Our purpose was to find the fastest race courses for elite Ironman® 70.3 athletes, using
machine learning (ML) algorithms. We collected the data of all professional triathletes competing
between 2004 and 2020 in Ironman 70.3 races held worldwide. A sample of 16,611 professional
athletes originating from 97 different countries and competing in 163 different races was thus obtained.
Four different ML regression models were built, with gender, country of origin, and event location
considered as independent variables to predict the final race time. For all the models, gender was
the most important variable in predicting finish times. Attending to the single decision tree model,
the fastest race times in the Ironman® 70.3 World Championship of around ~4 h 03 min would be
achieved by men from Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, France, the United
Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand. Considering the World Championship is the
target event for most professional athletes, it is expected that training is planned so that they attain
their best performance in this event.
