Why they Cheat
People have always tried to cut corners in order to gain a competitive advantage. But with the advent of chip timing, live splits and online results, photographers and live video feeds along the course, it’s revealed that a surprising number of recreation
People have always tried to cut corners in order to gain a competitive advantage. But with the advent of new technologies in running – chip timing, live splits and results, photographers and live video feeds along the course – have revealed that a surprising number of recreational runners cheat. Madeleine Cummings digs deeper, trying to figure out what makes seemingly normal runners do bad things.
Allison Tai thought she was in first place. It was Aug. 9, 2015, and she was on her way to finishing the Ottawa Spartan Ultra Beast race in Lac-Sainte-Marie. Since much of the running route was on trails, she figured she would have noticed another woman passing her. Towards the end of the run (which was about the length of a marathon), she stopped to do a set of 30 burpees and a reporter on the sidelines informed her that she was in second place. She finished the race and accepted a plaque for second, watching as a different woman – one she was sure she had passed – took first.
Almost immediately after the ceremony, perceptive spectators and Facebook friends started investigating
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 firstplace 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 Price 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 Times 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 prevalent in distance events – the kind Allison Tai suspects happened during her race. Coursecutting and bib-swapping is more common than you might think, and though technology 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 2:34:28. Organizers didn’t figure out Ruiz had cheated until days after the race and Gareau’s victory has long been overshadowed 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 argued that 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
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 occasion, 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 qualifiers, 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 legitimate qualifiers, 10 cut the course during their qualifying races, four used “bib mules” during qualifying races and four used falsified 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 identifying course-cutting, t hanks 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 coursecutting. 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 developed a sophisticated timing check-in system that can catch people who try to cut the course. 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.
Sportst ats 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 expensive – for people to swap bibs legitimately? Should race courses be more closely monitored 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 aggressive 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.