Help me understand this.
How is the system not slowly spiraling out of control? Lets say too many 50-54 M are in so they get more Kona slots. Konas comes around and the mean/median time is slow and now the age gradient is even bigger! So the year after even more makes the cut? And so forth each year
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Because they can adjust it if they see a statistical anomaly. They arenāt going to adjust it after a race or 2 but they have the ability to make tweaks at any point if things start to go off the rails.
That sounds terrible. You enter a race, get the shaft due to the slot algorithm being off. Some people win, ya!
Next quarter they tweak itās the other way. Now others get the shaft.
They just keep pretending to calibrate it, while letting an imperfect algorithm seemingly pick winners and losers at the margins.
Itās a really terrible way to introduce a lot of uncertainty into a race which is pretty damn effective at deciding who won already.
Except there isnāt uncertainty - the times you need to hit in each age group will largely be known in a cycle or two. Its like Boston - we know what times we need, plus or minus 5 mins. Yeah, thereās the dreaded margin, but just like there weāll generally know what we need to hit.
If thereās injustice, its that some times are more generous than others - not that thereās uncertainty. Thatās what we had before, the uncertainty of who shows up, particularly in the smaller age groups.
Now we have certainty. We can debate whether this is fair or not, but its far from uncertain.
(for the record, if thereās a benefit to one AG, I donāt think theyāll catch it for year #2. This seems like more of a year 3-4 item)
I made the point up thread. 7:49 for top age grouper is no surprise because 20-39 year old pros are going 7:2x as such this guy is getting beaten by 20 minutes by his peer group, which would be no different than the top age grouper in 40+ defeating his peers by 20+ minutes.
Nothing says they arenāt holding a few slots in their back pocket in case they see something they need to adjust. They may have budgeted 2 per race just in case they need to go back and open an email lottery if something was terribly wrong in the first 10 races of the new system. The sky isnāt falling
This is another reason sampling from multiple races would be helpful.
I would also argue that the line between AG and Pro (besides the money) would be pretty blurred at this stage in life (18-30). The winner is according to his linkedin still a student, my assumption would be that he is unmarried and no kids - If committed, you can keep a pro training schedule at that point (as shown by some of the pros these days) especially as he will not have the sponsor time commitments some of the Pros will have.
That being said a 7:49 is still hugely impressive and committing to that training schedule when you have other temptations in life is very admirable
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Agreed on all points. I am just pointing out that a 7:49 age group relative to a 7:29 pro of the same age, is like a 10:15 60-64 year old against the winner in 9:49. Just straight up comparison of same cohort of humans. We tend to forget that the fastest humans in 20-39 are already racing pro.
I wanted to point out that on https://www.coachcox.co.uk/imstats/im/recent/ you can review past results, with filtering based on Overall Time or Qualifier Time (and Rank).
The Qualifier Time displays the performance age-graded time
You can also update the number of slots.
This is great for reviewing past races, even though allocation was done in the old way.
You can also check this for 70.3 IM races.
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The KonaĀ® Standard is not related to the āmean/median timeā in each class. It has been calculated by the mean of the top 20% at five IMWC Konas (with both M&W).
If a particular div manages to KQ a lot cf other AGs in 2026, this will affect the bottom half of the AG, not the top 20%. "Even more will not make the cut" unless the top quartile athletes in that class disproportionately improve compared to all other AGs.
So I donāt think the formula is unstable, nor will it āspiral out of controlā. Relying on sampling 5 years worth of data dampens any swings, to beneficial effect.
HTH
Also itās application at a micro level further dampens it. By applying it race by race vs at the end of the season it blunts anything but the most egregious errors.
If you let in 10% more people into the WC in a particular AG than is considered fair (however you want to define), then what happens is the 20th percentile moves downward through the age group, and incorporates additional slower athletes.
Example - if 200 athletes in an age group, the 20th percentile incorporates athletes ranked 1-40. If you magically allow 220 athletes instead (for example because you got the coefficient wrong), the new ranking includes athletes ranked 1-44.
