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
- The fastest athletes are earning slots. Age-graded, performance-based rankings are working as intended.
- The distribution across age groups has been mostly in line with expectations, with natural variations depending on race conditions and performance on the day.
- The distribution of slots between men and women is not where we expected it to be based on our testing of the new system using historical data. So far, women make up ~16% of finishers and have earned ~24% of the total slots, which is higher than proportional but still below our 30-35% projection.
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,
