Are Asian triathletes slower than Westerners?
Last summer I had a chance to participate in the Ironman 70.3 World Championships. The Ironman 70.3 is a mid-distance triathlon: 1.9km of swimming, 90km of cycling, 21.1km of running. Ironman is a fairly established global brand that is associated with doing really physically challenging things (i.e. a really, really long triathlon) and anyone who is associated with that brand gains an aura of toughness, perseverance, and grit that often draws the admiration from friends, family, and colleagues. And well it should: regardless of your motivation to take on an Ironman (fitness, a drunken bet, a midlife crisis) or your initial level of fitness, training for this kind of race is no mean feat. Of course, within the Ironman world there’s a spectrum in the athletic level of triathletes, ranging from the huffers and puffers whose goal is simply to reach the goal, to the hardcore supermen and women who want to crush the race and bring home some gold. For this latter end of triathletes, they have an additional motivation to do these races: they have a chance to qualify for the Ironman World Championships by being really fast and getting a slot at any one of the 115 Ironman 70.3 races that take place all over the world in one year. In 2018 nearly 300,000 registered athletes representing over 200 countries and territories competed in Ironman races, and around 3,500 of those make it to Worlds.
After a few years of huffing and puffing I managed to qualify. It happened in Goseong, a small town in the south of Korea, in its first edition of the half Ironman. It wasn’t the most convincing performance on my part, and my main motivation for qualifying was as petty as they come (originally I was not very interested in World’s, but then I raced with a good friend in Xiamen, China, and he qualified and I didn’t, so suddenly there was wrong to right), but a slot is a slot, and 5 months later I was at the starting line at the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in Nice, France.
Being at World’s is quite an experience. Everywhere I looked I saw ultra fit men and women, and I felt surrounded by the real iron athletes of the world. The course was fantastic, riding up the Col de Vence, a cycling route that I was admittedly not very ready for. Athletes of all ages would shoot past me up the mountain, and looking up I could see the small shape of cyclists making their way up the switch backs to the top of the mountain. The run was unforgettable too, going up and down the Promenade des Anglais as hundreds of people screamed their support and threw their motivating high fives at us, lending their breath to fuel my wheezing lungs.
Halfway through the run, however, I realized that I was running with a predominantly Asian crowd, which felt a bit strange, because most of the athletes I had seen in Nice were non-Asian. Looking at my watch I knew I was not going to be beating any personal records, and that relative to most super ironmen I would be more at the back of the pack. But the implication of seeing so many Asian faces at that stage of the race was that Asian triathletes were on relatively slower than the others. Could this be true?
A look at the finishing time data would support this observation. I analyzed the finishing times of all male racers from the Nice race in 2019 and found the mean finishing time for Asian triathletes was 5 hours and 57 minutes, whereas the mean finishing time for the rest of the world is 5 hours and 15 minutes (Europeans were the fastest at 5:10). That is a really big difference which deserves closer examination. The box plot below shows the distribution of the runners, and there we can see that the middle fifty percent of Asian runners were at most as fast as the lowest fifty percent of any other region. The data really supports my initial observation that there seems to be a big difference between the speed of Asian triathletes and those from the rest of the world.
One big question about this data is whether we have a representative sample. After all, for such a large continent, it really did not feel as though there were many Asian participants in Nice. Indeed, Ironman held 115 races worldwide last year, of which 12 races happened in Asia, that is, between 10 and 11%, and yet only 201 of the 3257 male racers, a meager 6%, came from Asia.
One explanation for this could be that Nice is really far to get to for most Asian triathletes. As there are no direct flights, the time and cost of getting to Nice might be too much for many. One way to test this hypothesis would be to look at the times of the World Championships the year before, which were in South Africa. Being at the tip of the continent in the southern hemisphere, it is quite inconvenient for pretty much everyone, so one could argue that the field is somewhat leveled. Instead, only 111 triathletes from Asia showed up, a paltry 4.5%, which by the way was no faster than their 2019 counterparts, as I show on the plot below.
