FYI: Your IRONMAN Athlete Profile, Including Photos, is Being Scraped by Third Parties

Back in 2024, IRONMAN transitioned away from using Active as their race registration system. It now utilizes TicketSocket, a white-label provider of both race registration and customer relationship management systems. Essentially, it allowed everything to remain IRONMAN-branded throughout your registration and customer interactions with IRONMAN.

That platform is where everything that you do with IRONMAN lives. It’s where you register for races. It’s where you submit for your Flex90 benefits (if you have them). It’s where you can upload profile photos. And it’s where (almost) all of your race results wind up living — some stuff pre-2013 did not survive the data merge. (We here at Slowtwitch are empathetic to minor data losses as a result of large-scale platform migration.)

Those datapoints also talk backwards to one another; for instance, your profile photo uploaded in the race registration platform works downstream to the IRONMAN race tracking app.

All of this is meant to live solely within the IRONMAN ecosystem — race results, timing splits, your photos, everything. IRONMAN, in fact, asserts exclusive intellectual property rights on these items under the Terms of Service on their website:

You acknowledge that the content included on the Site, including but not limited to, text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, audio clips, video clips, software, and the selection and arrangements thereof, is and will remain the sole and exclusive property of WTC or its licensors and is protected by both U.S. and international copyright laws. Absent the express written consent of WTC, the content on the Site may be used for personal, non-commercial use only.  Any other use, including the reproduction, modification, distribution, republication or display of any of the content on the Site is strictly prohibited and an infringement of copyright or proprietary rights in the information, and of these Terms of Use.

It also specifically spells out that you can’t reproduce this content elsewhere — with some specific language on how it is done.

You agree not to, and warrant and represent that you will not assist any third-party in engaging in any activity or attempting in any way, to reproduce, in whole or in part, any content provided by the Site through any method (including, without limitation, through crawling, copying, caching, or framing), unless such access is expressly permitted in a written agreement executed by WTC. You may not, for instance, (a) incorporate the information, content, or other material in any database, compilation, archive, API or cache; (b) deep-link to the Site for any purpose; (c) access the Site manually or with any robot, spider, web crawler, extraction software, automated process, device, program, or algorithm to scrape, copy, or monitor any portion of the Site; (d) take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on the infrastructure of the Site; or (e) attempt to gain unauthorized access to any portion or feature of the Site by hacking, password mining, or any other illegitimate means. You agree not to use the Site, or any services made available through the Site for commercial purposes and agree not to share or transfer your account login information (if any) with any third party.  For avoidance of doubt, “commercial purposes” includes non-profit purposes.

It was under these terms and conditions that IRONMAN asked Christophe Balestra to shut down his popular aggregation site, The Obsessed Triathlete (aka OBSTRI). That site pulled timing data for athletes and awarded scoring for it. It also allowed for other key features like fantasy triathlon for professional races, etc. According to Balestra in a post he made on this site in 2022, he had made IRONMAN aware of the existence of OBSTRI that fall. He said at the time that IRONMAN had asserted intellectual property and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation claims, and that it would not be worth fighting those claims to continue operation of the site.

Fast forward to 2026, and there are two new data aggregators in town. But this time, it’s not just your race timing data that’s being captured. Your IRONMAN profile photos are also included.

First, there’s ProTriNews. As you can probably imagine, based on the focus of their podcast and associated content, they’re pretty solely focused on picking up on professional triathlon. According to Kyle Glass of PTN, the genesis of the site was having information for their podcast. “We needed to have a place to have statistics and comparisons directly in front of us. We’d heard that other resources might be shutting down, and that got us started on the work.”

They’ve also picked up on Fantasy Triathlon and their own ranking system. On the surface, not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it’s not hard to make an argument that this isn’t dissimilar from any of the services that, say, an ESPN or other large sports entity uses when it comes to statistics, analytics, or games.

If you scratch slightly below the surface, though, it becomes a little murkier as to how this data might be getting pulled. Let’s take, for instance, one pro athlete and their image on the PTN site. Here’s the top end of Sam Long’s profile from the PTN site.

Now, if you’ve seen this look from Sam before, it should be familiar. Here’s Sam’s profile photo on the Professional Triathlete Organisation’s (PTO) athlete database.

A quick check of the source code from the PTN website gives you the answer as to where the image came from: they pull it directly from the PTO (who, perhaps infamously, have similarly restrictive Terms and Conditions about images and media rights).

We brought this up with the PTN team. PTN’s Talbot Cox admitted that yes, they did an initial scrape of various sources during the initial buildout, working to transform that data into the site they made. He also noted that yes, they do pull a feed of non-real time results data for pro athletes.

He was quick to point out that both IRONMAN and the PTO had themselves scraped certain athlete photos from other sources in the build out of their respective websites covering professional athletes, such as those of Thor Bendix Madsen and Marty Andrie on the IM Pro Series site. The PTN team did also mention that all professional athletes can claim their profiles on the site and change these images out (for example, Trevor Foley now uses a photo of Will Ferrell as his character Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights), and build these profiles out to include links to sponsors and coverage of their races.

But it’s not just PTN who is aggregating data, and it’s also not just about pro data. There’s now Triathlon Lab, run by the ONYERLEFT team. They’re also picking up where OBSTRI left off with professional triathlon results and fantasy triathlon. But they’re also scraping and aggregating age-group athlete data — including your IRONMAN profile photo.

Here’s an example of this, with yours truly and my admittedly pathetic IRONMAN results.

Opening the element inspector, and it reveals the image source URL, which is highlighted below.

When I then do the same thing on my IRONMAN profile, it reveals that the image files are, in fact, the same. My image is being pulled off of an IRONMAN source and embedded into the Triathlon Lab site: a direct violation of those Terms of Service listed above.

As of this writing, there are over 1,000,000 age group athlete records within the Triathlon Lab application, with an unknown number of embedded athlete photos included. Requests for comment on this from the Triathlon Lab team were unanswered.

This is decidedly different than other event aggregation sites. Compare this with, say, Athlinks. Athlinks accounts require a registration process in order to claim and aggregate results into a single profile. Athlinks also allows you to make your athlete data hidden, or to make your profile private, if you wish to keep everything aggregated there. But unless you choose to opt into Athlinks, results are not condensed into a single, identifiable person — the exact type of thing that causes red flags with data protection laws.

It’s also different than things appearing within IRONMAN’s own ecosystem. As part of the registration process or uploading photos to their system, you give IRONMAN (and IRONMAN alone) a license to use that data. You also grant IRONMAN — and IRONMAN alone — the ability to re-purpose that data in a commercial manner.

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