what had happened. They sent Tai pictures
with timestamps and timing data from the
race results. Tai had started the race about
15 minutes late, but she managed to pass all
of the other women, including the so-called
winner, over the course of the run. The group
collectively concluded that the first-place
female finisher had likely cut the course by
about six or seven kilometres.
Tai contacted the woman and showed
her all of the evidence she and her friends
had gathered. The woman admitted she had
made a mistake and agreed to withdraw her
result from the race. Spartan gave Tai a first-
place plaque and no fuss was made about the
disqualification. Tai said she didn’t want to
rake the other woman over the coals for what
may have been an unintentional error. “I’ve
lost my brain in long-distance races,” she
said, “and I think it’s important not to be
too crazy and judgmental of other people.”
However, she wished the incident hadn’t
happened. She knew the woman who should
have come in third place, who had trained
hard but didn’t stand on the podium that day
and get the recognition she deserved.
Cases of serial cheaters are endlessly
fascinating – especially when they involve
average runners who aren’t chasing world
records or big pots of prize money. Last
fall, 61-year-old Gregory P rice was banned
for life from the Marine Corps Marathon
after he was discovered to have cut the
course multiple times over the years. (Price
admitted to shortening his marathons and
told the Washington Post that he didn’t have
a good explanation for doing so.)
Then there are the more suspicious cases,
such as the tale of the Michigan dentist, Kip
Litton, who set out to run a sub-three-hour
marathon in every state but whose string of
questionable race results was later picked
apart by online sleuths. Recently, the New
York Time s ran a story describing the swirl
of allegations surrounding the Canadian
triathlete Julie Miller. (Miller has claims to
have lost her timing chip multiple times
during triathlons and has been accused of
course-cutting during the run portion).
Both Litton and Miller have vehemently
denied they ever cheated.
A different kind of cheating is more preva-
lent in distance events – the kind Allison Tai
suspects happened during her race. Course-
cutting and bib-swapping is more common
than you might think, and though tech-
nology may be making it easier for us to
expose cheating, it’s not necessarily helping
us eliminate it.
Canadian runners have encountered
cheaters for years. The most famous example
is Rosie Ruiz’s cutting the course in order
to win the Boston Marathon in 1980. The
rightful winner was Jacqueline Gareau, a
27-year-old Canadian who finished the race
in 2:3 4:28. Organizers didn’t f ig ure out Ruiz
had cheated until days after the race and
Gareau’s victory has long been overshad-
owed by Ruiz’s deception.
In 2005 , a group of runners belonging
to Jean’s Marines (a Toronto-based training
group) was caught cutting the course near the
10-mile mark of the Marine Corps Marathon
in Washington, D.C. Jean Marmoreo, the
group’s coach who had encouraged the
shortcut, justified it in the press. She arguedthat her runners only cut the course in order
to finish within the time limit and that the
shortcut was used by many runners of that
race – not just those in her group.
In 2013, Neena Cheema and Mohammed
Razak were banned from the Vancouver Sun
Run for taking shortcuts that led them to
win their respective age categories. Officials
determined that Cheema had been cheating
the course for years, but Razak said that
he had taken shortcuts unintentionally: “I
don’t know whether that’s cheating,” he
told the Vancouver Sun. “I wasn’t there to
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