Ironman Cairns 2019: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification
The first of two racist analyse from the last weekend is the Asia Pacific Championship, Ironman Cairns. Cairns is a mid-sized race which, as a championship event, puts 80 age group Kona slots on offer. This year’s race fell inline with the previous few years and results trend closely to the course averages.
Comparing this year’s distributions with the amalgamated data from the previous 8 years shows minimal differences. The bike looks to be very slightly slower and the swim a little more focussed. Otherwise the broad picture from this race is one of conformity with previous results.
DNF numbers sit in the mid to high range for the course, but are certainly not exceptional by Ironman standards.
Age group medians also trend similarly to past results as we’d expect given the minimal variations in distributions.
Three quarters of the athletes come from Australia, New Zealand or Japan to race in Cairns and these three nationalities also take most of the slots. The remaining quarter of athletes comes from a wide range of countries.
Tracking the times for specific age group positions over the last few years shows that this years race is quite consistent with the last three years of racing. 2014 and 2015 showed the most deviation in results, but Cairns has mostly been a consistent course in the results it produces.
Based on the athlete list I’ve calculated the likely slot allocation and from that the automatic qualifying times in each age group. Finally numbers may have varied and roll downs may influence final qualifying times. You can compare these statistics with other races on my Kona qualification page.
As with other charts the top twenty within each age group trend close to the course averages. This is not universal, some older, male age groups push ahead of the average towards faster times. For the most part though front of pack performances were similar to previous years.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Cairns 2019 on my Google Drive.