Ironman Sweden 2019: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification
It’s another big weekend of Ironman racing with three events on the calendar and first for review is Ironman Sweden. Now a well established and fast European Ironman course Sweden draws a big field of over 2,000 competitors. It offers the standard 40 age group Kona slots for the 2019 Ironman World Championship. This year’s race looks to have been a fairly typical year for the Kalmar course.
Overall this year’s race trends similarly to the amalgamated results form the previous 7 years. It is very slightly faster, but only by a fraction. Looking at the individual splits this comes from a faster swim and bike distribution that counter a slower run distribution.
DNF rates for this years race are also normal for this course. There’s no major deviation from previous years of racing. The Kalmar course appears to be quite consistent in this regard.
Age group medians tend to follow the same pattern as the distributions and this is broadly the case here. There is some variance across age groups, particularly in smaller divisions. Overall though we see faster swim and bike with a slower run.
Sweden takes the most Kona slots as the largest group of competitors. The remaining slots are distributed among a few other nationalities.
Tracking specific placings and times across age groups generally shows an upturn over the last couple of years. In many cases this pushes towards Swedens fastest times, particularly at the front. As with other charts variance is a factor though and not all age groups show the same picture for this race.
Based on the start numbers I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation and from that the automatic qualifying times. Final numbers may vary and roll down is not factored in. You can compare this with other races on my Kona qualification page.
For the top twenty in each age groups times were average or better. A lot of age groups weren’t too far from the average, but some proved to be much faster. Most notably the M40-44 age division where top twenty times were almost all faster than previously seen on the course. This was definitely a challenging year to qualify in that group.
You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Sweden 2019 on my Google Drive.
