Registration has closed for The 2017 Boston Marathon, and those that have been accepted have been notified.
Boston accepted all applicants that ran 2 minutes and 9 seconds under their qualifying time, leaving scores of runners that met the qualifying standard on the outside looking in.
I received the below email from a runner that was accepted.
I did verify that this runner indeed finished right at the cutoff time. I will admit that she is likely not the only one to finish right at the cutoff, and I cannot determine for certain whether the disqualifications that were issued moved the cutoff time at all.
However, there were a handful of runners that registered for Boston 2017 that were disqualified as a result of tips that were sent to me, as well as from results of prior investigations. There were also additional disqualifications that were issued throughout 2016 that wiped out invalid Boston Qualifying times.
I shared this to show why I am as passionate about this as I am. While the cases of cheating get the attention, the reason I care as much as I do is because of the affect that cheating has on legitimate qualifiers.
The reality is that there are still runners registered for Boston that don’t deserve to be. I will continue to examine results from qualifying races and fight for more disqualifications where warranted. This won’t free open additional slots, but it will stop some from running in Boston that don’t deserve it.
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing it – and for all you do – and congrats to the squeaker!
You do great work and it's appreciated by all honest members of the running community.
Loyal reader (your site is even in my bookmarks bar on Chrome). Keep up the great work! And, yes, congrats to the squeaker. You will love Boston!
i don't think you're giving yourself enough credit. In addition to the people who were dq'd, there were an unknown number of people who thought better of trying to cheat their way in. The integrity of the sport has increased as a result.
Huge thanks for all of your work!
As referenced in the comment above, I suspect your work is not only kicking out existing cheaters, but it is discouraging folks from cheating in the first place & discouraging folks who cheated from registering.
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