How Kona Qualification Works

With the return to a single World Championship race in Kona and implied changes to qualification I thought I’d look at how qualification has worked up until now and what those numbers look like. All before adding a little speculation about what might be to come and the implications of that.

How you qualify

Qualifying for Kona, in principle, requires an athelte to perform well enough at another Ironman event. Each race is given a number of qualifying slots for the World Champs to distribute among the age groups. After the race these slots are offered to competitors starting with the fastest in each age group and working back. So, you race well, you’re one of the fastest among your peers, you go to Kona.

Races receive varying numbers of slots to allocate to competitors. Championship events typically get a lot more than regular Ironman races. There is then a specific method to allocating these slots among the age groups. Every division that starts the race is given a slot. The remaining slots are then divided among the age groups in proportion to their size. Larger age groups receive a larger share of the qualifying slots.

Proportional distributions can be done in many different ways. In the case of Ironman qualifying slots the D’Hondt method is used to handle the allocation. It took me a long time to find this solution, but back in 2018 I was put on the right path and determined the maths behind it. All qualification statistics on this site use this method to calculate slot numbers.

Qualification slots are claimed at a Roll Down ceremony after the race. So called because if a slot isn’t claimed it rolls down to the next finisher in that category and so on until all the slots have been claimed in that group. While I can work out the number of slots allocated, how roll down plays out is unpredictable. If athletes aren’t at the ceremony it can keep going all the way back to last place. Unclaimed slots from one age group get reassigned to larger age groups in the same gender.

Texas Examples

I’ll use Texas to give some examples and also see how the process has changed over time.

Back in 2013 there were only 50 slots for Texas; it wasn’t a Championship at that point. The percentage of slots broadly follows the percentage of staters, but at this low number there’s limited variation. For women, many age groups are limited to one slot with a few reaching 2 slots in total.

In 2023 100 slots were availabile at the Championship which greatly increases the closeness of the slot distribution to the athlete distribution. By this stage Ironman had moved to separate races for men and women (the race had been split over 2 days in 2022) and to increase the number of women they had an additional set of Women for Tri slots not shown in the chart.

By this year’s race Ironman had moved to separately issues slots for men and women rather than allocating and then topping up through a second process. This greatly increased the number of slots every age group received with that change being clearest for women who previously received relative few slots.

Numbers in Kona

The number of athletes in Kona grew in the early 2010s, but from 2015 onwards had stabilised. Limited space for transition being the reason. That changed after Covid when the format was shifted to a two day race in 2022. Women on day 1 with some male divisions and the remainder of the men on day two. There was a huge jump in the number of competitors, many coming from the backlog built up during Covid.

I’ve glossed over the race in St George (and not included its numbers here). In May 2022 the 2021 World Championship was held at St George. Qualified atheltes could choose to race here instead of waiting until the race in Kona. Unusually, the race itself was also a regular non-championship Ironman, mixing regular entries with qualified athletes. With that in mind and the fact it didn’t hugely shape the overall slot allocation story, I’ve ignored it.

To be honest, I initially forgot about it and had to go back through the data to be sure I could get away with leaving it out. My anecdotal experience is that most age group athletes focussed on Kona still.

2022 was only the beginning, more radical change came the following year when Ironman split the Championship over two locations: Kona and Nice. This allowed significantly more to compete at Championship events. A large change in the number of women competing at the World Championship, and more men too. We can also see that Nice was not as popular as Kona, women did not go in comparable numbers in 2024.

The majority – but not all – athletes at the Championship get there through qualification as I’ve outlined. So, the number of slots available each year tracks the number of athletes starting the Championship. That relationship is quite consistent prior to 2020. Then, after Covid, we get a jump in slots as expected.

The relationship isn’t quite as clean though. 2022 was a huge 2-day race in Kona which the increased number of slots don’t fully reflect. The extra numbers come from the 2020/2021 qualifiers who weren’t able to race in Kona and had held back until 2022.

I should also admit the potential for inaccurate slot numbers in that period with the addition of St. George and some races having slots added retrospectively. Fundamentally, it’s not a good year to model slot allocation from.

In 2023 the number of slots for women is far lower than we’d expect. At this stage Ironman introduced Women for Tri and added additional slots for women to each race. Unfortunately I didn’t track additional slot allocations at the time, but the result was many more women racing Kona in 2023. Then for 2024 we have separate slot allocations for men and women giving us higher numbers of regular qualifying slots for both.

What’s next?

Everything is changing again with the Championship returning to one day in Kona in 2026. The twist this time is there’s more space on the pier and capacity is around 3,000. If we look at start numbers from before that’s around 600-700 additional athletes. That’s a fair increase in slots on the way, but we don’t know how they’ll be distributed.

My best guess would be that Ironman will continue with the fundamentals of their allocation process – 1 slot per age group, then allocated by D’Hondt as before. They aren’t aiming for a straight 50/50 split of men and women on the island so simply returning to the original allocation of slots across all age groups would work. It would also see women getting around 25-30% of places on the island.

If they are still aiming to increase the presence of women in Kona then they could continue with the current process of having separate pools of slots for men and women. That would enable a precise ratio of men and women to be set and the allocation could continue as it does. The same could be achieved with top up slots for women similar to the previous Women for Tri initiative.

Equally they could come up with an entirely new route for this process. There’s more than one way to portion out qualifying slots. Personally I hope they don’t because that’s a lot more work to determine how it’s done and to implement it on this site!

If you’re thinking about qualification for 2026 you should expect fewer slots available than in the years of split racing. That reduction will potentially be most obvious for women unless Ironman takes delibrate steps to maintain higher nunmbers. It will be less keenly felt by men, but its impact will also depend on how Ironman approaches the number of women competing at Kona.

You can test the impact of adjusting slot allocations on qualification times for any race in the Ironman Stats section.