Ironman South Africa 2025: Age Group Stats and Qualification

Our second Ironman of the year is South Africa, the African Championship race (and only full Ironman in the region). As a championship event it gets more slots which combined with its relatively small size makes it a favourable destination for qualification. Although you should factor in its unpredictability, the swim has been cancelled or shortened a number of times.

I’ve made comparisons with past race results that do include cancelled swims meaning times are faster than usual for the course. This won’t affect stats for this year but if you want to see comparisons excluding shorter years you should go to my Facebook or Instagram where I’ll share some graphs. While you’re there you can follow the accounts too. Yes, this is just a shameless plug.

As I mentioned above, I didn’t exclude recent races with shortened/cancelled swims so there’s not a fair comparison of our swim data or our overall times. We can make some comparison of bike and run though. They’re not too different in distribution. The front of the race is very similar while the averages are only slightly slower. Not a hugely different year for the majority of the course.

What’s very clear here is the DNF rate is high. Given there’s uncertainty in DNF numbers in early years (rows in red) this makes the 2025 DNF rate almost certainly the highest for the course. Having a full swim pushed up DNF rates significantly but both bike and run DNFs are high too. Clearly not the easiest year of racing.

Median splits back up observations made from the distributions. Firstly, if you don’t exclude races with shortened swims then swim times are fast. Secondly the trend is a clearly slower average bike and a more comparable run average. Windy conditions making for a rough sea and tougher bike? I didn’t have any athletes racing South Africa this year to get a report from.

South Africa is an event that draws a large local field and a smaller selection from around the world. We’ve got some athletes that didn’t have a clear nationality indicated so a small percentage aren’t properly accounted for. This is normal at most races, but given the low numbers here, they happen to move up the table. Most qualifying times were take by locals, although at a lower proportion than their numbers suggest.

Tracking finish times for a range of positions at South Africa is a good way to show how variable the course has been. The range between fastest and slowest times is high as cancelled swims are included. Quick observations we can make: 2025 was comparable with many full length races in South Africa. It becomes more clearly slower with positions further back in the field.

Lots of slots on offer, particularly if you’re a man interested in racing Nice. Qualification times are based on finish times and the number of slots expected in an age group. Roll down does not factor into these calculations. You can find a lot more information on qualification times on my Ironman South Africa qualification page.

Tracking top 20 finish times for each age groups shows a more varied picture where this race is often slower than many of the other races. Generally the very front positions are more comparable with the average. A handful of faster athletes define the age group podium, then there’s a gap and times drop off more gradually again. Patterns are most obvious in bigger age groups with smaller ones being more variable.