Whether this will mean that the formula will spiral out of control, is another matter, but you can calculate the impact and without intervention, will continue the trend in making that age group easier.
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What you say is true but the effect will be marginal. I guess you could say that itās the margin which matters (circa 3 minutes in the example below).
For ease of data access (thank you Coach Cox) I looked at (just) one div in IMWC 2024: M55-59
301 athletes so 60 in the top 20%.
Mean time 10:32:56
If we instead (adopting your āextra 10%ā example) took the mean of #1-#66 it comes to 10:36:06
This is a difference of 0.005.
The effect of this will be dampened, as said, by the (rolling) five Kona sampling.
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As @timbasile said in the thread on the new qualification standard, this is known as the Bryancd Line. Itās well established and irrefutable.
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Getting a letter at the end of the season isnāt the same as roll down. IM messed up the slots for my race. AG should have had 5 slots and they allocated 2. I was 3rd in AG. I got a letter a couple weeks later saying āWeāre sorry, hereās your Kona slot, you have to respond byā¦ā I felt like it was given out of pity and not earned. Not the same with the adrenaline, cheers, coin, etc i had seen in the past.
Good on them for fixing it and not denying you your spot. Sucks you didnāt get to experience roll down but great that tin got the chance to go.
Expecting perfection is an unattainable expectation especially from a new system.
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Blockquote I would like to invite you to Ironman Canada Ottawa if you are young and fast! Surely you will beat all the fast old men and women around here HAHA!
Thanks for the invitation but I am neither of those 
. I would, however, love to do Ironman Ottawa at some point. I lived in Montreal for a couple of years would love to get back to that part of the world.
With the times though, I am 55-59 this year and ticking over to 60-64 next year. Iām in Australia so WA is our flat fast course and the Kalmar and Copenhagen times are way faster than the WA times across the board.
The time in WA was 9:12 at position 40 compared to 8:28 and 8:39 at Kalmar and Copenhagen for the same position. Ironman WA even has 75 slots for Kona this year although normally it has less.
I have done WA and I can get close to 9:12 age graded but nowhere near 8:28 and I struggle to think how the course could be much quicker itself as WA is dead flat. There can be bit of tricky wind on the bike and heat can be a factor but not enough to take 44 minutes off age graded times.
I am seriously impressed with the European performances.
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Yes, half a percent is meaningful, especially if youāre talking about more than 1 age group getting a boost.
If 9:15 is the age/gender graded score to beat, 0.5% means 2.5 minutes, after you apply the coefficients. What this means is for an age group with a preferential coefficient, youāre giving them anywhere between 3-5 free real world minutes. In Ottawa, this was 5-6 athletes in this zone starting at rank 50, 3 of which were in the 50+ categories.
Letās say under this scenario using the actual Ottawa results, that one of the M30s (rank 50) misses the slot to an M50 (Rank 51, 20s behind) or an F50 (Rank 52, 39s behind), due to the coefficients. Easy to see, since weāre taking about less than a minute vs 3-5.
Youāve now given an extra slot to a category and diluted that age group, while reducing the M30 category. The M50 has gone from 3 slots to 4 slots (+33%), or should we choose, the F50 has gone from 1 slot to 2 slots (+100%). As it turns out the M30 won his age group, but there are plenty of other athletes within the 2.5 minutes from this scenario (2nd in M30 was 4 mins back at 9:19 so plausible to say that if the older cohorts were boosted he might have missed out)
Now, this wouldnāt happen ever race for the same age groups every time, but if the older age groups are benefiting from a positive coefficient, it will happen at the margins every race. Then if it isnāt caught, after a few years the problem grows, not quickly at first, 1/5th of the effect per year, but when youāre already ahead by 0.5%, it compounds.
(Disclaimer: Iām not of the opinion that any AG is unfairly benefitting, just that if you had one age group or a set of them with unfair coefficients, the problem grows)
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Just a slightly off topic questionā¦ā¦
Does anyone know what the 2026 Kona Registration Fee isā¦ Athletes guide says TBC.