CoachCox

Today’s offering of age group rankings and statistics is the biggest so far. There are 13 Ironman age groups covering athletes from eighteen to their eighties, add in the pros and that’s 14 distinct age divisions, which makes 28 categories once we also include gender. Following on from the overall top 10 and the top 20 by nationality, I now add the top 10 by age group, allowing the fast 40-44 year old to see how they ranked in the world.

This is a lot of information, I have split the numerous tables across multiple images and for convenience, if you scroll to the bottom of this post I’ve included links to PDF versions of the lists. But to start, here are the top 10 Ironman performances by age group for 2012:

18 – 39

40 – 59

60 – 79

80+ and pros

Naturally I’ve also produced individual rankings for swim, bike and run. Click on the thumbnails below to open up full-size images of the corresponding ranking tables in a new browser window. Again for convenience I’ve also provided PDFs at the bottom of this post. If you’re really interested in the details I would download those.

Swim

• 18 – 39
• 40 – 59
• 60 – 79
• 80+ and pros

Bike

• 18 – 39
• 40 – 59
• 60 – 79
• 80+ and pros

Run

• 18 – 39
• 40 – 59
• 60 – 79
• 80+ and pros

At the risk of repeating myself, these tables have been produced from my database of all 2012 WTC Ironman results. They are the fastest times for the age categories as recorded on IRONMAN.com. In building the ranking tables I have at times had to verify times and results – checking the detailed splits for validity and in some cases looking at an athlete’s performance history. Where I believed a result was suspicious – like a sub 2:30 marathon, or a 14:30 Ironman athlete then racing a 9:15 in the same year – I have removed them from the results. I have also exclude Ironman New York from the swim rankings as strong currents heavily skewed the results such that they dominate the tables. I have made no other exclusions from these results even when courses are known to be short.

You can download the complete set of tables are available in the four PDFs below:

• Swim
• Bike
• Run
• Overall

I have one more set of ranking statistics to come. I’ll be updating the blog on Thursday with the top 100 male and female Ironman age groupers of 2012. This will bring the rankings to an end for now while I explore the results data in other ways and look at better means to rank athletes taking the differences for course into account. For the next two days I’m putting the data to one side as Gill enforces a Christmas embargo on my computer.

Ironman Athletes by Nationality – An Interactive Map

Also produced from my Ironman results database is this interactive map of the world showing athlete counts by country and fastest, average and slowest performances by country too.