Crikey, just been skimming through the briefing notes for the 70.3 this weekend as I was looking for something.
Anyway, it says if you accept a 70.3 WC slot for Nice 2026 they’ll relieve you of 813 euros 
that does include all the charges though.
About £750, I’m fairly sure didn’t pay much more for the full WC in 2023. Probably a good job the new qualifying process means I won’t get a slot, although I can see a lot of people deciding they don’t want to pay it, so more rolldowns.
Wtf.
Someone needs to start a campaign 
dont enter, dont pay.
Talking of IM money….
The rich get richer…etc
Wtf…
IM Wales… £690
I want entry to the WC for that.
Here is an IM idea… stop milking the cow… it will die.
Entry to the WC round here only costs 20p and the one at Tesco’s is free (but minging)
Isn’t there some weird price elasticity with certain luxury goods, if you ask more the demand actually goes up? Handbags and so on. I guess IM becomes that?
It hasn’t died, just regenerated into UTMB.
Its a £1 in the Lake District or 1 GBP, the wife loves it if I quote GBP “Great” “British” “Pounds” I can almost hear her spelling and shouting it out.
Do you mean dynamic pricing or a version?
I don’t really know
But some brand like Hermes flogs a bag for £5000 and has a waiting list , while you can get an equally functional bag for £20 down the market they can’t wait to flog you one.
Or those, you know, candles.
They do have tiered pricing, but in general it is now tears as well!
(see what I did there 
)
Looks like a £450 entry fee hasn’t stopped Bolton 70.3 filling already!
Oops, they’ve admitted their historical data has led to very few women qualifying so far and have announced changes to the process!
TBF to them they did say it would be reviewed and have acted quickly, but if the previous scheme rewarded the top athletes regardless of gender then this is trying to level numbers from a quick glance.
I’m sure it might make more sense after a better read.
First and foremost, I want to congratulate all the incredible athletes who competed in this year’s IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship races in Nice, Kona, and Marbella. The performances were inspiring, the dedication extraordinary, and we’re truly grateful to be part of the journey – and the dream – to compete on the biggest stage in triathlon.
I also want to thank everyone who has shared feedback on the new World Championship qualification system. All feedback is a gift, whether positive, negative, or constructive. As a new system, our commitment from the beginning has been to monitor, learn, and evolve if needed – and we are deeply committed to listening to and learning from our community.
Over the past months, we have been diligently working on analysis, research and consultation around the slot allocation system. This letter shares an update on what we’re observing, what we’re learning, and importantly, what steps we’re taking to improve the new qualifying system.
Our Philosophy: Performance Matters
The goal of the new system is simple: to give every athlete the same opportunity to qualify based on performance. Early feedback has told us this approach resonates with our community, and we continue to believe in the foundation of this philosophy.
That said, there are certain elements of the new system that are not playing out as we expected, in particular, an imbalance we are observing among men and women in the performance pool slots. After one-third of the way through the qualifying cycle, 96% of performance pool slots have gone to men. When we tested the new system using historical data, we expected a performance pool split closer to 15-20% for women and 80-85% for men. If true, when combined with the Automatic Qualifying Slots (the podium slots for age-group winners), this would have resulted in women earning 30-35% of all slots by the end of the season. The performance pool is not tracking as expected, and now that we have sufficient data to make informed decisions – for the overall health and long-term growth of the sport – we need to act.
What We’re Seeing
While these trends align with the current state in many endurance sports, one of our goals is to support and accelerate the growth of women participation in triathlon, like how women’s participation in marathons and half marathons has grown over the past several decades.
So, we asked ourselves: Why is this happening, and what can we do?
What We’re Learning
Conversations with athletes, surveys, and early feedback from our IRONMAN Championship Competition Advisory Group highlight two main factors:
Timing and the “Kona Effect”
This year, around 60% of the top-performing women (based on global rankings) competed in the 2025 IRONMAN World Championship in Kona. In comparison, around 20% of the top-performing men raced in Nice. As a result, many of the fastest women have not yet entered qualification races for 2026. While future events may help rebalance this, there’s no guarantee, and we don’t think waiting is the best solution.
Slot Declines and Roll-Down Dynamics
A higher percentage of women than men are declining slots, often due to wanting more time to make a decision or balancing family or professional commitments. When performance pool slots are combined across genders, any slot declined by a woman is more likely to go to a man simply because men make up about four times the number of women participants currently. Based on this feedback, we have tested extending decision windows in a few races this year. Those experiments delivered mixed results, and we will continue to test and learn how we can best meet the needs of our athletes when making slot decisions.
