Ironman Qualification Slot Allocation
How many slots would my age group get if the race had 100 slots? You can now set your own slot allocations on any of my race qualification pages, but this only came about after I built this slot allocation tool. Before that I’d only implemented the slot allocation algorithm on the server-side. This tool brings it to the browser allowing you to produce a slot allocation based on your own start numbers and total slots.
The initial table shows a fairly typical slot allocation based on 65 slots for men and 35 slots for women. The number of starters is calculated using the averages from 2024 Ironman races to determine the proportion of 2000 starters in each age group. All of this is fully adjustable using the controls on the page.
The first set of controls set the number of slots being used for the allocation. You can either set slots separately for male and female divisions (as used with split championships) or set fro all age groups (as used previously with a single championship).
- The first text box specifies the number of slots assigned to Male age groups.
- The second text box designates the slots assigned to Female age groups.
- The third text box designates the slots assigned for All age groups.
Setting slots for All will zero the Male and Female options and setting either male or female slots will zero the All option.
Once you’ve specified the number of slots you can make adjustments to the number of starting athletes for the allocation. You have two controls for this:
- The text box sets the total number of starters. This is a superficial setting as the ratio of age group starters matters to the allocation.
- The final dropdown specifies the starting ratio to use. The default is the ratio of age group starters across all 2024 Ironman races, but you can choose the average ratio for a range of Ironman races.
Adjusting the above options will automatically update the number of starters in each age group and the slots allocated to that age group. You can further refine this by editing individual age group start numbers. This overrides the starter ratio selected in the Athlete Number controls and immediately recalculates the allocation. So if you want a very specific ratio of starters you can achieve that here. Just be aware that as soon as you adjust one of the Athlete Number controls syour tart numbers will be overridden.
There are no limits on the slots you can allocate. so you can see what happens at the extreme. Should Ironman ever give men 650 slots at a race there will be a lot of qualifiers in M40-44.
You can adjust qualification slots on individual race pages now and this also shows qualification times for those slot numbers. That’s probably the more useful tool the majority of the time. However if you’re trying to predict slot numbers at an upcoming race you have a start list for, this tool might be the way to do it.
