News Update: IRONMAN Events Fill, Reaction to New Trans Rules, More NYC Races Gone

Photo: IRONMAN

It’s that time of the year when we’re kind of waiting for things to get rolling on the triathlon front. We’re a little over a week from the first WTCS race and, that same weekend, we’ll see the innovative Race Ranger anti-drafting technology used with age group racing at Challenge Wanaka.

In the meantime, though, here are a few stories that have crossed our desks over the last week or so with some thoughts about them:

Follows to the Transgender Athlete Policy Changes

As Ryan Heisler reported last week, “World Triathlon announced sweeping changes to its rules and policies, impacting both elite and age group athletes across the spectrum.”

The issue that has generated the most interest from last week’s announcement has been the revisions to World Triathlon’s official transgender athlete policies for both age group and Elite (professional) athletes. There’s a new “age-group open” category that replaces the men’s category for World Triathlon events, with the age-group female category “limited to athletes ‘assigned female at birth,'” Ryan reported.

There are two excellent follow-up stories that illustrate the complicated issues around all this that are well-worth reading. Kelly O’Mara, who has been doing an outstanding job covering all this stuff for, in her words, “about a decade,” wrote an excellent piece for Feisty (read it here) which outlines some excellent reasons as to why this “new policy is a bad idea.” I can’t do the story justice in a few sentences, but O’Mara points out that the new policy creates a more restrictive environment for age group athletes than elites, this new “open” category is hardly going to be “welcoming or inclusive,” and the issue around enforcement since World Triathlon will look into the issue “when athletes report other athletes.”

The other story I would direct you towards is by an Alex Hutchinson (who I used to work with at Canadian Running Magazine). In a piece he wrote for Outside, Hutchinson deciphers the science outlined in a paper published in January in the Journal of Applied Physiology titled “Evidence on Sex Differences in Sports Performance,” which you can read here. The paper outlines seven “statements on the topic of sex difference in sport, along with the evidence to support them.”

Hutchinson concludes:

“But even if you take them all at face value, they don’t tell you what the rules for transgender or intersex athletes should be. That involves a difficult balance between fairness and inclusion. Maybe the male-female differences discussed here are the most important consideration; maybe they’re outweighed by other factors. I don’t think there are any easy answers here, but any compromises we reach need to acknowledge that these differences exist and are persistent.”

Hutchinson nailed it – a transgender policy should balance fairness and inclusion. O’Mara argues that this new policy won’t do that, and I tend to agree. With the current political climate, though, finding “balance” on such a fraught issue will be tough.

New York Triathlon Puts 2025 Races On “Permanent Hiatus”

This will be old news for some, but on January 24 New York Triathlon announced that it won’t be putting on any events this year.

New York Triathlon (NYTRI) has been running since 1983 (it began as a tri club in Syracuse) and, according to the company’s website, “is now the longest-running triathlon race organization in the Northeast.” The grassroots events the group organized (over 800 over the years) included duathlon and sprint triathlon events in and around New York City.

I reached out to the current race directors in hopes of getting more information on the 2025 races, but have not heard anything back.

The news, though, highlights the challenges of putting on a race in the region. The New York City Triathlon (bought by Supertri a few years ago), hasn’t taken place for a few years and its uncertain if it will ever return.

There is some good news for New York City racers. On Tuesday night I was part of an information session for the returning “Westchester Triathlon,” (full disclosure – I have done announcing at the Toughman Tri, another race organized by the new race director, Richard Izzo, and I will probably be announcing at the Westchester race this year). During that call I also got to chat with the race director of the Mighty Montauk Triathlon, Merle McDonald Aaron. That race has been running since 1982.

IRONMAN 70.3 Oceanside Sells Out

If you want to race in Oceanside this year you’ll have to grab an IRONMAN Foundation spot or sign up for one of the “enhanced athlete event experiences.” The Oceanside race kicks off IRONMAN’s North American season that includes nine full-distance races and 34 70.3s.

Other races that I’ve seen that are sold out include the IRONMAN 70.3 events in Mont-Tremblant, Rockford-Illinois, Oregon and IRONMAN Ottawa.

I’ve reached out to IRONMAN to see what stats are available around race registration. I am pretty sure numbers have been getting better year over year since the pandemic, but it would be great to have the stats to back that “feeling” up. We are definitely well past the days when there were a lot more IRONMAN events sold out by this time of year, though. I’ll do a follow up story once I have some stats.

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