Edit: as this thread started with Kalmar and Copenhagen and some of the following races with combined quals were tabled in the content for 2026 KQ dynamics, I was asked to change thread title by @Ajax_Bay
I went into the Ironman app to check out age graded results for Kalmar which was on Saturday, but they were not yet up on Sunday.
In any case I am interested to see how slot allocation worked?
Did they do 2025 first on the old system and then take those athletes out from the 2026 outright + age x gender grading for 2026
Is there a link for the age x gender graded results?
Any record of how many men and how many women took 2026 Kona slots ?
Same questions for Copenhagen which is still going on as I type this out.
Perhaps Kalmar awards/slot allocation is still going on on Sunday and Copenhagen on Monday which is why I am not seeing the combined results in the ironman app yet and it only goes up at awards ceremony
In the blurb for Kalmar in the app, it says that athletes can take a slot for both 2025 and 2026. It says the 2025 allocation will be conducted first and then the 2026 allocation. I took this to mean that they will run the 2025 allocation on the old system and then the 2026 allocation using the new system (i.e. the same results set is input, but the outcomes using that results set will differ according to the 2025 vs 2026 allocation rules). I’m not there but had a friend doing the race so have been trying to figure it out.
That is really unusual. When I have been at 70.3s with slots for two years you could only take one year or the other the theory is that you have race at least once to qualify for each championship not get two championship slots off one effort. Let’s wait to hear what happened on the ground.
The age graded results are out for Kalmar so I will try to figure out how to paste the top 50 into this thread
With a quick glance I only see 8 women in the top 50 so depending on who takes what, that does not bode that well (at least from this race) for a Kona 2026 with more percentage of women vs Kona 2019, but let’s see what shakes out.
Yikes. Top 3 men 50+ and only 8 women is a huge problem. Again, they have the discounting mechanism wrong somehow. Or worse the whole system is flawed.
The point is that if the system has these wild disparities between races it needs to be adjusted. There needs to be a semblance of consistency in regards to who is awarded slots at races, it can’t be this disparate. That’s not something IM is going to be happy about. You just can’t have a race where only 8 women get slots out of 50 or vice versa. And a M65-69 being number 1 really begs questions. It can’t just be “well, that’s the way it is”.
It’s 8 slots out of 40, so 20%, which I think is a bit below the Kona average - but perhaps not so much below that it couldn’t be evened out by other races elsewhere? I guess everyone will be watching that closely to see if something is really off in the age-grading in this regard.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with a M65-69 being the fastest age-graded time. Surely the system is designed such that any AG can provide the fasted age-graded time? Now, if as future races unfold, we see it’s always the same age-group (or a small number of age-groups) always being the fastest age-graded time then I’m with you (and I guess your comment is just revealing this as your fear / suspicion?).
Yeah predicated on the back testing that was done in the other thread on the topic. There was a distinct bias towards older male AG’s and it seemed to not be solving for trying to get more women to Kona, especially in the younger AG’s. The old system was flawed but it was knowable. It was easy to understand. This, if it continues to have wild swings, will end up being too confusing and not an incentive for people to chase slots. That’s where this COULD become a cash flow issue for IM and not a road they will want to go down. I just think the using of 5 years or whatever of Kona finishing times as the discount qualifier is causing some problems.
Any age group should be able to “win” the age graded and the more outlier a guy or girl is in an older age group, the more their assist to the top, whereas someone in 30-34 on the men’s side gets zero assist, so that person has to be an outlier in which case that person is already racing PRO today, so you really need to compare the top older age group age graded times against the top male pros to get the reality version of this.
In any case is matters ZERO what the top person in each age group ends up at in the age grading (other than them occupying a rank, but they get their slot regardless and don’t bump anyone).
I see the top raw time in the results in the winner of M30-34 with an 8:26. We can debate that the top 30-34’s in the world are going around 7:30, so when age graded athletes go sub 8:26 statistically it makes sense that top athletes in these other divisions should actually be able to go close to 7:30 age graded except the age grading 5 year data was not normalized to pros it was normalized to 30-34 as the baseline, excluding pros.
Or are they trying to entice the fast European women to make the long haul to Kona this year as it is unlikely that the same woman takes a kona slot for this year and next year, and maybe the first place woman takes Kona this year and the 3rd place who is not ranked high enough in the performance pool for 2026 still gets an outright slot for 2026
It would be interesting to see how many women took Kona 2026 slots. Minimally there are eleven slots for the top taker for the sub 75 age groups. There are three women in 2-3rd place in the top 50, so there could end up being more like 14 out of 40 going to Kona
How many slots does Copenhagen have for 2026? As I understand the system, firstly one slot per AG go to the winner (or second or third): that’s about 20 slots (10 female). The rest goes to that list.
