Potentially Suspicious Runner To Run 836 Miles in 9 Days for "Charity"

It is also worth noting that his 2015 London 5:04 result has 27 photos so he isn't invisible to mid-course cameras like Rossi is. Although most are near the end, you can see Tower Castle in the background of one plus he hit all the mats.

http://results-2015.virginmoneylondonmarathon.com/2015/?content=detail&fpid=search&pid=search&idp=9999990F5ECC8300001700D9&lang=EN_CAP&event=MAS&search%5Bname%5D=reading&search%5Bsex%5D=%25&search%5Bnation%5D=%25&search_sort=name&search_event=MAS

What amazes me is that his London Marathon result was not been picked up well before now.

Every year there are a sprinkling of stories about course cutters at London Marathon. Most tend to start the course then when they get over Tower Bridge they turn left and head towards the finish line. This saves the course cutters around 10 miles on the day!

The race organisers are usually pretty good at weeding out the obvious cheats as they skip timing mats and post ridiculous negative splits. I would of thought that any runner who misses two or more timing mats would warrant further investigation. Missing every mat except the very last one is hugely suspicious and would surely have thrown a massive red flag to the organisers. The last on course timing mat at London is at the 40k mark.

When you consider that there are no photos of him on the route except in the final mile and no records of him crossing any on course timing mats it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than he skipped the most of the course.

C'mon London Marathon, check this result out...

I am sure they have software which flags missed mats, I suspect it comes down to how much hassle and "dog chewed my timing chip" garbage they want to deal with. To complicate things there must be a genuine failure rate although my personal anecdote is that in 100+ chip-timed races I have taken part in I have not had one chip issue of any kind - and yes I check these things obsessively.

Timing Matt wrote:

[...]So Dave likely never crossed the Start line at all. May have just gone directly to the Finish line and not even bothered to go to the Start line.

And he probably never had his chip activated at Expo, either.

That's right, and VLM kindly get a crowd and a bunch of other runners to produce some faked photos as momentos. Such a shame for Dave all those runners had 4 hour plus finish times, it makes it look like he finished when they did.

I just found this about the Vaz LeJog incident, I'm sure plenty of people will fancy a slight rewording - I found it only captioned properly in Chrome for me.

http://www.captiongenerator.com/89716/LEJOG-the-truth

Last year this dinny b1tch got thrown out of the results.

Very easy to spot them, I had a look myself.

Anyone who missed mats could be spotted in the thousands of results by just scanning down each page.

I reckon VLM were wise to him in minutes and took his results down. Otherwise I and others would have spotted him at the time.

Then he did what he did best and conned them into letting him keep the medal and re-instated his time.

I reckon

Can someone post Shakespeare in Spring's summary to the Facebook Ultrarunning Community thread? Gary needs to eat a lot of humble pie. And then sausages. He is still acting like Dave is innocent.

Shite Hawk wrote:

And he probably never had his chip activated at Expo, either.

No, I think his chip was activated. Let me break down exactly how this would have played out.

Gun goes off at precisely 10:00:02 AM. Race starts.

Around 11:00 AM, our hero arrives at the race. Probably wearing a sweatshirt or jacket over his bib so as not to draw attention to the fact that he's wearing a race number.

At exactly 11:07, he casually strolls across the Start line. He thinks his chip has registered, but does not realize the mat has been deactivated because it's more than an hour after the race. He notes the time--11:07.

He then proceeds to a local cafe for a sandwich, cup of coffee, smokes a couple cigarettes, whatever. Just hangs out for a couple hours.

Shortly after 2:00 he takes off the jacket, hops onto the race course, and runs to the Finish line, crossing at exactly 2:19 PM.

So he does the math:

Start - 11:07

Finish - 2:19

A 3:12 marathon! Fabulous!

But because his chip did not register at the Start, gun time becomes his official start time, and the results show:

Start - 10:00

Finish - 2:19

A 4:19 marathon! Ouch!

Thus he starts claiming his 3:12 marathon.

I remember the Natasha incident very well...we had a real laugh at those second half splits. She laid down a real world class performance....then posted a cracking selfie on her Twitter feed stating she'd "Done it".

I think you've nailed it, one interesting question is whether he had help getting from Greenwich to the Embankment or whether he used public transport under his own steam and nobody else knew.

Here we go, our version of Mornington Crescent

https://goo.gl/maps/Xvat5q9ubik

Anyone who is wearing a London Marathon bib gets free transport on the London underground / TfL for the day. It would be easy enough to jump on a Greenwich, head to Westminster and get off there. That would bring him out roughly where you see the photos of him.

I will get a friend of mine that lives close to pop into coach Neil's shop and see what he thinks of this farce. I'll report back.

Shite Hawk, we are anxious for the next update.

Shite Hawk wrote:

Timing Matt wrote:

[...]So Dave likely never crossed the Start line at all. May have just gone directly to the Finish line and not even bothered to go to the Start line.

And he probably never had his chip activated at Expo, either.

Timing chips for races aren't "activated" at expos. At expos they would verify that the chips is assigned to the correct runner. Most races don't bother with this any more.

The chips are transponders that are encoded with the bib number. They respond at a certain radio frequency that is sent from the mat and send back the bib number to the transceiver (mat). There is a enough energy in the signal from the transceiver for the transponder to bounce back the bib number. This occurs multiple times a second as the runner crosses the mat.

I once had a problem with a timing chip not working consistently because I had attached my car key to my shoe laces near the chip. Some car keys are also transceivers and if the transponders respond at a similar frequency it is possible for one or the other to be drowned out.

The missed chip rate during races is about 1-2% per mat.

Timing chips for races aren't "activated" at expos

If my memory serves me well, at London they do actually activate your chips at the expo. You pick-up your race pack at the entrance of the expo. The pack contains a timing chip you attach to your trainers. This chip is taken from your pack and activated as you enter the expo. So it is possible that it wasn't activated. That said, if it wasn't active then it wouldn't show in any mats, start, on course or at the end. This would mean he wouldn't actually get a gun time as they wouldn't know when he crossed the finish line.

TimingChip wrote:

Timing chips for races aren't "activated" at expos

If my memory serves me well, at London they do actually activate your chips at the expo. You pick-up your race pack at the entrance of the expo. The pack contains a timing chip you attach to your trainers. This chip is taken from your pack and activated as you enter the expo. So it is possible that it wasn't activated. That said, if it wasn't active then it wouldn't show in any mats, start, on course or at the end. This would mean he wouldn't actually get a gun time as they wouldn't know when he crossed the finish line.

No. That is not how they work. Don't believe everything that volunteers at expos tell you.

Attach to trainers? Very few races do that anymore. Most races have the transponder attached directly to the bib.

Flounder wrote:

Timing chips for races aren't "activated" at expos. At expos they would verify that the chips is assigned to the correct runner. Most races don't bother with this any more. [...]

I stand corrected. The ones last year (when I also ran) were one-use only ie they weren't taken back in The Mall after finishing, if that makes a difference? The previous time that I ran it in 2012, they were returnable and the blurb said they had to be activated.

Flounder wrote:

Attach to trainers? Very few races do that anymore. Most races have the transponder attached directly to the bib.

Last year they were shoe ones, exactly the same as before, just non-returnable.