The IRONMAN Pro Series Has Succeeded at Everything But Its Original Mission

This weekend, the IRONMAN Pro Series heads to upstate New York for another running of IRONMAN Lake Placid. It is the second-to-last full distance IRONMAN in this year’s Pro Series before the grand finale at the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona. It also happens to be the second-to-last Pro Series event in North America before Kona; next weekend’s 70.3 Boise marks the final North American stop.

By all accounts, IRONMAN Lake Placid should shape up to be another tremendous event. We have the full-distance IRONMAN debut for Paula Findlay on tap, taking on a women’s field that also includes Lisa Perterer, Marta Sanchez, and 2022 IRONMAN World Champion Chelsea Sodaro. You can read more about the field this weekend in our preview article here.

Lake Placid should be the next chapter of a story of phenomenal professional racing that we’ve had all season long. It’s actually been one of the most consistently exciting season of long-course professional racing that I can remember. Between the IRONMAN Pro Series, the T100 events, and the continued elevation of Challenge Roth into the biggest full-distance prize outside of Kona, we have been spoiled rotten by the quality of the racing.

The biggest thing that we’ve seen this season is that we’re seeing the sports top stars compete against one another more frequently. We’ve seen, for instance, the mighty Norwegian trio of men race each other multiple times already. We’ve had Kat Matthews versus, well, just about everybody. The racing is close and often requiring some late-race heroics to see victory.

And we’ve also gotten spoiled by the elevation of live coverage for these events. Yes, even with all of the hiccups, hurdles and preferences for certain broadcasters, we are not far removed from the days of having to track these races via text updates and splits being updated alone. (Though, for those looking to tune in this weekend, this is your annual reminder that the backwoods of upstate New York usually result in the occasional disruption in the live video feed. If you’ve been up there, you know how *ahem* challenging the reception can be across any network you can think of.) We have consistently working live coverage for all of the major events, almost always on YouTube.

This has to be nearly exactly what IRONMAN had in mind when the Pro Series was created a couple of years back. And, let’s not forget, we don’t get to having the Pro Series without the legwork that the PTO and World Triathlon had done on T100. You have the best professional athletes racing each other at your events more often, and getting more eyeballs on your product.

There’s just one small problem. And you can find it right in the name of the product itself: Series.

Remember all of the initial marketing around these events? It was about how important the season-long narrative was. How the points for the Pro Series mattered. How at the end of the year there would be Pro Series champions and the sizable bonus pool attached to it. And, to their word, those bonuses do still exist.

But, whether by accident or by design, things have been a lot quieter with regard to the actual Pro Series and their standings this year. That could be in part due to having the same names that you might find fighting for the IRONMAN World Championship atop the respective standings (as in, it’s the Norwegian Trio atop the men’s standings, and defending IRONMAN World Champion Solveig Løvseth leading the women’s rankings). It could be because two-time defending women’s champion Kat Matthews is not putting forth the same kind of dominating position. It could be related to how the 2024 Series champion Gregory Barnaby has struggled ever since earning that crown, with a single podium finish to his name since.

Or it could just have to do with the fact that long-course triathlon is probably ill-suited to the Series format. It’s hard to create a season-long narrative when, on any given start list, you might be lucky to get 40-50% of the top end of the sport there. Depending on the athlete and their schedule, there’s typically 4-5 moments that you can reliably count on exceeding those numbers:

• 70.3 Oceanside as the unofficial kick-off to the North American season;
• IRONMAN Texas as the big “check the Kona box” moment;
• Challenge Roth;
• IRONMAN 70.3 Worlds;
• IRONMAN World Championship

That’s it. That’s the list.

What that probably tells us is that if there’s desire to create a “true” season-long narrative, there needs to be fewer of these races. That’d take to a model more similar to what we see out of the World Triathlon Championship Series and, to a lesser extent, to what T100 has done. You’d have 6-8 of these races, award points, and go from there. Heck, WTCS makes a whole ceremony out of whomever is leading the series at each event — in part because they’re all there at the same time.

But I think that would be the wrong lesson to learn here. Though I think the points model is broken (it does not properly reward finishing position, especially when you win), and that there really isn’t a “season long” narrative to find, the Pro Series races bring a level of consistent excitement to triathlon as a whole that hasn’t been there since the glory days of races selling out before online registration even opened. The single greatest advertisement that IRONMAN has for its product is high-quality professional racing, and the Pro Series delivers nearly every single time.

I also think it is correct, strategically, for IRONMAN to continue to have prize purses available for non-Pro Series events. What I would like to see is a slightly stricter barrier to entry for Pro Series races so that, say, we don’t run into the situation where top-ranked athletes are potentially shut out of a top-tier event because they simply didn’t click the registration button fast enough. I’d also prefer that there be some non-Pro Series races available that athletes who have either won races or currently competing on the Pro Series couldn’t enter, so that athletes might breakthrough and win there, then come up onto the Pro Series itself.

For now, though, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the racing.

Tags: