Ironman Australia 2025: Age Group Stats and Qualification Times
It was a quick year for Ironman Australia. Entirely thanks to a cancelled swim. Instead the race began on the bike with a rolling start for athletes. I don’t know exactly how they formatted this, but having done a rolling bike start at ITU Worlds in Vegas many years ago, it’s not a great way to start your race.
Big changes make it hard to make meaningful comparisons. I usually exclude these races from broad stats to avoid their influence. To put together this analysis I’ve played with data in an attempt to compare like-for-like as much as possible.
Result Distributions
To allow a bit of comparison with previous years of racing I’ve removed the swim time from the overall time for the previous races. It’s never going to be a perfect comparison, the impact of a removed swim is more complicated than just eliminating its time.
Accepting those limitations we can see that this year’s race trends slightly faster over both bike and run and so the adjusted overall time too. This is more pronounced at the mid-pack than front-of-pack and the difference isn’t huge.
DNF Rates
Missing swim times don’t mix well with my code to determine where athletes DNF. I’ll need to fix that, but it’s going to have to wait (check in at the change log for new on updates and fixes). With only the overall DNF stats to consider the race looks to fall into normal parameters. DNF rates on run and bike not particularly influenced by the swim.
Median Splits
As we can’t compare swim I’ve simply removed them from the median split charts above. They largely support the findings from the distributions – averages are slower for the majority of age groups. Not huge differences, but noticeable.
Competitor Origins
With under 1,000 athletes starting Ironman Australia is a smaller race. Not surprisingly the majority of athletes are Australian. Qualification slots also look to mostly go to Australians with performance matching their numbers at the race.
Performance Changes
There’s a few years gap in Australia’s race history following Covid. Otherwise performances have actually remained quite consistent through the years. This year showing a major increase in speed due to the shortened course. There’s more variability in the women’s performances over the years, this is likely a reflection of fewer athletes in each age group.
Qualification
Based on start numbers and slots available at this race I’ve calculated the expected qualification slots for each division. In this case the times are much faster than normal and wont’ tell you too much about a typical race in Port Macquarie.
Age Group Top 20
Our final charts look at the performances in the top 20 of each age group. Of course 2025 has faster times in most age groups, some smaller age groups show less of this trend. As per other sections of this review, we can’t use the times from this race to tell us much about how qualification compares. I’ll note that the slope of this year’s top 20 is generally similar to previous years which you could take as an indication of similar levels of competition.
Conclusion
My main conclusion – if an Ironman doesn’t have a swim, it’s faster. It’s hard to draw much more from this year’s data. Comparison isn’t straightforward. Bike and run appear to have been a little bit quicker, perhaps down to conditions, but it could simply be part of the effect of racing without a swim.
While I’ve used the data here, due to the adjustments to the race it’s times won’t feature in averages used elsewhere on the site.