Tim Vandervlugt wrote:
Greg TR, SaraB Triguy and others, keep up the good work.
It is very clear this mike rossi guy does not have the ability to run a 3:11 marathon and cheated just to get into the Boston marathon.
Although, the only thing I would add is this - people have been writing that you shouldn't be involving VIA or BAA, but I totally disagree. I think this is much more about BAA (and then VIA and then Rossi). He's just one cheater. But it's Boston that has created and benefited the most financially from the whole "qualifying for Boston" phenomena. To me it's like knock-offs. The reason why people pay so much for name brands, like Louis Vuitton, is to be seen with the product. When people purchase a knock off LV purse, and so it appears then as though just any old person can carry around a LV purse, it decreases the value of the real LV purse.
So, if BAA knows a person has cheated to get to run their race, yet they reward the cheater equally to the person who trained hard for many years to get that same opportunity - how valuable is it to run Boston? Why should someone put in the work when they get the same product from BAA if they just cheat? Why buy into the qualifying time crap - if you want to run Boston, find the right race and cheat. Or, more importantly, why bother running Boston at all since a person can just cheat to run it and BAA doesn't appear to care, so what's the big deal?
I am surprised that both BAA and VIA haven't done something about it. Preventing it from happening again is the correct thing to do, but I honestly though it would have been more important to both of them to be seen to do something when it's obvious a person has cheated.
A long winded way of showing support for what you guys are doing, sorry.