The Return of the Kona Lot...uh, I Mean Drawing

Ryan Heisler

Essentially: it's a suggested minimum donation. You can enter for free, or you can donate more (or less). The donation is, as in most cases, tax-deductible.

I think it's the best of the opportunity to still give the non-elite athlete a shot at Kona while also (hopefully) maximizing the amount of good that IMF can do.

And for what it's worth, Deschenes doesn't get enough credit for cleaning that place up. The 2014 Foundation financials are about as sound as you can ask for: each donation they made gives specific outputs as to what the finances were used for, mass detail about how funds are allocated to organizations, and refund provisions of the place they donate to doesn't actually use the funds appropriately. I wouldn't hesitate in terms of entering and knowing that your funds were actually going to be used in a proper manner to benefit the communities where IM races take place.

No, I'm not entering (I'm a bit pre-occupied in October this year).

Mark_after_Dark

Ok, so where is the transparency to make sure that those who donate more aren't given preference over those who donate less? I had heard grumblings before how the same group of people were getting in every year, who coincidentally had ties to people within the WTC.

Mark_after_Dark

Honestly, it seems even more rigged than before.

Ryan Heisler

Certified 3rd party has to do the drawing. They can't cert themselves.

Mark_after_Dark

Mmmmm.

Ryan Heisler

I'm normally as skeptical as you are with this (hello, lottery letter). Considering the amount of legal wrangling it took to put this back in place, and the amount of attention it would likely get from everyone (press, lawyers, etc.), I'd be hesitant to say everything is not on the up and up.

Disclosure: I talked a lot with Dave Deschenes at IMF about this, procedures, potential places for the dollars to go, etc.

ellsworth53t

The other plus of the donation page is thay you can now see how many people have donated.

Zach Miller

sending my postcard in now! haha no probably not

Theo

It's nice to see it be back, but they trimmed it down to only giving out 10 slots, so it's more of a token lip-service than anything else.

Ryan Heisler

Theo said:

It's nice to see it be back, but they trimmed it down to only giving out 10 slots, so it's more of a token lip-service than anything else.

I think that is in part because they had already allocated a fair number of slots to other opportunities (e.g., IMCDA getting a bunch of slots to help it sell more entries). And, for what it's worth, they haven't announced how those slots might be awarded (e.g. "the next finisher to cross the line gets a Kona slot!" instead of just standard KQing.)

If this is successful, there's chatter of expanding it closer in scale to the old program.