Mark Allen vs modern IRONMAN: would he go sub-8 at Kona today?

I love debating how sporting greats from previous eras would perform against the current crop if they were racing now. Who would win in a 100-metre sprint between Jesse Owens and Usain Bolt is an unanswerable question, but that doesn't stop us playing out the romance and speculation of such a scenario.

I was recently asked how IRONMAN® great Mark Allen would do in the modern era if he had today's technological advantages? Could he go sub-eight hours at the World Championships in Kona?

Would Mark Allen win today's IRONMAN World Champs?

Anyone who considers themselves a fan of triathlon will tell you that the ‘Iron War’ at the IRONMAN® World Championships in Hawaii in 1989 is one of the best triathlons ever raced. Dave Scott and Mark Allen continued their seemingly annual proverbial boxing match against each other at Kona by taking themselves to the very limits of what a human body could tolerate.

That year was the first of six IRONMAN® World titles that Mark would win during a glittering career that included winning the sport's inaugural World Championships over the Olympic distance in 1989, as well as numerous wins at Nice. The only reason I don’t list more of his accolades here is because of my word count limit. The man stockpiled high quality victories.

Allen’s fastest IRONMAN® time at Kona was 8:07 in 1993, so just 7 minutes shy of the eight-hour barrier (and it took another 25 years before anyone could break eight hours).

Given Kona’s extreme weather, the dynamics and risks you face when racing so hard for so long, I’d suggest the best way to shave the time is to look for the factors that have as little dependence on those conditions as possible – in this case, the technology an athlete uses. I’ll intentionally cherry-pick one technology each from the swim, bike and run legs to see how Mark could have fared today...

Swim: Mark Allen vs Today

One of the nuances of Hawaii is its general ban of wetsuits. This is something of a shame for our exercise because it's well known in research now that the use of a wetsuit not only improves the body position and buoyancy of a swimmer, but also reduces the exercise intensity required to maintain a given velocity compared to when swimming without one.

The verdict: Yes, athletes can use swimskins under certain conditions but the data on those is much less clear, so we’ll assume that Allen makes no headway against modern day triathletes here.

Bike: Mark Allen vs Today

Mark’s best ever Hawaii time was a 4:29 bike split in 1993, but if we can estimate his values then and upgrade those with what we typically see today, we can back-calculate the time saving he could make now.

We didn’t have Strava or GPS computers on our bikes back in '89, so getting hold of the exact bike course now is challenging. So I asked AI to recreate the course and provide me with a GPX file I could then drop into a few of my own apps to see the impact of Mark’s coefficient of drag area (CdA) changes and also add in the recorded weather of that day.

Back in Mark’s day, aerodynamic testing was still in its infancy so we don’t really know what his CdA likely was. By 1989 he was already benefitting from aerobars, but these (and the bicycle frames themselves) were often quite traditional looking and lacked the shaping and refinement we see now.

However, looking at the published research of early cycling aerodynamic scientists like Chester Kyle, it’s fair to assume that elite triathletes around this time may have had a CdA around the 0.28-0.30 mark. A male elite-level long distance triathlete’s aerodynamic drag (CdA) value these days will typically be in the 0.20-0.22 range (depending on their size and equipment), so that’s a fair bit less.

Mark’s racing weight and power output are also important to know too but for obvious reasons, this also wasn’t widely publicised. Again, A.I. estimates that elite triathlete’s of his size and height would typically fall in the 66-75kg range and winners of his size are often in the 270-280 watt cycling power output range.

The verdict: All in all, there is a fair slice of estimation and potential error in all of this but if we plug in the course, the weather on that day, his estimated weight, power output and CdA and then drop his CdA to modern levels, he’d have saved roughly 19 minutes on the bike leg alone.

Run: Mark Allen vs Today

So then we move to the run. The biggest change in running technology since the rise of running shoes in the 19th century is the emergence of ‘supershoes’ in around 2017.

Supershoes are the type of running shoes that comprise some form of light, highly energy-efficient foam such as Pebax and a composite energy return structure both housed within the sole of the shoe. To understand their impact (pun intended), the level of energy return you get back from a traditional distance running shoe when your foot strikes the ground is around 65–75%. However, a supershoe has been reported to provide a return as high as 87%.

The verdict: Now, Allen’s best marathon time at Kona was 2:40 set during his legendary 1989 performance. If we take the research that says that a typical supershoe could increase running velocity by 3.4% and assuming the same conditions and effort, he’d have completed his marathon leg using these shoes roughly 5 minutes faster. Being able to see your opposition has its benefits in a race but with this level of gain, Allen would have been over another kilometre up the road by this point.

How fast would Mark Allen be now?

So, with some crude back-of-a-napkin calculations, the use of A.I., and some reasonable assumptions, we can show that Mark Allen would have gone under 8 hours. I reckon he’d have saved at least 24 minutes and finished somewhere around 7:43 (giving him time to get showered and start sipping on a margarita in the bar by the time the eight-hour finishers start to cross the finish line!).

How would 7:43 stack up today? Well, without considering any other technological changes, improvements in nutrition or seeing the same favourable conditions that athletes raced in 2022 or 2024, his time would've been fast enough to win 26 of the 28 IRONMAN World Championships held in Hawaii since his last title in 1993 (up to and including 2026).

There’s a pretty good case to be made that with this historical adjustment, his 1989 or 1993 outings in particular would still be some of the best Hawaii IRONMAN® performances ever. But that's a debate for another day...

Further reading

• A short history of sports nutrition (and how carbs became king)
• A history of marathon fueling
• A history of Tour de France fueling