Ironman Wisconsin 2025: Age Group Stats and Qualification Times

It’s almost a week since Ironman Wisconsin took place – a slow delivery of results analysis on my part. The race itself wasn’t slow, certainly not by the standards of recent years. And it was definitely a fast year for the front age groupers competing for the 40 Kona slots on offer.

Result Distributions

Comparing this year’s results with those from the last 5 years the race trends faster across all splits. This is true for the medians, but appears to be particularly strong towards the front of pack. In this comparison 2025 comes out significantly ahead of the previous race data.

DNF Rates

We also get a much lower DNF rate than in recent years. In fact more in line with the period prior to 2019. The last 5 years stand out as particularly high, 2022 reaching the extreme level of over 25%.

Median Splits

As medians reflect the trends shown in the distributions we see faster averages for every split quite consistently.

Competitor Origins

Wisconsin mainly draws athletes from the US with a small percentage coming from further afield. Kona slots look to mainly stay with the US too.

Performance Changes

Looking at how performances have changed over the history of Wisconsin (going all the way back to 2003) while times appear to have been quite stable for much of that time they are definitely more volatile in recent year. We can see the big bump for 2022 and the improvements in times since. Were I to compare this year’s results with those prior to 2019 it might not look quite as fast. 2022 has a big effect on that trend.

Qualification

Based on finishing times I’ve applied the appropriate adjustments and ranked athlete times in order to determine where slots went and the times that achieved qualification. This assumes there was no roll down – that will influence the numbers. You can examine this in more detail and play with the numbers on my Ironman Wisconsin qualification page.

Age Group Top 20

I mentioned earlier that the front of pack was fast and we can see that in the charts above. The top twenty in each age group often trending much faster than the average and for some age groups clearly the fastest in recent years. This is most pronounced among the male athletes but younger women’s age groups also perform well.

Conclusion

It’s definitely a fast year for Wisconsin, at least in the context of recent years of racing. If we go back further in the race’s history times may not stand out quite as much. Still front-of-pack age groupers raced quickly for the slots on offer.