Busted, Disgusted, Cannot Be Trusted

On Saturday I obliquely referred to a possible cheater at the Brooklyn Half.

Transferring bibs in NYRR races is against the rules, but it's NYRR's problem. Unless you beat one of our runners out of an award while using it. Someone's gonna get put on blast on the blog this week when the Brightroom photos come out.

Allow me to be less oblique. The woman who was listed in 4th place among the 40-44 age group had never broken 2:00 for a half marathon. Heck, she'd never run faster than 8:00 miles for any distance at an NYRR race. That made her performance seem suspect. When the Brightroom photos showed up last night, I fully expected to see someone else with her bib. Maybe a guy. Maybe a woman other than the one listed. But somebody. Much to my surprise, no one seemed to be wearing that number in any photos. Not only did she elude Brightroom's still photographers, no one wearing that bib was in the videos at 15k or the finish. That seemed curious.

So I went back to the results, and sure enough, there's another runner who remarkably ran the same splits as her at every checkpoint and at the finish.

Unlike his counterpart, there is someone in the photos with his number. Not only is he in the pictures, but he's also .......wait for it .......wearing D-Tags on both shoes! So, it seems pretty clear that he ran the race with his own legit D-Tag and with hers. Presumably she just wanted the credit for doing the race, but in the process she managed to displace our lovely Ms. Sin Quee, and the runners behind her.

Certainly this wasn't the only case of a bib transfer in Brooklyn. As I pointed out last week, Craigslist had dozens of bibs for sale. And in one really bad case, a poster on the NYRR Facebook page is calling out a guy who wore a bib belonging to the woman who is (temporarily) credited with winning the 35-39 AG.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the two runners in question are perfectly nice people. I'm not suggesting that their sin is unique or unforgivable. Obviously bib transfers happen all the time in NYRR (and other) races, and I know that good, law abiding citizens occasionally do it.  As far as I'm concerned, that's NYRR's problem most of the time. But if the transfer affects the awards, it's a different story. And if it affects an award for one of our athletes, all bets are off.