Did Wesley Korir Start 5 Minutes Back and Run 2:13

If you have 2 heats of a 5k at a track meet with medals to the top 3, it goes off the "separate" races and awards those with the top 3 overall times. I hope Korir gets his well deserved money. Great race!

sc42 wrote:

xc4 wrote:

Yeah, I agree with rojo that it would not be fair to the 4th and 5th place guys to put korir in 4th place...

You guys are nuts. Even though he was denied the opportunity to start with the first wave, Korir still outran all but three of them. Just repeating the order in which they crossed the line and ignoring that they did not start together is illogical.

If the guys who finished behind him want to whine, then they could've started with the mass start, same as Korir. Nobody made them line up in the elite wave. Somebody made Korir line up in the other wave, and he did his talking with his feet.

san diego native wrote:

HYPOCRIT ALERT

Why is it that when a guy runs 2:22:02 gun time that works out to 2:21:58 you idiots yell and scream that he didn't run the standard and therefore should be left out of the trials?

Now a guy starts 5 minutes late and you want him included.

Which way is it, gun time or chip time?

He wasn't "5 minutes late." He HAD to start 5 minutes behind the elite field. Why can't they just start everyone at the same time? Obviously put the elites at the front, but don't start them separately. I used to think starting the women ahead was a good idea so they don't get caught up with the sub-elite men, but that is the nature of a marathon. A marathon like Chicago is going to be crowded. So there's no problem having male pacers, but they don't want to "race" with men? Then we might as well have men's only and women's only marathons, but then people would complain about that too.

That's not at all what this was, though.

2miler wrote:

If you have 2 heats of a 5k at a track meet with medals to the top 3, it goes off the "separate" races and awards those with the top 3 overall times. I hope Korir gets his well deserved money. Great race!

sc42 wrote:

You guys are nuts. Even though he was denied the opportunity to start with the first wave, Korir still outran all but three of them. Just repeating the order in which they crossed the line and ignoring that they did not start together is illogical.

If the guys who finished behind him want to whine, then they could've started with the mass start, same as Korir. Nobody made them line up in the elite wave. Somebody made Korir line up in the other wave, and he did his talking with his feet.

I was watching around 3 miles, the elites came by and then this guy and another kenyan cam past about 5 minutes later absoloutley hauling ass. They had a huge gap on the rest of the top 100 guys less than 3 miles in and were probably running faster than the elite pack was already. I saw him again just before 20k, he rolled up some Asian guy who started with the elites, as he went by him he patted him on the back and gave him a big high 5, then proceeded to walk away from him...good stuff, the guy deserves to be 4th.

To "lohalloran" - I remember a couple of weeks ago you inquired about a problem w/ your knee. Sounds like you were a spectator today. Sorry to hear that, but it was lees than ideal out there today. My knee gave me problems the last 10 miles & I hobbled in to a time about 45 min. slower than I thought I was capable of...

Both the website and a congratulatory e-mail they sent out to the finishers where the list the men's and women's top 5 shows him in 4th place.

does not take into consideration American elite runners. Only cares about the money and fast times.

If they screw him you would think that Larry Barthlow was the director.

Congratulations from Bank of America for finishing the 2008 Bank of America Chicago Marathon! Your recorded finish time was 2:53:24 and you placed 245 out of 31,401 finishers.

The recorded finish time will be the gun time for Elite and Top 100 participants, and chip time for everyone else.

This year's top finishers were:

Top 5 Male Finishers

1. Evans Cheruiyot, KEN, 2:06:25

2. David Mandago, KEN, 2:07:37

3. Timothy Cherigat, KEN, 2:11:39

4. Wesley Korir, KEN, 2:13:53

5. Martin Lauret, NED, 2:15:10

Top 5 Female Finishers

1. Lidiya Grigoryeva, RUS, 2:27:17

2. Alevtina Biktimirova, RUS, 2:29:32

3. Kiyoko Shimahara, JPN, 2:30:19

4. Constantina Tomescu-Dita, ROU, 2:30:57

5. Desiree Davila, USA, 2:31:33

Top Male Wheelchair Finisher

1. Kurt Fearnley, AUS, 1:30:16

Top Female Wheelchair Finisher

1. Amanda McGrory, USA, 1:55:12

Thank you for participating in the 31st annual Bank of America Chicago Marathon. As we continue the great tradition of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, we hope you will continue to be a part of this world-class event.

