Next in this week’s round of analysis is a new event – Ironman Haugesund in Norway. A new addition to the Ironman calendar, it drew a small field of just under 600 athletes and offered 30 Kona qualification slots to age groupers. As there are no historical results to draw on this will be a quick analysis with a brief comparison to Kalmar and Copenhagen for no other reason than proximity.
I’d consider both Ironman Sweden and Copenhagen to be among the faster Ironman courses – not on the level and consistency of Frankfurt or Austria, but courses for fast times. Haugesund appears to be a slower event largely down to a much slower bike than either of the other two races. We’ll need more races to determine if that’s typical of the course.
Comparing the DNF rates for these 3 races shows that Haugesund has the highest with bike and run DNFs both being higher. It’s not an unusually high DNF rate though, just in comparison to either Kalmar or Copenhagen.
These were the median splits for each age group at Haugesund. It’s worth noting that some age groups in this chart had fewer than 10 athletes.
As with most European races Haugesund drew a wide field of European athletes and spread the Kona slots out proportionally to them.
Another sign of a small race is the speed with which times drop off in the top twenty for each age group. The competitive field is small, so the number of athletes vying for the slots is also relatively small. Whether that makes it a good choice for a qualifier is hard to say at this stage – it’d take a few years of data to determine that and by then the picture would likely change.
Based on the start numbers I’ve estimated the slot allocation in Haugesund and from that the automatic qualifying times. exact numbers may have varied and roll downs would influence the final qualifying times. You can compare with other races on my Kona qualification page.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Haugesund 2018 on my Google Drive.
