The PTO Rankings Were Bad, Renee Kiley Helped Fix Them

Renee Kiley is a professional triathlete from Australia who has podiumed at Ironman Hamburg and Ironman Cairns. She spoke with us about her experience as a member of the Professional Triathletes Organization Athlete Ranking Committee, and how they worked together to build an improved and more transparent ranking system.

In your opinion, what was the biggest flaw in the previous rankings?

In my opinion, there were two main problems:

Lack of transparency: Speaks for itself. The old system created a lot of anxiety for athletes not knowing in advance what races would help them progress up the rankings, nor what points a great performance might get them.

Unreliable methodology: Yes the old system's algorithm took into account previous times on courses, etc. when calculating the AIT (adjusted ideal time) but it also created a "profile" for every athlete based on their history/past performances.

What this means essentially is that if athlete X had 2-3 great races they have a robust profile, so even if they perform poorly in their next race, but win it, and the field is weak or small, they usually would score around the same as what they had in previous races as it was "assumed" their race was good based on their history, and because there were no other athletes in the field to really compare to.

This created a situation that made it difficult for athletes who were more inconsistent in their performances (Ie. Maybe they chose to finish races in a slow time on bad days instead of DNF) or those that had breakthrough performances (perhaps in conditions or on a course that suited them better than their past races) to score well unless they were racing in the highest quality fields. There were a lot of assumptions and objectivity involved in addition to the maths.

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