Sincerely,

Bank of America and the Bank of America Chicago Marathon Staff

248 Korir, Wesley K Louisville KY KEN 25 M 02:13:53 4

They official recognize him as the 4th place finisher on the website. Interesting now for the elite "4th" and "5th" place finisher. Let's see how this plays out.

Run77 wrote:

Regardless of the rules or legal issues, Chicago will end up paying Korir $15,000.

The bad PR Chicago race officials will receive if they don't pay, will do more damage than if they shell out the $15,000. And if Korir goes to court, Chicago will pay more than $15,000 to defend itself. Korir might even be able to go to small claims court and represent himself if he keeps his request for damages to $10,000. That would be embarassing for Chicago.

This is an easy decision. Pay the $15,000, invite him over for a fancy dinner and turn this PR disaster into something positive by acknowledging this remarkable achievement.

Actually, the Chicago Tribune is now reporting that Wesley Korir is listed as 4th overall but he won't get any prize money. It doesn't say if they talked to marathon officials. It doesn't cite a source, but that's what's being reported in the Tribune.

"International track rules for road running say that only athletes who start with the elite race's opening gun qualify for prize money."

That doesn't seem unreasonable, but it does seem that those alleged "international track rules" should have been clearly and expressly incorporated into the rules of this particular race if they were to be applied here to deny prize money to Korir or anyone else who ran in the mass race. Moreover, considering that there were only a couple of American men and about four American women who were listed to "start with the elite race's opening gun," it will be interesting to see if Carey applies those alleged "international track rules" to deny prize money to Americans who started in the mass race instead of the elite race. I'm betting that he won't.

From what I've seen so far, this looks like a monumental screw-up. If the race organizers don't shell out an extra $15K to try to make everyone happy, they should be fired by the race sponsors. This is horrible PR.

Grammatica wrote:

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

I agree. If anything it had to be more difficult to start with the masses and not have the elite field to pace off of.

"off".

"off of" is not a proper term in the English language (a barbarism).

Did you just learn that and now you feel the need to show off and correct it everytime you see it. What a pussy.

iaaf.org now has a front page story on this.

Here's the link and the last paragraph of the iaaf article. Race directors have the discretion to choose who can compete for prize money in their races, so it's not just a matter of having the fastest time anymore.

http://www.iaaf.org/LRR08/news/newsid=48031.html

The rules, Estes determined, are clear. The elites and Korir ran separate races. Korir may have been the fourth fastest man on the day, but he was not eligible to get the $15,000 on offer for the fourth place finisher in the elite race because he was not a competitor in the elite race.

Big ups to Wesley for a heck of a race. Instead of whining about 2nd class treatment, he ran it out instead of talked it out. That's old-school.

It appears that by the rules, there's no obligation to pay him anything.

But anyone who cares anything about the reputation of the event and the sport has got to make sure he gets paid the 15,000, very soon, at a press conference, with one of those giant "stunt checks", Check Number 004.

3 weeks ago I contacted the marathon office and was told that prize money would be determined off of clock time. Based off there decision prior to the race wesley finished 4th!

ridiculous! wrote:

I started a couple threads about this before the race and no one seemed to think it was a big deal. what makes things worse is Wesley had to pay 110 bucks and when he paid he was paying to start with everyone else. THis change was announced a few weeks before the race after he paid.

Exactly! He and all the other runners paid to compete in the Chicago Marathon. Not the "Chicago Amateur Marathon" or "Chicago Elite Marathon". It was marketed and sold as a single race, but operated as different races. A breach of contract in my opinion. Of course the elite runners order of finish will be ahead of his, if the start earlier. I'm assuming there is no handicap system in the official marathon rules for the event. Fastest time wins, and this would normally be the same as order of finish, except for the preferential treatment for elites. It is the vast untalented majority who are subsidizing the prize money for the elites. To run it as two separate races seems unfair.

I think the issue is that if they aren't paying him the money then it's a clear acceptance that there were 2 seperate races going on.

The IAAF article fudges the issue as this has nothing to do with gun or chip timing as BOTH these times are gun times.

It's pretty simple.

There were two races. Cheruiyot won one of them whilst Korir won the other. They can't put the elite times down as times for the "top 5 of the race" as they clearly weren't in the same race.

They need to decide whether this was one or two races and there's no way they can claim it's one race as in what race bar a handicap does one group of runners get given a 5 minute headstart?

It does also mean that the Chicago "marathon" as most of us would know it has absolutely no prize pool. There is however a race that runs the same course at almost the same time which does pay out prize money.