Home > News

Hoping to qualify for Kona? Good luck punching your ticket at Mont-Tremblant

This year's race in Quebec offers fewer men's world championship qualifying slots than ever

Photo by: Kevin Mackinnon

Earlier this year we reported on the long-awaited official announcement of where the men’s Ironman World Championship would be taking place this year. On Jan. 5 we learned that the men would compete in Nice, France on Sept. 10.

Splitting the world championship to two venues meant there would be changes to the qualification process for the races. The last qualifying race for Nice will be Ironman Lake Placid on July 23, 2023. That race will offer men 65 qualifying slots for the race in Nice.

Ironman Mont-Tremblant will be one of the last qualifying races for the women’s championship in Kona this year (along with Ironman Copenhagen, which takes place on the same day, Aug. 20), and will offer 100 women’s qualifying slots. (That’s down from the 120 slots that were to be offered before the split was announced.)

For the men, though, the race will offer just 15 qualifying slots for the 2024 men’s championship in Kona. That’s a dramatic decrease from the 35 slots that were to be offered before the announcement of the split, and the fewest spots that have ever been offered for men at the event.

Women’s pro start of the 2019 Ironman Mont Tremblant (Credit: Kevin Mackinnon)

In 2019, for example, Ironman Mont-Tremblant offered 40 qualifying slots in total, with 25 going to the 1,659 men competing in the race, and 15 dispersed among the 661 women.

The other Canadian full-distance race, Ironman Canada in Penticton, is not included in the list of qualifiers (see link below) – it will serve as a qualifying race for the 2024 championship events in Kona (men) and Nice (women).

Here’s a complete list of the world championship qualifiers.

A list of the 2024 qualifiers held in August, 2023. None offer more than 20 qualifying spots for Kona.

Deferrals

Male athletes who had already qualified for the Ironman World Championship at races held after August last year have the ability to defer their entry to Kona in 2024, which no-doubt affects the number of qualifying slots that will be offered at the roughly 44 Ironman qualifying events.

Lots of slots at European events

Many of the August races that no longer serve as qualifiers for this year’s men’s championship take place in Europe, so Ironman appears to have distributed those slots to other European events. Ironman Nice in June will offer a whopping 200 slots for the world championship race in Nice, while the Ironman European Championship in Frankfurt and Ironman Austria will offer 150 slots.