cheat anybody.”
Race directors say cases of deliberate,
serial cheating are extremely rare. Tim
Hopkins, who has been the race director of
Vancouver’s Sun Run for over a decade, said
that in an event with 30–45,000 people,
“ it’s a single-digit number of people who
don’t” run the full 10 kilometres.
But course-cutting and bib-swapping is
surprisingly common in races. Marc Roy,
the owner of Sportstats (the biggest timing
company in North America), said that most
large marathons usually have 10 –40 people
who cut the course. It’s likely that many
of these incidents are honest mistakes.
Sometimes people drop out of races but their
bibs are counted accidentally. On one occa-
sion, Roy recalled, a medical team crossed
the finish line with several bibs in a backpack.
That led to several runners being incorrectly
counted as finishers.
Derek Murphy, who started a blog and
Facebook discussion group to investigate
cheating among Boston Marathon quali-
fiers, identified 47 cases of people who did
not qualify legitimately for the 2015 race.
According to his analysis, he reasoned that
29 people ran Boston with bibs from legiti-
mate qualifiers, 10 cut the course during
their qualifying races, four used “bib mules”
during qualifying races and four used falsi-
fied race results. These runners, most of
whom he did not name publicly but has
reported to the Boston Athletic Association,
came from France, Italy, Japan, Australia, the
U. S. and Canada.
In February, Runner’s World profiled a
man in New York City named Jonathan Cane
who makes a hobby of looking for improbable
split times in race results. He claims to have
identified 500 cheaters during his searches.
Cane said he doesn’t notify race officials
unless the results affect one of the runners
he coaches, but that he wants organizers to
be aware that there’s a lot of cheating going
undetected.
Races have gotten smarter about iden-
tifying course-cutting, thanks to better
technology and race photography. After their
cheating scandal in 2013, the Vancouver Sun
Run started placing a timing mat midway
through the course, in order to deter course-
cutting. They move the mat each year so that
runners don’t know where it will be.
Anita Darcel, the race director of the
Canadian Death Race, said they have devel-
oped a sophisticated timing check-in system
that can catch people who try to cut thecourse. At the beginning of each leg of the
race, runners “check in” to checkpoints via
a timing chip that can be worn like a ring.
There are checkpoints at the beginning and
end of each leg and also a hidden “cheater’s
box” on each leg. If you stick to the trail,
you’ ll see the box and know to check in, but if
you take any shortcuts, you might miss it and
get disqualified.
Sportstats also looks closely at chip
data. For the past five years they have used
“cheater check ” software that f lags anyone
who is missing splits. Then they review
each case individually, usually looking to
see if people who are missing a split ran
unusually fast final kilometres. For example,
if someone runs the first half of a marathon
in two hours, but then the second half in
1:15 , that would raise the company’s alarm.
Sportstats provides a list of suspected errors
to race organizers or marshalls and they
have dedicated staff who make corrections.
Roy said that sometimes the company gets
emails from spectators live, during events.
Staff members then rush to correct the
information before the runners in question
cross the line. Bib-swapping, which is more
common than course-cutting, is trickier to
catch and correct. Though race photos can
help identify it, some people slip through
the cracks.
The persistance of course-cutting raises
questions about how far we should go
to crack down on cheating. Should race
organizers make it easier – and less expen-
sive – for people to swap bibs legitimately?
Should race courses be more closely moni-
tored and results better analyzed? Some
runners argue it’s unfair to shame people for
something like bib-swapping and that the
punishment of having the word “cheater”
associated with your name online is worse
than the crime. Others, like Jonathan Cane,
think race directors need to be more aggres-
sive about disqualifying people. “I mean,
if you are going to take the time to take
photos and put out timing mats but then
not do anything about it, what’s the point?”
he told Runner’s World. “Either just call it a
free-for-all and we will all go on the honour
system, or when people run implausible
splits, disqualify them.”
Tim Hopkins, the Sun Run race director,
said they take allegations of cheating very
seriously but don’t focus most of their energy
on outing cheaters or trying to prevent it
further. Their race, he said, is fundamentally
about encouraging people to be active.
“Cheating is not a priority for us. Safety is a
priority,” he said.Madeleine Cummings is a reporter and runner
based in Edmonton.
54 Canadian Running November & December 2016, Volume 9, Issue 7Guy Parsons