From here we can confirm that Asians are under-represented, and the natural question that follows is why this is the case. To answer this question it is helpful to look at the way the qualification system works. For any race there are a number of qualification slots available, which are then distributed somewhat proportionately across the different age groups of both genders. So the 30–34 male group, a rather large group, might have three slots to contend for, while the 55–59 female group, usually a smaller group, might only have one. Those slots are given to the fastest racers in that group. However, if one of those racers does not accept the slot, it rolls down to the next fastest person. This means that if you’re lucky, you don’t have to be particularly fast to qualify for worlds. In my case, for instance, it was enough to be fourteenth.
There are races where you have a higher chance of getting the slot, so “slot hunters” will travel to those places in an effort to increase their chances. It’s no surprise to see hundreds of Western triathletes show up at fairly remote places like Xiamen, Liuzhu, or Goseong for a chance at glory. Why do they feel like they have a higher chance at a slot at these places? Usually there are two reasons. The first is that the probability of a roll down is higher because a lot of the local racers who perform well reject the slot. This is probably due to the cost of participating in finals: the entry fee alone is around $400–500, to which you would have to add the cost of flights, hotels, plus the time taken off work, which in Asia is usually quite limited. These are big disincentives, especially for those coming from countries with much lower GDP/capita than their Western counterparts (case in point: there were 82 Japanese triathletes at 2019 Worlds and only 31 Chinese, even though there were five times as many races in China).
That in itself is probably not enough to justify the trip to Asia for so many Western triathletes. Besides the increased likelihood of a rolldown, Westerners need to feel like they have a shot at finishing relatively quickly. This goes back to the main question of this essay: is it the case that western triathletes are faster than their Asian counterparts? An explanation could be the following: the Westerners who raced at Goseong or Xiamen were very fast triathletes who were not fast enough to clinch a slot back home. If it was the case that they were faster than their Asian counterparts, we should expect mainly non-Asian podiums at these races. In Xiamen and Liuzhou, this is exactly what we see: hardly any Asians making the podium, the few of which are Japanese or Hong Kongese. However, in Goseong, Nagoya, and Taitung, in most age groups there were at least two Asians in the top three. The “slot hunter” effect,then, does seem to exist, but it seems to be mainly constrained to China, where the triathlon culture is still developing. Outside China, Westerners would still be rolling the dice and praying for a roll-down.
There is probably a third reason that Westerners are willing to make that bet: it is likely that Asians simply don’t care enough about Worlds to go through the effort of taking up the slot. This is related to the first reason regarding the economic constraints, but I look at it from an Ironman brand perspective. In the West, Ironman is already synonimous of extraordinary resilience, the brand is well established. In Asia, not so much, as people are still at an earlier stage, simply becoming familiar with what a triathlon is. The sport is still in its infancy in many parts of Asia, and even countries where the culture of triathlon is more developed it pales in comparison to European countries. For example, Spain has about one third of the population of Japan, but just about as many registered triathletes. The triathlon hobby is on an upward trend, and the Ironman brand should probably keep investing in growing the sport in this region. Efforts like assigning more slots to races in China is something that they’ve been doing so far, but this seems to increase the likelihood of more slot hunters coming from abroad. A more grassroots approach might be more effective in the long term, such as supporting local teams and athletes. Another interesting idea might be to imitate the Nike Run Club, which is basically fierce brand ambassadors taking potential customers out on free runs, but for Ironman.
The triathletes I ran with at Worlds probably do not truly reflect Asia’s triathlon potential. The difference in average finish times are likely exaggerated by the under-representation of triathletes due to differences in economic potential between regions, allowing relatively fast Westerners to travel to Asia for a chance at a slot either via podium or via the rolldown. The Ironman brand is probably not strong enough to push Asian triathletes to fight for a Worlds slot, which is a good focus point for the company, perhaps investing more in grassroots initatives, as the culture of triathlon continues to grow in the Asian region.
