IRONMAN chief admits Kona / Nice World Championship split was “shrinking global triathlon community’

IRONMAN CEO Scott DeRue says one of the primary reasons for going all in on Kona for the World Championships from 2026 onwards was because the current split with Nice was actually “unintentionally shrinking the global triathlon community”.

That was the stark conclusion to come out of extensive research the organisation has conducted over the last 12 months and more.

And DeRue, who took charge in January 2024, also admitted that the stated aim of having separate women’s and men’s races had failed to spark a hoped-for increase in women taking part in the sport.

More women were exiting after IMWC goal

TRI247 sat down with the M-Dot brand’s CEO after their big announcement that from 2026 they were returning to the men’s and women’s races both taking place on the same day – and on the Big Island in Hawaii.

2022 saw the first departure from what had been the norm as the women raced on the Thursday in Hawaii, followed by the men two days later.

But DeRue pointed out that very specific circumstances had guided that decision by his predecessor Andrew Messick.

DeRue told us: “When we decided to split the races, there were really two reasons why we did that.

“The first is we had all these deferrals from the cancellations [after Covid] and we had to go to essentially two days of racing to accommodate all those deferrals.

“We did that in Kona, obviously, in ’22 but it proved unsustainable for the local community there for all the reasons we know.

“And so then we split locations between Kona and if you’re going to do anywhere outside of Kona, it’s Nice – the history and the legacy of Nice with regards to the sport of triathlon as the birthplace in Europe. It’s an honest World Championship-calibre course and a beautiful city.

“The second reason was our goal of growing the sport overall and in particular growing the participation of women in the sport – the hypothesis was that the split races would help us do that by putting more of a spotlight on the women’s race.

“But what we found is that we haven’t been seeing more women come into the sport. We were seeing more women exit the sport after doing the World Championship race. And so that led us to kick off an extensive research set of research.”

Entry points the key driver

Some of the headline aspects of that research can be found here but essentially because there wasn’t as big an appetite for age-groupers to race in Nice, World Championship qualifying slots were easier to come by and many people were able to tick that off their bucket list and then seemingly look elsewhere for their next challenge rather than stay in swim, bike and run.

DeRue adds: “We had surveys, focus groups, interviews, expert panels, as well as looking at our own data about where people are racing, where they’re not racing, qualifying slots and so on. And what we found is that we need to focus more on the entry points to the sport and less on the World Championship and the pinnacle of the sport.”

Asked for more specifics, he told us: “What we found in our research is that there were three things that would really advance the growth of the sport in pure women participation.

“One is visibility, so women seeing other women in the sport. So, for example, we’ve already evolved how we do our social content, our original content documentary series, with that insight in mind.

“The second thing that we found was the race experience itself and very specific things like women’s specific facilities. I was having a conversation with Chelsea Sodaro the other day and she was asking this question and I asked her, do you know that we had lactation room space on course last year for women who were racing who needed lactation space?

“And most of our athletes don’t know that, but those who needed it, they do. And so I think we can do a better job of educating our community around some of the innovations that we’ve been investing in. But we also need to continue to evolve, continue to innovate and listen to our community about what the needs are.

“And then the third was community. And one of the things we found in our research, because we didn’t only talk to women triathletes, we also talked to women endurance athletes in other sports. And what we found is that in running, for example, there’s much more of a community around training relative to triathlon.

“And that relative lack of community was keeping people from actually coming into the sport. And so we’ve shifted our focus to focus more on those entry points as opposed to the World Championship. But our commitment to the goal is as strong and as steadfast as it’s ever been.”

Short-course experiments

The gender balance in long-distance triathlon is still shockingly skewed – around 20:80 in IRONMAN races, a very different scenario to many other sports as DeRue readily acknowledges.

He explained: “We’ve looked at our races around the world. We have some races that do really, really well in terms of women participation and some obviously that do less well. And we’ve studied what is it around those races that might help explain that. So some of it’s about investing in our TriClub programme and taking a fresh look at how we can help that be even more successful in this regard.

“Another area of focus is from an entry point perspective. This will be relevant for men as well. But how do we help, in some cases, rebuild the short-course infrastructure in the sport?

“We’re not going to to move into short-course racing as a company, that’s not our place to be in the ecosystem. I don’t think that would actually be good for the sport and the vibrancy of the ecosystem.

“But we can start to experiment in different places with more short-course. We just launched this race In New Mexico, a 70.3, but around it we built a festival that does include some short-course racing. And that’s an experiment to see if that can be helpful in this regard.

“But also how do we work with USAT and the federations around the world, other race directors, to identify ways that IRONMAN as a brand, as a community, can be helpful in advancing the short-course formats to inspire more people to get into the sport?

“And so those are a couple of areas of focus and our team is really excited to take that on in the coming years.”

There are also potential learnings closer to home, with the IRONMAN / UTMB partnership an obvious one and one with similar challenges. DeRue added: “Road running is much more balanced from a gender participation perspective and trail running still is catching up and we’ve learned a lot from our UTMB experience.

“Some things are going to work, some things won’t, but that’s how we learn, that’s how we get better and that’s how we grow. And we’re trying to be very transparent about what we’re finding in terms of what’s working and what’s not working with the community.

“We understand people are going to have different perspectives and different beliefs and opinions about it, but we’re trying to be as athlete-centric as possible, as data driven as possible and as principled as we can about the decisions we make and where we can focus to move this.”