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That annoying moment your chip fails in the London Marathon
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http://www.athleticsweekly.com/featured/mysteruns-club-leader-defends-number-swapping-london-20130/
Bugger, I chucked one of mine. Could have made my entry fee back
Yes, she's gone and my finishing position is 1 better then it was this morning!
Top link, cougie ^
You know she'll profit from all of this?
ITV4 or similar will now sign her up to create a 26 episode series of her training to prove that she can complete a marathon in the time she was supposed to have done last weekend. She'll be banned from London so will no doubt find her way into New York instead, or maybe she can fake her way into Boston...
I think we may know a bloke that could get her, her Boston qualifying time too ....
I doubt she will profit from it.
JSW didn't profit from cheating last year and the woman who claimed to have run in high heels and mostly didn't has never been heard of since.
This is her moment of fame (infame?
) nobody knew who she was before Sunday and she'll be forgotten about in a few weeks.
all these plastic blonde bimbos look the same
Proves my point!
cougie wrote:
Oh yes - I wonder if they came this year ?
Pics on their facebook page suggest they did. Interesting that there are very few race numbers shown, and even one of those is folded so that only the number itself is showing. Could be a deliberate wind-up on their part, but they do have form...
Here's my blog on this cheat. I hope I have given the RW forum due credit for outing her.
http://son966.wix.com/unknownbeauty#!Cheating-is-not-the-only-way/cy97/5721c5a40cf228a96f15215f
Please share and donate to London Youth.
Ah, that makes sense.
Depends if the "tasty" refers to the photo or the time........
Ooh, is their Facebook page still active ? ... I couldn't find it when I last looked .. I must have been blocked ... tsk tsk .. time for a little identity swapping of my own !
Wouldn't that be easiest if you want us to actually see what it is you're saying.
I really CBA following links off of here.
Fair point Cougie. Didn't want to clog the forum with my prolix blog. But here goes:
Cheating is not the only way
Before this week I hadn’t heard of Natasha Argent. I kind of wish I still hadn’t. On Monday morning, she came to my attention as having suspicious split times at the previous day’s London Marathon. Being a (very) minor celebrity, related to a slightly less minor celebrity, she was deemed newsworthy, and by Tuesday her dodgy marathon times made it into the Sun, Mail and Metro. To cut a long story short – much as she did the marathon – she had somehow avoided running around 12 miles of the 26.2 mile race.
If this hadn’t come within a few days of the Manchester Marathon fiasco of 24,000 runners being cheated of a valid marathon times (see my previous blog), it might have passed by without comment from me. After all, she was not the first, and will not be the last, to cheat in a marathon in one way or another. But I was still smarting from my lost Manchester personal best, so Ms Argent’s case affected deeply. I wondered why she had skipped those 20km, then posed with her finisher’s medal in the full knowledge that she had not earned it. I was brought up to believe that cheats never prosper. Of course that’s not entirely true. But it is true that when cheats got caught the social media backlash can be painful. And if one chooses to cheat in one of the world’s most closely observed athletics events, and the world’s largest charity fundraising event, one will most likely be caught. In this case, it simply took a Runner’s World reader to run 50 lines of code over the marathon results to identify Ms Argent’s implausible split times.
When I first saw those splits, it was perfectly clear she had not actually run the marathon. Looking at her finishing straight pictures, it was clear they were not of a person who was powering to a 3h44m marathon finish, but they were taken less than four hours after the race started. Of course the London Marathon has since confirmed the obvious, and she has been removed from the results. It would have been easy to right an angry rant blog earlier in the week, but I resisted the temptation. After all, there was little to be gained from pointing out the obvious fact that someone had cheated, perhaps hadn’t realised how easy it was to spot their deceit, and now they would face the consequences of embarrassment (presumably) and trolling (definitely). I wanted to do something more positive, and came up with two things: a lesson and an action.
First the lesson: If you want to know the truth of a story, educate yourself.
I value a free press, but it comes with numerous downsides. I have long known that one can’t rely on the media for knowledgeable, accurate, non-biased reporting. The Argent cheating story provided excellent evidence for this.
As a seven-time marathoner (yes, I’m still counting that Manchester run; I’m told the 100 Marathon Club will accept it), including London, I know a fair amount about marathon running and timing. Enough to know that those writing in the Sun, Mail, et al knew little about either. Here is a list of the mistakes made in this week’s reports about Ms Argent:
These are all errors that would have been perfectly clear to an experienced marathon runner, but perhaps all the marathoners on the editorial staff of those publications had taken Monday off to recover from their own Sunday marathon exploits. Perhaps.
So, don’t rely on reporters to deliver to you all the facts of a case, nor to get those facts right. Do your own research. Use your own judgement, discrimination and analysis. As I say, educate yourself. The Twitterverse will thank you for it.
That’s the lesson; next the action. Ms Argent was ‘running’ for a charity, London Youth. Reports of how much money she had raised varied from c.£500 to £2500. What she certainly did raise was a bit of a media storm for London Youth, which had to field questions on her performance – she herself appeared to have gone into hiding, or at least made her social media accounts private, which apparently amounts to the same thing these days. There was no reason to believe that London Youth were in any way to blame for Ms Argent’s actions, but being associated with a notorious cheat, which is what she was rapidly becoming, was hardly helpful to their fundraising effort, and did not exactly set a great example to the youths they try to help. So as a counter-measure, I set up a JustGiving page – Honest Runners for London Youth – on which any genuine marathoners, or runners of any distance, can donate to London Youth. It’s an attempt to show that runners by and large have great integrity; it’s a largely honest sport, in which what one gets out in terms of times and medals, is directly related to the amount of work one puts in. If you have a couple of quid available, please do make the effort to donate. Show people that #realrunnersdontcheat.
I really have no idea what Ms Argent was doing between passing the 20km mark 2h 17m into the race, and passing the 40km mark only 48 minutes later, but I do know she certainly wasn’t running 20km at world record pace. But I do know one mistake shouldn’t come to define a person. Maybe next time she comes to the media’s attention, it will be for something admirable, and maybe next time they’ll report it accurately.
Who are you, again?
So in a nutshell, Sonny says don't believe the newspapers, believe the RW forum.
no he got it wrong...
He said Runnersworld readers.........I bet none of us on this thread have read the Runners world magazine for a decade..
we are runersworld forum users
he did tell you not to believe things that are reported though
Would have been best left on the blog, tbh.
Why is anyone surprised that tabloid newspapers know nothing about marathon running? It's not as if these stories are reported in the sports section.
The comments below the articles have more value in that runners will come on and explain to non-runners exactly why he/she can't be telling the truth.
to be fair 20k is near enough halfway so as not to confuse the general public that much
i was think that......she onviously didnt just cross the mat and then jump straight into ataxi......
If i was to drop out at the 20k mark .. I would say I only managed to get halfway before dying.I wouldnt say 20/42th of the race
Thats right seren you would have to say 10/21ths of the race
or 1/2.1 but thats just silly...
or 47.6190476% that would be far more accurate
No!
A marathon is 42,195 m, not 42,000 m.
47.3989809219102% please