IRONMAN Revamps Kona Qualification System to Increase Women’s Performance Pool Numbers
Age-group competitor Julie Worth competes at the 2025 IRONMAN World Championship in Kona. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon
It all seemed like it should work. When IRONMAN announced its new Kona Qualification system in early July, the concept of a performance-based qualifying system based on both age-group winners along with “athletes, who on a relative basis within their gender and age group, are most competitive” seemed to make sense. Just over a third of the way into the 2026 qualification process for Kona, though, IRONMAN has decided to change the system to ensure more women earn qualifying slots in the “performance pool” of those most competitive athletes.
As a quick primer, the system announced in July offered an automatic slot to the winner of each age group, with the ability for that slot to roll down to the top three. If none of the podium finishers took the slot, it would be placed in the “performance pool” slots. Those performance pool slots included all the remaining qualifying slots from the race and were handed out based on an athletes’ competitiveness based on how close they were to a “Kona Standardized” time.
Slowtwitch forum users will be all too familiar with the issues that IRONMAN acknowledged today in its release talking about the changes to the Kona qualification system. IRONMAN notes that “approximately 96% of performance pool slots are going to men, and 4% to women.”
Based on IRONMAN’s testing of the new system, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the performance pool slots should have been going to women. That, combined with the age-group winners slots, would have ensured that roughly 30 to 35 percent of the Kona slots would have gone to women. All of that hasn’t been working out. According to IRONMAN, for the first third of the qualifying races:
- Men have represented 84.4% of overall finishers, while women have represented 15.6% of finishers.
- Based on first-offer acceptance, women were offered ~24% of slots and accepted 20.3% of slots overall.
- Approximately 15% of women’s Automatic Qualifying Slots have rolled to the performance pool (i.e. have not been accepted by women’s podium athletes). By comparison, only 3% of men’s Automatic Qualifying Slots rolled to the performance pool.
- These results have reduced the actual slots women are receiving and negatively skewing actual slot allocation from events.
Initially IRONMAN seemed ready to let the system play itself out. Officials felt that part of the reason all this was happening was because, based on global rankings, roughly 60 percent of the top age-group women were racing in Kona (vs about 20 percent of the top age-group men who were in Nice), so most of those women were likely to enter races either later in 2025 or in 2026, so the system would catch up. They also note that since performance pool slots were combined, since more women passed on slots those slots were more likely to go to a man because there are about four times as many men competing.
With so many people up in arms about the qualifying process right now, though, IRONMAN isn’t going to wait to see if things play out.
New System
IRONMAN has announced that, starting with IRONMAN Arizona this weekend, it will be making the following changes:
Performance Pool Split by Gender: Performance pool slots will now be awarded separately for men andwomen. Men and women will have their own performance pools, and the number of slots in each gender’s pool will match eligible age group starter representation in that race, thus preserving our performance-based allocation principles while supporting distribution across men and women
Automatic Qualifying (Age Group Winner) Slots Remain within Gender: Winner slots that previously rolled within the podium of the respective age group prior to moving into the overall performance pool, will now roll down within the respective gender’s performance pool.
Provide Retroactive Winner Slots to Performance Pool: For IRONMAN races already completed in the 2026 qualifying cycle, we will retroactively apply these changes and offer slots to any athlete – women and men – who would have earned a slot had these changes been implemented initially. This means the 24 women’s Automatic Qualifying slots and 8 men’s Automatic Qualifying slots that rolled into the combined performance pool so far this season will be retroactively offered to the men and women who would have earned these slots. In addition, we will retroactively allocate performance pool slots from past races to athletes who would have qualified if the performance pools had been split between men and women from the beginning (44 slots will be retroactively awarded to women). Retroactive slot allocation will be made automatically in the coming days to eligible athletes. If the slot is not taken, it will continue to be offered to the next highest-ranked athlete within the respective gender.
We’ll have more analysis of today’s announcement for you later today. In a conversation with IRONMAN CEO Scott DeRue earlier, he said:
“We did not design the system initially, or now, to manufacture an outcome around age distribution or gender distribution or anything of that sort. We’re really trying to design a principled system that is rooted in the performance-based philosophy that ensures that every athlete, regardless of age, regardless of gender, has an equal opportunity to qualify based on their performance. And that’s what’s motivating these changes here as well.”
“We don’t have a particular goal around gender distribution or age group distribution or anything of that sort that we’re trying to design the system to achieve,” DeRue continued. “We’re really grounding it in the principles of this performance-based philosophy and what we think is ensuring an equal opportunity to qualify. And so we feel pretty good about that in terms of these changes being aligned with that philosophy and approach.”
