The strangely common case of runners caught cheating happened again Sunday at Hamilton’s Around the Bay race, with a woman called out for cheating by a runner from Windsor who participated in the race and follows the blog Marathon Investigation.
“The red flag was that she ran quite a slow split at 10k (4:33/km) and 15k (4:21/km) and then somehow managed to pass all of us Windsor boys on the hilly section and finish at 1:57:14,” wrote the runner in question in an email to iRun. “This would have been an insane negative split and there’s photo evidence of her running at 15k and her at the finish line finishing at 1:57:14, so this is not a timing chip error.”
The woman in question apparently had two chips on her shoe and both were disqualified after the discrepancies were brought to the attention of Sportstats CEO Marc Roy and confirmed by Around the Bay race director Anna Lewis. For the good samaritan runner, the errant runner got his attention after striking up a friendship with Tanis Smith on the race course.
“We chatted during the race about Windsor and about training with Lionel [Sanders], she worked her tail off to catch back up to us after the windy section, she deserved to get that place,” the runner wrote. “When I saw that her husband [Josh Bolton] got eighth, but she didn’t get eighth cause of a cheater, it PISSED me off and fired me up to figure this out!!!”
The way the sleuth did his reporting was by combing through public data. “I did a lot of snooping—at her Athlinks records, at the race photos, on her Facebook, on her Strava, to piece together evidence, and I even contacted a man she ran with during the first 10k and they both had identical splits and were both friends on Strava and Facebook,” wrote the sleuth. “He didn’t admit the crime, but definitely did not deny wrong doing.”
Tanis Smith-Bolton, who now jumps up a place in the finisher standings, is a member of the Grand River Endurance Club and a sponsored Skechers athlete. Yesterday she wrote her race recap for iRun, prior to realizing there had been a fraud. On Facebook she exclaimed her gratitude to the racer for correcting the finishing results.
“When your overall placing at ATB moves up one spot due to dirty cheaters. You can’t jump in the elite women’s top 10 randomly and not have people notice!” she wrote. “Thanks for all the investigating and straightening it out for me! Great people runners are I tell ya!”
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I would love to run a slow 4:21/km pace 🙂
How does two timing chips on the cheater aide her in her plan to cheat?
What a badly written article. No evidence of what actually happened. Just a suggestion that the splits didn’t add up. Maybe they did or maybe they didn’t somehow cheat. But publishing and article like this based on someone’s sour grapes, and putting up a picture of a runner without stating whether this was or wasn’t the person involved is pretty poor.
Nobody likes a cheat. But work on your facts and your journalism too
Agreed.
I love marathon investigation dot com too but this article gives me nothing…
which one of the three “Windsor boys” at 1:58 cracked this and what made them check the splits? What did the associated strava look like? Who is this accomplice and how does he fit in to the article???
The leading picture of Bolton is ridiculous. Everyone is cheated by a cheater/course cutter.
Sorry. But that was a poorly written article.
Well…Read that article 3-4 times. Still do not get what happened exactly, and who is who. What a confusing way to tell things…
If you cannot write, just keep running 🙂
very poorly written….cheating is awful, terrible but i was struggling with article. read it twice and still didnt know who was who and who was male or female. plus no real info given.
There are updated info on The Hamilton Spectator and Canadian Running Magazine.
I agree that it is a poorly written article, and I had to do math to figure out why cheating was suspected.
Around the bay is 30K, and based on the reported avg pace at 15k, she finished the first half in 1:05:15. That means that she would have had to run the second half of the race in just under 52 minutes. The pace for the second half would be 3:28 min/km, which is much much faster that 4:21 min/km. Very highly unlikely.
The aforementioned runner is saying that she hurt herself, and got a ride from about the 18k mark to near the end. She got out and finished the race and never intended to cheat… I find that a bit hard to believe…but whatever.
So this Windsor area runner took this girl to task over a simple “I’m naive, I didnt know”???
I cant believe IRUN would put this story out there if there if the girl didnt stand on the podium and try to collect some prize money…. Did she? Im willing to bet she didnt. This could have been ironed out with an email, not a tar and feathering.
I really don’t think this is that big of a deal. Sportstats/ATB DQ’ed her, she didn’t deny anything and sincerely apologised…end of story. All this hate and publicly shaming her is totally unnecessary. All those runners who feel ‘personally offended’ seriously need to chill out and focus on enjoying their own running.
This lady deserves being outed. Thank you to the amateur sleuth who figured this out. I wish more people would stand up for what is right.