Yep, know someone who did 9:42 and didn’t make the top 20 in the M40 cat.
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Both races this weekend were offering slots for Nice, I thought qualification had finished? It’s only about 6 weeks until the race.
On the old roll down system.
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Guess it’s the annual offer Nice to anyone time of year. They offered places to all AWA last week.
I believe they offered Nice alongside the Kona allocation, a bit like getting a blankety blank chequebook and pen when you failed to get one of the actual prizes.
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Yeah, dual qualification at the weekend for Kalmar and Copenhagen.
Was it only AWA gold? Will they extend to bronze? Should I do a few long rides 
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Just checked the Divisional ranking for Kalmar in the top 50.
11 M50-54 and 5 M55-59, 16 slots for 50 year old men.
Men in their 30s got 10, as did men in their 40s.
Start numbers of 50 somethings are usually way below 30s and 40s.
How long before a few barbs come the way of the 50 somethings for having it easy for KQ? 
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Or possibly having more time and resources to train!
There are some rumblings about lack of female places on slowtwitch but they faired better at other races.
I think it does feel a bit fairer in many ways, but the flaw could be the age group calculation being incorrect.
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The time and resources to train is a good point. M30s and 40s - a few would have time and resources, but vast majority won’t.
Very hard to get pegged against your top 20% Kona finishers (who presumably are mostly the ones with time and resources) when you don’t.
Having time and resources is much more common in 50s so KQ chasers will almost certainly have the same time and resources as their top 20% Kona so a bit easier to get closer.
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According to the CoachCox website (cut and paste and I put it in a pivot table)
| Ironman Sweden 2025 | Ironman Copenhagen 2025 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIV | Count | DIV | Count | ||
| F18-24 | 1 | F18-24 | 1 | ||
| F25-29 | 1 | F25-29 | 2 | ||
| F30-34 | 1 | F30-34 | 4 | ||
| F35-39 | 1 | F35-39 | 1 | ||
| F40-44 | 1 | F40-44 | 1 | ||
| F45-49 | 1 | F45-49 | 1 | ||
| F50-54 | 1 | F50-54 | 1 | ||
| F55-59 | 2 | F55-59 | 1 | ||
| F60-64 | 1 | F60-64 | 1 | ||
| F65-69 | 1 | F65-69 | 1 | ||
| M18-24 | 2 | F70-74 | 1 | ||
| M25-29 | 1 | M18-24 | 3 | ||
| M30-34 | 3 | M25-29 | 4 | ||
| M35-39 | 1 | M30-34 | 2 | ||
| M40-44 | 5 | M35-39 | 1 | ||
| M45-49 | 2 | M40-44 | 1 | ||
| M50-54 | 8 | M45-49 | 3 | ||
| M55-59 | 2 | M50-54 | 1 | ||
| M60-64 | 1 | M55-59 | 6 | ||
| M65-69 | 2 | M60-64 | 1 | ||
| M70-74 | 1 | M65-69 | 2 | ||
| M75-79 | 1 | M70-74 | 1 | ||
| Grand Total | 40 | Grand Total | 40 |
Female/Male – Female/Male
11 / 29 -------------- 15 / 25
Think I am misunderstanding this, I thought the female and male had 20 slots each and then it was performance adjusted?
If not it explains…
Not for IM where they’re moving to a one day for all, it’s one pot for all and allocated based on relative. performance, with expectation somewhere slightly over 20% KQ allocation will be to females
I think 70.3 where they’re aiming to keep having separate days for genders has a different approach to ensure enough female qualifiers to fill a day.
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Yes you are correct, I’d got 70.3 in the back of my head.
It explains the grumbles.
I expect they are going to have to change it.
But women only make up a smaller proportion of the field usually.
It does put the emphasis on quality rather than getting lucky at rolldown. Regardless of gender.
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I understand that, however seems a bit harsh that if you are female you’ve got to pretty much win your division.
From the two events only 5 slots across three divisions for non-winning performances and three of them were in the F30-34 cat/div
Generally I think it is much better than the old system though.
You don’t though, you just need to be good? If your ranked score is good it’s irrelevant of gender. But with smaller fields there’s less likely to be quality.
They estimate this format will give at least the same, and likely more female KQ places than the pre-2019 system on proportional entries.
Maybe I’m being naive but I don’t see the problem with this. There’s nothing stopping this system being completely reversed and having 75% female entries and men having to win their AG to qualify, people just have to be good compared to their relative peers.
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I could potentially see an argument that women are disadvantaged (society wise/childraising etc) from being able to go to Kona, so the only people who go to WC are the super super keen, and therefore that relative performance for top 20% skews upwards?
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Fair point.
In Copenhagen 4 out of the first 5 that missed out were female so that kind of skews it a bit… it could have easily looked different.
Maybe, only looking at two races after all.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
That thought had crossed my mind.
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If your ‘top 20% Kona’ is a different population than your normal KQ wannabes then you are disadvantaged.
So top 20% Kona in most AGs would be exclusively ‘time and resources to train almost professionally’ people. For M55-59 I’d imagine most KQ wannabes have that level of time and resources so can get close and get a good divisional rank.
Other AGs will not have the same depth of time and resource rich athletes and if not in that arena it will be very hard to get close enough to get the divisional ranking
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Yep.
The people who will qualify for world championships will be those that have the ability to compete against the best of the world in their field.
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This was an interesting comment in the Triathlonish newsletter this week…
This week’s Kona thought: It is confirmed: The algorithm that determines the age-graded rankings (and, thus, determines who gets to go to Kona 2026) is currently based on age-grouper Kona performances from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022. This will roll forward each year in the future. At first, I just thought it seemed kinda generally dumb to be basing qualification on things from a decade earlier — because I think we can all agree (whatever we think about how that breaks) that the sport looks very different than it did in 2016.
But the more I thought about it, the more this simply doesn’t pass a basic logic test.
Think about it this way: The algorithm is based on the top 20% of people in Kona, which mean it looks at people who already qualified under whatever system was used that year. Now, there was one system of qualifying pre-2020 and a different system post-2020.
So if your argument is that the old pre-2020 system was not fair (largely to under-participated groups — women + older age-groups) and thus we needed a new system (which, take it or leave it, this is essentially what was said and why the new system was rolled out), but then you use who qualified UNDER THE OLD SYSTEM (2016-2019) to establish the math that CREATES THE NEW SYSTEM — then all you’re really doing is locking in the old model. ie. If someone had to be disproportionality good as a woman or 60+ athlete to qualify under the old system (because of participation-based proportional qualification), and then those disproportionally good athletes are now being used to establish the new benchmark…
Do you see what I’m saying? It’s fundamentally statistically different than pulling from the entire pool of Ironman athletes to determine who should qualify out of that pool.
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But were they disproportionally good, or were there just not very many of them?
If the latter, then is taking the top 20% from a small pool any better or worse than from the M40 which as was discussed earlier, could see a large spread in times due to the large spread in time and money available at that stage in life?
The top 20% of M40 is going to skew to the money and time available crowd, meaning you will need money and time to get a good AG score.
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