The 2024 IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship qualifiers who are NOT racing in Taupo, and what it means

It’s race week for the final big event of the 2024 triathlon season, the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship.

Taking place in Taupō on the North Island of New Zealand, the December time slot represents by some margin the latest time slot in the calendar year that the championship has been held, since the event was inaugurated in 2006.

A total of 90 professionals in both the men’s and women’s divisions qualified for the event, but around half that number will start this coming weekend (you can check out the current start lists here: Women | Men).

Coming at the end of a busy year of racing, the December date for this year’s event will have played some role in the significant difference between qualifiers and starters, but is certainly not the only factor in determining who has made the trip.

Race predictions and the favourites will be highlighted elsewhere, but for now, let’s have a look at some of the key athletes – that had qualified for the race – who are NOT racing this coming weekend.

Absent Champions

While the 2023 winners, Taylor Knibb and Rico Bogen, will aim to defend their titles this week, we will be missing several previous IRONMAN 70.3 World Champions.

The most successful athlete in the history of this championship, Daniela Ryf, will of course be absent from the race course on Saturday having announced her retirement in August, with injury preventing her from doing the volume and intensity of training she needed to compete at the top level. Will anyone ever match or surpass her five IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship titles?

Also absent is Great Britain’s 2021 champion, Lucy Charles-Barclay. That success in St George is still in my eyes the greatest single performance that LCB has produced, a “perfect day“, dominating the field with the fastest swim, bike and run splits to cross the line more than eight minutes clear of second place.

Having changed her early-season plans, Lucy was all set to try and defend her IRONMAN World Championship title this year, at a new location in Nice. On the eve of the race however, she had to withdraw due to injury. Off the back of her calf tear in Kona last year, and having to make the decision to pull out mid-race on home soil at T100 London, her focus is understandably on getting healthy, strong and fit for the 2025 season. She’s hardly been inactive however, with swim and bike racing keeping her busy.

Joining LCB on the top step of the podium in St George three years ago was Gustav Iden, and along with 2022 champion, Kristian Blummenfelt, both of the Norwegian stars from Bergen have elected to pass on the event this year. The reasons behind that were outlined to us recently by their coach, Olav Aleksandr Bu, in a wide-ranging interview with TRI247.

Kona didn’t go to plan for either athlete this year – ‘brutal”, the description from both – and both have elected to make it a season break, rather than further extending their racing year.

Previous podium finishers

It’s not just previous 70.3 World Champions who are absent. 2024 IRONMAN World Champion, Laura Philipp (bronze in 2017), Emma Pallant-Browne (silver in 2017, bronze in 2022) and South Africa’s Jeanni Metzler (silver in 2021), all ticked the qualification requirements but will miss the Taupō event.

After struggling at T100 London and then having to DNF at T100 Las Vegas, Great Britain’s Pallant-Browne had already called time on her season – missing the T100 Final in Dubai. That decision was to allow further investigation and healing of a tear and bleeding in her gut lining, which has been consistently impacting her this year. If you’ve followed Emma’s career, you’ll know she’s never been one to miss out on racing opportunities by choice – but always taking the positive, she says it’s “an earlier end of season break which means I can start my 2025 build earlier.” See you next year, Emma!

2024 of course saw the career highlight for Germany’s Philipp when she took victory in Nice to become IRONMAN World Champion. Alongside four T100 races, three 70.3s and a second place at Challenge Roth, it’s no surprise that Dubai was always going to be the final event of her year for her.

For Metzler, Taupō was very much in her season plans, and it would have been her first championship start since that silver medal three years ago. There have been plenty of tough times since then, but after feeling a pain in her foot while training, she was recently diagnosed with a severe calcaneal stress fracture. That’s unfortunately meant time in recovery boots rather than super shoes.

On the ‘qualified but not racing’ previous podium finishers on the men’s side, we are missing the silver and bronze medallists from 2023, in Frederic Funk and Jan Stratmann, plus the second placer from 2021, Sam Long.

After securing a T100 contract for 2025 with a tenth place overall, Frederic has been combining off-season with a long honeymoon, while Sam Long is looking forward to his wedding in a couple of weeks’ time, following a season which began in the first week of January and didn’t stop until T100 Dubai in mid-November.