DeRue also said that IRONMAN will continue to monitor the Kona Qualifying system and will make additional changes it as needed.
At least they are trying. And listening to feedback - which is not nothing.
I don’t believe that for a hot second! LOL!
The title of the article is misleading. They aren’t increasing slots they are guaranteeing a proportional number of slots. If women’s participation doesn’t increase this actual hurt the people who will be celebrating it as a victory. All those women who were competing in Kona weren’t part of the performance pool in these races, they will now be added back in and would have likely naturally increased the number of slots acquired in the performance pool. But loud squeaky wheels got a change but at what cost. I do like the change of the podium slot not leaving the gender, that was an absolute winner of a change. I believe the other will end up favoring men more than women.
I still think their Kona index numbers are out of whack. Let’s just go back to the old system.
100%, but that’s why they need to assign slots on a proportional basis. I was advocating on a fixed percentage basis on how many women they wanted at Kona, but this at least MAY encourage more women to sign up is they know in their AG they there will be more than one slot opportunity.
So to understand e.g. im az lets say 40 slots. 10 for age groups in each gender leaving 20 slots. If the field is 20% women they will get 4 performance slots?
So how does this drive female participation?
Why have been easier to add 5 women slots at the end of each race.
Yeah I was gonna say, that part is not fixed especially on flat courses with down current swims (it only seems to hold up decently on hillier/harder courses where there’s more separation on the bike/run). This fixes the women’s lower representation in the performance pool but not men 50+ dominating it.
The problem there is that the multipliers are skewed by the fact that you have so many fast 20s and 30s men essentially putting back BOP pro times at WCs, and you don’t have that at other races, so the 25-39 AGs are represented unrealistically fast vs 40s, 50s, etc in non-WC races. My opinion on how to fix that was either to use a global performance pool calcualtion from the prior 2 years, or use race-specific performances for the past 5 years (for races with that history). Maybe (hopefully) they’ll address the multiplier calcs before 2026
The under 40 crowd is already highly represented at Kona between the AG and pro fields. I doubt IM will do a whole lot to increase those numbers or make adjustments outside of the natural adjustments that will happen to the coefficient after Kona next year.
Dude it just tells them if you show up you have a chance at a slot outside of winning your AG. A small chance, yes a better chance than the men, but still it’s a chance that seems reasonable.
For men under 45, especially under 35, still no soup for you.
Incidentally, there’s exactly 20% of women signed up for this race and 11F and 12M age groups. I assume the proportion will be based on finishers so I expect 3 “extra” slots to go to the women. But that combined with the AG slots rolling to women will actually means 14 out of 40 slots will go to women. That’s 35% of slots.
Assuming they got 1 or 2 previously it would have been 30-33%. Assuming the women raced really well in AZ they could have had more. But likely, thinking about it, there’s probably a lot of fast older men about to crush it on Sunday so I suspect the results were going to look worse than CA did for PR purposes.
Because overall slot allocations will still be 11 age group winners, plus 4 performance pool = 15/40 = 37.5% of all slots, or nearly double vs raw participation.
Well no shit the pro field is almost all under 40, I don’t think that exactly counts! But what you’re gonna have without changes is over 2x the number of qualified men from 50-59 as opposed to 25-34, even though these days 25-34 has 1.5-2x the finishers of 50s men. Which makes no sense under any system, even if 50s men are performing better which ( do believe, but the times from 25-29 and 30-34 are also crazy fast), that’s a 3-4x swing in what they would have by proportional representation.
Which I’m not arguing you need exact proportional representation, but you shouldn’t have the largest participation AGs getting half the qualifier slots of a smaller AG.
They are. This doesn’t quite fix the old vs young part that’s going on.
Part of it though is that the older age groups are verifiably more competitive - at least in the 1 race that I analysed. This might well resolve itself with less fanfare.
But yes, in a perfect world, count only qualifiers through the roll-down ceremony (at the very least).
Do we have any idea what percentage of female IM participants are actually motivated by Kona slots? I gotta imagine it is very low number like it would be when looking at all IM participants. Maybe the number is slightly higher for 2nd time participants.
The 45 and older crowd are competing against the best of the best in their AGs. The under 40’aee competing against the best of the best of the pretty good field bc the best of the best are pros. So it is somewhat relevant. The under 40 if good enough can go pro and be part of the 80ish that qual for Kona or they can be part of the next tier who qual as an AG and finish an hour + behind the best of their AG.
Now if there is a reduction on pro licenses due to changes in how federations or IM allow them then they would absolutely need to adjust it bc that would be unfair as the coefficient wouldn’t xome close to representing that new world.
Depends on if the swim gets cancelled or not. I would expect it to be slightly better for younger people with the swim not being a downriver swim.