I think Kyle meant that IM had equal slot allocations but 1000 fewer women accept a WC slot, so those women’s slots went unused relative to what should be a similar capacity for 3000ish for both genders.
Which female participation is a good deal higher in 70.3 than fulls, and even then there’s not as much demand to fill a race to the same extent as men. Which not to your point but more broadly, I think is ok- long distance tri is much more popular with men than women. We should still continue to try to grow women’s access and opportunities to compete, but when your sport is 75% men, doing do at the expense of opportunities for men (especially in ultracompetitive and limited opportunity world championships) feels misguided.
The guys piled on the PTO (they insist on calling the organisation “the T100” for some reason) for asking the 4 athletes who completed the full run in Dubai if everyone else should be disqualified.
According to the PTN, putting athletes under such pressure and “making them do the officials’ job” is inexcusable.
I think the PTN failed to reflect and realize that this was just an informal way of asking the athletes: if we do not disqualify the rest of the field, will you file a protest?
See, the athletes do have a say in what determination is made. They (one of them) can effectively make the officials enforce the rules, and then everyone else gets DQed. So unless the officials DQ everyone else, it is the 4 athletes’ call.
And athletes in fact catch flak whenever a protest is filed on their behalf for some minor infraction by others, such as here. C’est la vie.
Finally, saying that “Birthwhistle earned 4th place and was relegated to dead last” is sort of, er, I’d say not the full picture…
lol right so we are going to make the wrong call unless you are going to force us to make the right one.
Or maybe they could have come up with a better solution than asking the athletes competing to decide between 2 very terrible options. But hey it’s the T100, winging it is their brand so at least they are consistent.
A big part of the problem is that the T100 and previously the PTO has played loose and fast with the rules and has shown NO ability to make the proper calls for fair racing and sport. Even when the PTO was on the rise in 2022/2023, we were all knocking them for blatant drafting in all the races and a lack of officiating (which mind you has continued to this day, and then you have bs penalties like Rico Bogen and Jess Learmonth handed out). Orr Jan handing the swimskin to the head official at PTO US open, which should’ve been a penalty. Or refusing to DQ Hayden for illegal shoes even when he offered to be DQed to put the controversy to bed. Now it’s just par for the course that they don’t have the gumption to do the right thing and DQ everyone who didn’t do the full run course.
Now you couple these with other longstanding T100 professionalism issues- cancelling and adding new races at late notice (3 this year alone), not paying athletes until 1-2 years later, not allowing athletes who had declined a contract to race at all. It’s al ongstanding problem of them not having professionalism and not being able to execute a race series properly both in planning and execution.
All of their fuckups are a separate matter. (The PTO’s, I think, as that’s the name of the organization running the T100 series). Not clear to me if the officiating fuckups are to be blamed on World Triathlon or the PTO. In theory you’d expect World Triathlon to be responsible for officiating here, but I haven’t seen this laid out clearly anywhere. ProTriNews seem to be placing the blame for burdening the athletes with the weight of the decision squarely on the PTO, not World Triathlon.
Anyway, this is a situation of:
Pick the solution they picked, which most people seem to consider fair - but you need to ask the 4 athletes if they will protest, because if they do, there is no solution 1,
DQ everyone but 4 people, which I suppose most people would not consider fair.
I had the opposite happen (the Hayden/MVR situation) where I was running with a group of 3 at the front of a half marathon (local race, so not super competitive), and the lead biker made a wrong turn and led us off course by over a half mile, before we all realized it when cars were coming by and we had to turn around and go back. There wasn’t much depth out of the remainder of the field, so I ended up winning even with the mistake (and running 14.3 miles, a new HM distance PR!). But the women’s leader had also been led off course, and she ended up not catching up to the 2nd place woman who ran the proper distance. She was pretty mad, and if I were the organizer I would’ve paid her the $$ difference between 2nd and first, but she didn’t deserve the win over the woman who finished first.
If the reverse had happened, and we had cut the course following the lead bike, believe me I would’ve been very pissed at the race, but accepted that I couldn’t have won not completing the full distance. A DQ for cutting the course even unintentionally to to race official negligence is 100% fair and should’ve been handed out.
Totally agree that WT does own some responsibility for the mistake and how it was handled post race. However, WT is a partner and not the owner and overall responsible party that is PTO/T100. As you said there seems to be no clear delineation on who owns the responsibility for these types of decisions and that falls to the owner not the partner.
If they needed to gauge the likelihood of a protest they should have asked those questions in private of the athletes they were looking to displace from their rightfully earned position in the race. Putting it to a public vote was shameful. Instead they took the cowards way out and put the athletes in a situation where they were damned either way and took the noble path to their own financial deteriment. PTO/T100 needs to at a minimum pay the 4 athletes as the 1-4 placed athletes even if they don’t give them the points or official recognition.
According to Mika the T100 guys came to the athletes with the two previously discussed options. Then Jason West stated the obvious: that Greg, he and Jake are the only ones who would gain from disqualifying the rest, but he wouldn’t want to gain from such an unfortunate situation as it wasn’t the other athletes fault.
After that no one really knew what to do and Jason proposed to just have a vote, so it wasn’t really the T100 who had the idea of the vote.
Kudos to Jason for having leadership courage and an ability to count. Two qualities that were visibly lacking this weekend. I still agree with @Bryancd that this should have been an WT and T100 decision and not an athlete decision.
Yeah way to shirk off responsibility by just asking the athletes. Can you think of any other professional sports organization that looks to athletes in this way? IMO this is a top down issue and if I was an investor I’d be asking for a change in leadership at the tippy top. Too many issues with T100 that have gone unaccounted for.
There’s a 3rd option is which to place the 4 who completed the course as #1-4, and then run down the list from there. That way everyone who counted correctly gets rewarded, while those who messed up only lose a max 3 spots.
The part I find funny is that Mika Noodt knew he was in 2nd, and still lifted the finish line banner. I get that everyone else would be wondering what’s going on, but Mika didn’t have a reason to suddenly win.
I believe he said afterwards that he was confused by the banner but thought maybe they held one up for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Maybe they do that at Roth? I think he referenced Roth.
The athletes had already lodged a protest, the outcome from the rule book was that the 13 had to be disqualified. The officialsnobv didn’t want to do that and came up with the idea of taking it back to lap 7. They then came back to the athletes and said we have to disqualify 13 athletes or we could take the final places from the end of lap , the last tuming that everyine crossed. What do you all want to do, which of these 2 options. And once again, this would never be a fair vote, just on numbers.
The best resolution, which should have been decided by the race organisation, would have been to award the top places to those athletes completing the full course, in order of finishing, and then call the remainder of the race ‘cancelled’ on the basis that some portion of blame for Noodt et al’s error can be accepted by the race organisation. Cancellation option draws on World Tri Comp Rules Appx V 15.1(e) and then go on to share #5-#18 prize money and points between those (drawing on Appx V 15.2(b)). This rewards athletes’ ability to count to 8 (or wear a watch and knowing how long the run course has been briefed as) and did not need to be put the athletes who ‘did the business’ under peer pressure to vote.