As for Jan, he closed his season in the best way in early October, when winning IRONMAN Calella-Barcelona in a rapid time of 7:28:25. That secured his first full-distance victory, in what was the most consistent season of his professional career so far, which also included a fourth place at Challenge Roth.

Fan Favourites

As we reported recently, there will be no Lionel Sanders in New Zealand. Having been initially ‘out‘, then changed his mind to ‘in‘, the decision was taken out of his hands following a bike crash in training. ‘No Limits’ may well have more IRONMAN 70.3 victories on his CV that any other active racer, but still doesn’t have an IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship podium to add to his two second-place finishes at the IRONMAN World Championship. Fourth – 10 years ago in Mont-Tremblant – is his best. His next opportunity to improve on that will be in Marbella, Spain in 2025.

One man absent who would surely have been in the discussion for the top step of the podium is recently crowned T100 World Champion, Martin Van Riel. In a season in which he has chased Olympic Games success and the T100 series, he recently raced his first full-distance IRONMAN in Cozumel. Already planned to be his final event of 2024, a bike crash which resulted in stitches to his elbows was unlikely to change that decision!

Having already referenced Daniela Ryf (retirement), Lucy Charles-Barclay (injury) and Laura Philipp (by choice) as absent IRONMAN World Champions, Chelsea Sodaro is another champion, qualified for Taupō, who will not start on Saturday. The 2022 Kona champion returned to the IRONMAN World Championship podium when finishing third in Nice this year, and ‘called it a season’ last month, explaining:” “My body is telling me that it’s time for a rebuild so I’m going to listen.”

T100 stars

The introduction of the PTO’s T100 World Tour has meant that we have seen many championship-level quality fields racing through the year already, from Miami in March all the way through to November in Dubai. If we take those events as a guide – and looking beyond the names I’ve already mentioned – then there are a further two T100 podium finishers from the 2024 season who were on the qualification list**, but will not be in Taupō

Germany’s Mika Noodt is currently sitting at #5 in the PTO Rankings. Fourth at the 70.3 World Championship in 2022 (St George), he took third spot this year at T100 Ibiza. Unfortunately, that would be his final race of the season as he was knocked of his bike by a car just days before the T100 race in Las Vegas, while training in Flagstaff. His focus has had to switch to rehab, recovery and getting back into structured training with eyes now looking towards 2025.

Third this year at T100 Singapore, Belgium’s Pieter Heemeryck added four further top-10 finishes on the T100 Tour to finish eighth overall, securing his contract for 2025. After a season which he described as a “rollercoaster, with some great highs and lows”, Dubai was the the moment to call time on his season.

(** It’s worth noting that athletes including, but not limited to, Magnus Ditlev, Sam Laidlow, India Lee and Flora Duffy as examples, were not qualified for the race anyway).

Race Depth

With a good number of familiar names absent, how does that impact the potential quality of the field?

There’s plenty of scope for opinion and armchair discussion there, but we can apply at least one objective measure. When the PTO implemented their new rankings system for 2023, part of the new formula used was for Strength of Field (SOF). Based on the ‘average ranking points of the top five athletes who start the race’, what might that tell us ahead of Taupō?

Starting with the Pro Women, the top five athletes set to race currently hold positions 1,2,3,4 and 7 in the PTO Rankings, providing a SOF score of 98.72. While it’s only one measure, that score is higher than every T100 race this year, just marginally above the 98.53 of the Grand Final in Dubai.

For the men, the top five athletes (per the latest PTO Rankings) on the start list hold positions 3,6,7,10 and 14 in the standings, which outputs a SOF score of 94.36. If we make a similar comparison, then the T100 races in Dubai (96.87), London (95.25) and San Francisco (94.56) were ‘stronger’.

Offsetting that to some degree from my perspective however, is the presence of two truly top-tier short course athletes and Olympic medallists, Hayden Wilde and Leo Bergere, who bring the sort of talent and potential that is not reflected by their low PTO Rankings – which of course, is a factor of their limited middle distance racing.

My ‘big picture’ takeaway? Despite missing a host of star names, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this is a weak field. Expect a couple of early Christmas presents to be served up this weekend, and bring down the curtain on the 2024 season.