One of the common patterns in endurance and ultra-endurance sports is
to have one or two races that everyone wants to do (the Hawaii
Ironman, the Boston Marathon, Western States 100, etc.) Naturally,
as soon as the sport gets popular you have more people who want
to do race X than the race organizers can accomodate. [Interestingly,
this seems to be true no matter the size of the event: Hawaii typically has around
1800 participants, Boston over 20,000.] As a race organizer, then, you
are faced with the problem of deciding how to pick the actual participants
from those who have the desire to participate.
The first problem seems to be deciding what to optimize for, with the two
most common objectives being:
- Choose fairly among everyone who wants to do the race.
- Choose the best athletes.
Fair Selection
The easiest way to choose fairly is generally to run a lottery. You take
applications for a race up until date X and then just draw however many
entrants you want out of that list. [Note that there is always a yield
issue, since some people register who never show because of injuries or
whatever, so the number of actual participants is never totally predictable.]
For races which are only mildly oversubscribed, what's more common is
take entries up until you're full and then close entry under the "you
snooze, you lose" principle. Ironman Canada does this, but now it
basically fills up right away every year so you more or less have
to be there the day after the race when registration for the next
year opens up.
Merit-Based Selection
Choosing the best athletes is a more difficult proposition, since you
first need to identify them. You might think that you could just
have a big qualifying race with everyone who wants to race
and just pick the top X participants, but this clearly isn't going
to work. Since the size of the target event is generally (though not
always) set to be about the maximum practical size of a race, if you're
going to pick out the top people to race in your target event, the
qualifying event would have to be much much larger, well beyond
the practical size. Instead, you somehow have to have a set of
qualifying races and draw the best candidates from each race.
In some cases this is easy: If you are drawing national teams
for the world championship, you can just have each nation run
its own qualifying race and since each such race only needs to
draw from a smaller pool, it's still manageable. However, many
events (e.g., Ironman) aren't laid out among national lines so this
doesn't work.
There are two basic strategies for drawing your qualifying candidates
from a number of races. First, you can have a qualifying time. For instance,
if I wanted to run the Boston Marathon, I would need to run some
marathon under 3:10. Obviously, there is a lot of variation in
how difficult any given race is, and so this leads to people forum
shopping for the fastest race. It's extremely common to see marathons
advertised as good Boston qualifiers. The key words here are
"flat and fast"
(A qualifying race can only have a very small amount of net downhill, so
non-flat means uphill,which slows you down.). Obviously, a qualifying
time doesn't give you very tight control over how many people you
actually admit, so you still have an admissions problem. As I understand
it, Boston used to just use a first-come-first-served policy for qualifiers
but in 2012 they're moving towards a rolling
admissions policy designed to favor the fastest entrants. That said,
At the other end of the spectrum, the Western States has their
qualifying time set so that there are vastly more qualifiers than
eventual participants (it looks to me like it's set so that practically
anyone who can finish can qualify [observation due to Cullen Jennings])
and they use a lottery to choose among the qualifiers.
The other major predictable approach is that used for the Hawaii Ironman.
The World Triathlon Corporation (who runs Hawaii) has made certain
races "Hawaii qualifiers" (my understanding is that a race pays for this
privilege) and each race gets a specific number of slots for each
gender/age combination. The way that this works is that if there are
5 slots in your age group, then the top 5 finishers get them. If any
of those people don't want the slot (for instance they may have already
qualified) then the slots roll down to the 6th person, and so on.
all of this happens the day of or the day after the race and in person.
This method gives the race organizer a very predictable race size
but poses some interesting strategic issues for participants: because participants
compete directly against each other for slots, what you want is
to pick a qualifying race that looks like it is going to have a
weak field this year. Unfortunately, just because a race had a weak
field last year doesn't mean that that will be true again, since
everyone else is making the same calculation!
Arbitrary Selection
One thing that I've only seen in ultrarunning is invitational events
with arbitrary (or at least unpublished) selection criteria. For instance,
here's the situation with Badwater:
The application submission period begins on February 1, 2012 and ends
on February 15, 2012. A committee of five race staff members, one of
whom is the race director, will then review and rank each application
on a scale of 0 to 10. The ranks will be tallied on February 18 and
the top 45 rookie applicants with the highest scores, and the top 45
veterans with the highest scores, will be invited (rookies and
veterans compete separately for 45 slots for each category). At that
time, or later, up to ten more applicants (rookie and/or veteran) may
be invited at the race director's discretion, for a total of
approximately 100 entrants, and 90 actual competitors on race day.
I guess that's one way to do it.
