they made the call after doing some testing. While seeing that testing data doesn’t really make a lot of difference, IRONMAN will gain even more credibility by releasing as much data as they can to show exactly why today’s decision was a no-brainer.
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