A member of our community summarized the challenge well:
“Equality of access isn’t achieved by ignoring imbalance; it’s achieved by designing systems that account for it.”
What We’re Doing Next
Beginning immediately (including IRONMAN Arizona this weekend), we’re making the following updates to the system:
Performance Pool Split by Gender
Performance pool slots will now be awarded separately for men and women. 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 Slots Stay Within Gender
Automatic qualifying slots for the winners of each age group that roll past 3rd place and into the performance pool will now stay within the same gender’s performance pool.
Retroactive Slot Offers
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 women and men who would have earned those 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 to be allocated to women). Retroactive slot allocation will be made automatically in the coming days to eligible athletes.
How is this different from the old “proportional” model?
In the past, the proportional model began by awarding one slot per age group and gender. Any remaining slots were then allocated to the largest age groups, regardless of gender. In practice, this meant that most smaller age groups in both genders, and most women’s age groups, received just one slot each, while the majority of extra slots went to men in the 30-45 age range, simply because they made up the largest demographic.
The updated performance pool model honors our performance philosophy by continuing to prioritize age-graded performance, while also addressing the observed imbalance between men and women in the sport. This ensures every age group has a competitive opportunity to earn a slot within its respective gender.
Looking to the future
We’ll continue to monitor how the system is playing out; we will continue listening to and learning from our community; and we remain committed to evolving the system if needed in the future.
Our collective aim is to inspire athletes globally to experience the joy, the sense of belonging, and the feeling of personal achievement that are woven through the sport of triathlon. Triathlon is life-changing for so many people around the world, and we are committed to a system that ensures athletes have an opportunity to live their IRONMAN World Championship dreams.
You can find more information – and track ongoing updates – on our new 2026 Qualification Update page. You can also subscribe to email updates and share feedback on the same page.
Thank you for your passion, your engagement, and for being part of this incredible community.
With gratitude,
Didn’t I point this out at the outset? But I got talked around when a few people made discussion points against my points.
My mind is kind of that they didn’t do this from the outset. Roll downs stay in each gender for example.
Just found my email on the subject and read the above (scan read) it seems to make sense. Thinking.
Err, don’t you want to clip your email address off the bottom of that, its public and searchable?
I couldn’t unsubscribe you though. lol (I wouldn’t)
tl;dr The sports screwed
Apparently St Polten 70.3 is returning to Ironman in 2027 after being with Challenge since 2019. It was always a race I fancied doing but next year is unlikely and then Ironman are likely to add £150 to the entry price 
Different set up to when @Jorgan and I did it but will be same 2 lake swim, which is cool, same fantastic bike leg, worth racing alone, and I think the run is slightly different due to the new stadium and set up, but I could come out of retirement for another ride on that course alone!
Unconfirmed reports I’ve just loaded their website 
Whilst I agree with some points in the article, the $14k to do 70.3 is very misleading. Sounds like she had zero equipment, including a bike, so you’re not buying that stuff every race.
For the past few years, I’ve been involved in organizing the Zyterm Triathlon in Zug.
It’s a two-day event:
Saturday features the Kids Triathlons (various distances by age), the Swiss Youth Championships, and the Double Sprint National Championship.
Sunday hosts the Sprint and Olympic distance races.
Entry fees are 100 CHF for the Sprint and 120 CHF for Olympic, with youth/junior events priced between 20–30 CHF.
We attract around 2,000 participants over the weekend, with roughly 1,200 in the Sprint and Olympic races. Financially, we need about 85% capacity to break even—and thankfully we usually hit over 95%.
Most of our infrastructure (barriers, bike racks, etc.) is owned by the club, and we rent marquees from the Canton at a very reasonable rate. Timing is handled by Datasport, which is pretty expensive.
The event is entirely volunteer-run, with over 400 people helping with setup, marshaling, and pack-down. No one on the organizing team is paid.
Outside of Ironman events, Zyterm is likely the largest and most successful triathlon in Switzerland.
Putting on an event of this scale is expensive. It requires strong participation numbers and a huge volunteer effort. In my experience, it’s incredibly hard to make commercially run triathlons viable without charging very high fees.
One ongoing challenge is road access. Most of our course uses open roads, with only the first and last 2 km closed to traffic. Unfortunately, we regularly encounter aggressive drivers, which creates safety concerns and complaints.
After negotiations with local authorities, we’re changing the bike course this year to use more rural roads. It’s a bit of a shame—one of the highlights was the super-fast lakeside route, where many athletes could complete the Olympic bike leg in under 55 minutes. But sometimes it only takes a handful of irresponsible drivers to cause major issues.