I like Ironman as a brand and have mostly good experiences, but they really need to actually enforce rules for age groupers or create an elite amateur division.
Ironman Texas was a great experience as always. But my one gripe was the lack of rule enforcement as usual.
On the bike I was riding and then all of a sudden a clearly organized peloton of about 16 bikes, many of which were wearing the same kits, passed by me. I could have joined this group and drafted freely off of them but I stuck to the rules and called them fucking cheating fucks as they rode by and some of them flipped me off.
I kept a legal distance from them for a few miles and then I saw a couple of Ironman crew on a motorcycle and asked if anyone was going to do anything about the draft pack up ahead and they said no because we aren't race officials. Then a while later race officials drove by me on a motorcycle and told me to let them do their jobs and stop barking about the draft packs or I will get a card for unsportsmanlike conduct. In other words, stop pointing out about how we aren't doing our jobs.
I get that the focus is on the pro race but they have race ranger. I understand that with 3000 athletes that there will be some unintentional drafting but that is not what this pack was - it was clearly organized and tightly packed.
Also, something really needs to be done about swim start corrals. I lined up in the front of the 1:00 to 1:10 corral for this race. I saw by far the largest contigent of athletes lining up in the under 60 corral I have ever seen. The athlete next to me said there was no fucking way all these athletes were going to swim under an hour, especially in a non wetsuit swim and I agreed. It took me 15 minutes after age group gun to get in the water - last year I lined up in the middle of the 1 to 1:10 corral and was in the water in less than 5 minutes. The entire swim was a minefield of slow swimmers infront of me that I had to swim over or tried to draft off of but abandoned quickly after I realized they were slow. I was looking at the swim times at those who started ahead of me and there were lots of 1:20 and 1:30 swims. A guy I follow on Strava whose Ironman swim PR is 1:21 started 5 minutes before me so he chose to line up in the under 60 corral despite never coming close to that in the past and he swam a 1:31. An overweight guy in a speedo was in the under 60 corral infront of me and I passed him as he breaststroked away in the first 300 yards and I looked him up and he swam a 1:42. There needs to be some kind of system to ensure these corrals are actually representative.
And don't get me started on Ironman looking the other way when it comes to doping and PED use in the amateur ranks. They were promoting the steroid using BPN influencers at Ironman Arizona on the Ironman social media pages and there is a girl who openly admits to doing steroids on her social media who took a Kona slot at Ironman Malaysia.
I think these issues can be fixed by implementing an elite amateur division where those who are in this division are drug tested, mass start on the swim, and get race rangers.