4 Ironman world champions to compete in men’s strong elite field in Kona on Oct. 26

Defending Ironman World Champion Sam Laidlow of France leads an elite men’s field of 56 triathletes, including three other winners of the championship, who will compete in the upcoming Oct. 26 race in Kailua-Kona.

“As a true clash of the titans, we are expecting some unforgettable performances,” race organizers said about the 2024 VinFast Ironman World Championship. “[It] will be fun for all to watch unfold.”

The iconic 140.6-mile swim, bike and run event will bring together the world’s top professional male triathletes to compete for the coveted title, 6,000 points in the inaugural Ironman Pro Series, and a piece of the $375,000 professional prize purse. The winner takes home $125,000.

The World Championship also includes amateur age-group triathletes from around the world, including participants from Hawaiʻi.

This is the first time the field will be only men. Last year, the field in Kona featured only women, with Lucy Charles-Barclay of Great Britain leading the race out of the water and never looking back en route to her first World Championship victory after finishing second four times.

In 2022, with the field of the popular triathlon growing too big for all participants to compete on the same day, including a backlog of qualifiers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ironman organizers added a Thursday race before its traditional Saturday race.

The addition of a race in the middle of the work week irked some downtown business owners who closed due to road closures and the mayhem. Other community members complained they had not been consulted about the format change, saying the small town of Kona with a population of about 23,000 couldn’t can’t support the onslaught of thousands more participants and their supporters.

The 2023 race originally was going to be a two-day event, but public outcry led to Ironman adding a second site for the World Championship in Nice, France. Women and men competitions would alternate between the sites going forward, with Laura Philipp of Germany winning this year’s women’s World Championship in Nice.

Laidlow will wear bib No. 1 for the first time due to winning last year’s World Championship in his home country of France. In 2022, he finished second in Kona, helped by setting the bike course record of 4:04:36.

He was overtaken in the latter stages of the race by Norway’s Gustav Iden, a race rookie who stormed home to his first World Championship by smashing the course record of Jan Frodeno by nearly 11 minutes. Iden finished in 7:40:24.

Iden, who also is a two-time Ironman 70.3 World Champion (2019, 2021), has not raced a full-distance triathlon since his 2022 victory in Kona due to injury. After initially struggling to rediscover the form that saw him claim three world titles in four years, Iden has started to show signs over the past few months of the threat his competitors know he can pose.

Fellow Norwegian and 2021 World Champion, Kristian Blummenfelt, also will return to Kona after finishing third in 2022. Despite dedicating his year to short-course triathlon in a quest for back-to-back Olympic Gold Medals, Blummenfelt had a runaway victory at the Mainova Ironman European Championship Frankfurt triathlon less than two weeks after the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

Patrick Lange of Germany will be on the hunt for a third Ironman World Championship title. He has finished on the podium four of the six times he has raced triathlon’s pinnacle event. He holds the Ironman World Championship run course record of 2:32:41, which he set in Nice last year on his way to finishing second.

Other contenders for this year’s title include Magnus Ditlev (Denmark), Rudy Von Berg (USA), and Léon Chevalier (France), who all finished in the top five at last year’s World Championship in Nice.

Other threats in the packed field include: Matt Burton (Australia), the 2024 Ironman Asia-Pacific Champion, Rasmus Svenningson (Sweden), the 2024 Ironman African Champion, and Lionel Sanders (Canada) and Trevor Foley (USA), who this year have both won an Ironman race and two Ironman 70.3 events.

Kona’s Ironman race course begins in Kailua Bay with a 2.4-mile swim. Next is a 112-mile bike on the course renowned for its historic long sustained climbs, strong crosswinds, and exposed terrain beauty with lava fields on one side and the ocean coastline on the other.

The final leg of the race is a 26.2-mile run, the length of a marathon, on a route that takes athletes past the spirited crowds on Aliʻi Drive, up Palani Road to the Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway that leads them to the long-awaited HOST Park at the National Energy Laboratory Hawaiʻi Authority.

Athletes end the long race to the roar of thousands of spectators as they cross the historic Aliʻi Drive finish line next to the host Courtyard King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel.

Another layer of excitement is the inaugural Ironman Pro Series. The winner of the Kona event receives 1,000 more points that other full-distance Ironman events. In Kona, eight out of the top 10 professional athletes in the men’s standings will battle for series points and a piece of the end of year bonus prize money.

Matt Hanson (USA) leads the standings due to his fast, consistent racing so far this season. He also will be competing in Kona. But in six World Championships, his beat finish was 13th in 2022.

Live race day coverage will be broadcast for free across multiple platforms for global viewers including proseries.ironman.com, DAZN and YouTube, as well as Outside TV in the United States and Canada, L’Équipe in France and ZDF in Germany. 

The professional men’s field: