The first of this weekend’s Ironman races I’ll be examining is Ironman Barcelona. Now in its fourth year as an Ironman branded race, Barcelona attracts a large field to its fast course. There are 40 Kona slots for the 2018 World championship on offer at the race.
Comparing the distributions for this year’s race with those for the previous three suggests 2017 was very slightly slower than the grouped results. The differences are small in each distribution and the impact is hardly significant. So overall the results look to be par for the course.
My previous data blends DNS and DNF numbers in the results so it’s hard to directly compare swim or overall figures. Allowing for that, both bike and run DNF figures appear to be typical for the course, falling somewhere in the middle of the years.
As the distributions were so similar, so to are the medians. There’s variation among the age groups, some faster or slower by small margins, but no major trends among them.
Barcelona draw a broad range of nationalities, with the UK being the most numerous at the event. Kona slots look to be distributed equally widely too.
Unsurprisingly, there’s not too much variation in times when we track them for specific age group positions over the last four years. Small variations again, but no major trends and no particular year standing out.
Based on the start list I’ve estimated how Kona slots were likely to be distributed and from that the finishing times that automatically qualified. Roll down and final allocations may impact these numbers. You can compare with other races on my Kona qualification page.
Finally, tracking the top twenty in each age group shows a bit more variance across age groups. Broadly speaking the fastest finishers – those making the podium – produced times matching or beating the average for the course. Further back we see more variation with some groups trending faster than average and some slower to differing degrees.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Barcelona 2017 on my Google Drive.
