This year’s edition of the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii will rightly always belong to Lucy Charles-Barclay.
Four runners-up finishes in a row in Kona from 2017 to last year before eventually finishing on top of the podium on Saturday laid to rest any stigma of being the nearly woman (even if those second places were often triumphs in the face of adversity).
Charles-Barclay also became the first cannon-to-tape winner in the competitive era of the race, set a new course record, and put two years of injuries behind her including a fractured hip and metatarsal bone in her foot.
A step-change in performance
Yet it wasn’t just a triumph for the 30-year-old and her team. Already billed as the most talent-laden Ironman World Championship in history, the racing was fast enough to be seen as a step-change in performance for the sport.
Last year in the men’s race on the Big Island, 10 pros finished in under 8hrs. This year, 16 women crossed the line in under 9hrs.
The next highest cohort of sub-9hr finishers was in 2018, where in ideal conditions 10 women beat that mark.
This year, Britain’s Laura Siddall clocked her fastest time in five visits, broke 9hrs, and still placed outside the prize money that pays 15-deep.
A 97% completion rate
But it wasn’t just about the professional women either. The first truly women’s-only Kona experience witnessed a full complement make the swim cut-off, and a remarkable completion rate reported at 97% as 1,984 amateurs and 46 pros stuck it out to the final stretch along Ali’i Drive.
The numbers only tell part of the story. The vibe wasn’t as frenetic as last year when the two-day experiment of women racing on Thursday and men on Saturday made for several thousand more athletes and supporters on the island.
But that didn’t detract from the experience, nor general feedback about how positive the week had been as a whole. ‘Women supporting women’ was a phrase heard often, and coincidentally or otherwise, there were thankfully far fewer reports of spats with locals or pre-race collisions with motor vehicles.
Devaluing the title?
One criticism levelled at the event is that in creating a day purely for women’s racing there simply isn’t enough Ironman triathletes of the required calibre, with the result that the organisers throw out slots like confetti and ultimately devalue the ‘World Championship’ title.
The counter to this is that the fastest women are still turning up in the numbers that they always did, and winning an age-group title is still as merited as it ever was.
It also has to be recognised that from a previous best of 800 female participants prior to the pandemic, there are now more than 2,000 slots available.
Ironman couldn’t have been naive enough to expect demand to rise in parallel with supply and it will take time for the sport to grow to that level.
A change in the qualification structure
The other factor is that historically women are far less likely to enter more than one full distance a year than men. Again Ironman is aware of this, which is why we can expect to see a change in the way age-group qualification is structured for the women’s race in Nice in 2024.
The latter point is also born out of necessity because the current system of qualifying through Ironman racing isn’t working, with available slots not just rolling deep into age-groups but, in around half the races in the new qualification period, not being taken up at all.
This is fuel for naysayers that Ironman’s philosophy to split the races is flawed, and that it should all come back to one day, and preferably one day in Hawaii. But instead why not take the view that Ironman’s policy is creating opportunity for female triathletes to aspire to.
What we witnessed in Kona on Saturday, with such a high percentage of finishers and around 50% more YouTube viewers tuning in to watch the women's race than the men's race in Nice, should only add to that belief that when it comes to long-distance triathlon, if you can see it you can 100% be it.
Top image credit: Sean Haffey/Getty Images for Ironman
