Ironman Brazil 2019: Age Group Results and Kona Qualification

Ironman Brazil was the second Ironman race of the weekend. It’s a former South American Championship event that’s now returned to the standard 40 Kona slot offering of most races. Since the change the number of competitors has dropped with this year being at the lower end for mid-sized races. Despite that the race results trend similarly to previous years.

Note that I’m excluding 2011 results from most of my comparisons due to an unusually slow year and a poor quality results set.

The results from this year’s race compare very closely with the amalgamated results of the previous decade. There are small variations, but these barely impact on any of the distributions and median splits vary by a matter of minutes at most.The bike is perhaps the only area where times how any hint of different and this remains small.

DNF data has been variable over the years so it’s hard to build a clear picture when much of it was combined with DNS numbers (red rows). From what we have bike DNF rates look to be low this year, but run DNFs more towards the high side.

With the distributions looking so similar it’s hard to pick out major patterns when comparing medians splits for each age group. Some of the bikes are a few minutes slower, but not for every age group. Similarly runs tend to be slightly faster for many, but not all.

This is mainly a South American race and the majority of Kona slots stay there too with 80% of automatic qualifying times being by Brazilian athletes.

Tracking times for specific positions in each age group shows what an outlier the 2011 event was. It also demonstrates that aside from that year times are generally quite consistent. There has been a bit more variation in the last few year and for some age groups 2019 is a little faster, particularly towards the front of the age groups.

Based on the results I’ve calculated the Kona slot allocation for Brazil and from the the automatic qualification times. Exact slot allocation may vary slightly and roll down will influence the final qualifying times too. You can compare this with other races at my Kona qualification page.

For the biggest age groups – 40 to 50 year old men – this years race was one of the fastest. The picture is more varied in other, smaller age groups. For the most part the trend is around the average for the decade with a few age groups coming in noticeably slower too.

You can access a spreadsheet of the full results from Ironman Brazil 2019 on my Google Drive.