Triathlon in Decline Part 2

Since I commented on the apparent decline in triathlon participation numbers in my neck of the woods back in September, the topic has come up again on slowtwitch, both as a thread on their forum and as an article on the front page. Obviously both of these are within a much larger context than my local analysis, but some interesting points were raised that caused me to take a second look at what the stats say about this issue.

I looked at what is likely the biggest local race, the Canadian, which takes place on Labour Day weekend and covers the largest range of distances (super sprint right up to half-iron in its current iteration). As per usual I didn't consider non-tri events (swim-cycle, duathlon, or relays). Additionally, since I was interested in the Age Group breakdown, I didn't consider athletes in the Try-a-Tri events or those that registered for other events as Clydesdales/Athenas, since neither of those include age categories.

I looked at what has happened to participation over a decade's time, to see if the patterns have changed. We already know the numbers are down, but rather than how many participants there were, I was more interested in who was participating. Here is the participation on all triathlon events at the Canadian by both males and females, broken down by age group.


The lower overall numbers are apparent, though there are couple of interesting exceptions:

• F55-59 and M55-59 were unchanged
• F45-49 and M60+ were actually up

Both age spreads show a pretty standard bell curve. For the men, this doesn't change all that much from 2008 to 2017, with 40-44 being the largest group. For the women, there are some interesting things to note. The average age is a little younger than the men in 2008 with 30-34 being the largest group. However, in 2017 largest age group is actually 45-49, with 25-29 and 35-39 in a tie for second - the bell curve is out the window for the women and the average age has shifted upwards.

In 2008, 31% of the women participating were under 30, and in 2017 this proportion had dropped slightly to just over 28%. For the men, the shift was a little bigger - in 2008 21.5% of participants were under 30, and by 2017 this number was down to just over 16%. It's to be expected that the average age is creeping up since we have an aging population, but it's also clear than younger males are not really into triathlon.

I noted in my last blog post on this subject that I think it's obstacle course racing like the Spartan Race and Tough Mudder that is drawing away many would-be triathletes - the industry has grown exponentially over that time period. For example, the 2017 Ottawa Spartan Race (the first edition of which, from what I can tell, was held in 2011) drew about 10 times the number of participants as the Canadian, despite having significantly higher entry fees ($125-$144).

A 2015 analysis of obstacle course racing puts the median age at 33, with a 63/37 male/female breakdown. A 2014 analysis of Tough Mudder specifically lists their median age as 29, with a 70/30 male/female breakdown. By comparison, according to TBI, the average triathlete is 44.

I'm not sure if I see these trends reversing. It's hard to beat the appeal of OCR - you can do it without any real training and it doesn't require any special equipment. It's also more social, both in terms of social media visibility and the fact that you can get bunch of your friends together to do it.

If Lionel Sanders manages to win Kona, this would likely put triathlon on more peoples' radar in this country. Likewise, if our mixed relay team medals in the 2020 Olympics, which I think they can, that would also go a long way to helping triathlon to a resurgence. On this point, the mixed relay format is pretty fun to watch, and the team aspect makes it more social. It would be interesting to see if this format is viable at the age group level. We've seen the increasingly popular swim-run events pop up recently in Ottawa, so the industry is willing to get on board with the trends. Maybe more non-traditional formats are the way to go. In the meantime the WTC races seem to be doing well, so perhaps the modern triathlete just doesn't want to race all that much and they'd rather drop the cash on one or two big expensive races per year, rather than race the more low-key local races. I don't really understand what's changed in that regard over the past decade, but it would seem to me that the big-ticket long course races have not experienced the same decline as small local races.