11,000 runners at Mexico City Marathon are DQd for cutting the course, 5,000 got the DQ in 2017. I need an explanation.

I like to hear an explanation too. They made so much fuss about my mat failure and yet there are 11,000 doing it in Mexico.

ohh wow, I fully expected reading that there was a mistake or place where a corner could be cut and people were following the leader. NO!!! 1/3rd of the field was actually skipping large portions missing 5k check points trying to get credit for a marathon without doing one. amazing culture tidbit especially considering so many just got caught for it 5 years ago.

A few years back cheaters wanted to get the finisher medal for bragging rights. Each year for conservative years medals spelled MEXICO. Cheaters really wanted the O. Have an extra O? ROJO could use a couple.

You be you. I came to see if LetsRun was talking about the Mexico City cheating and the man trying to use a homemade wheel to run to London. Maybe Rojo will promote the hamster wheel story too.

They didn't know what it would be like to run a marathon at 6-8,000 feet above sea level in hot weather.

i don't know the details about such an event but is it perhaps because one or a few guys cut the course and then everyone behind them thought that they was going in the correct direction because all the people in front of them were?

This is preposterous--to suggest 1/3 of runners intentionally cheated. The percentage of the human population predisposed to cheat in a fair sporting event is much lower than 33%.

I've run the race. And I think the percentage could be even higher. Tons of people just start and then hitch a ride to the finish. I ran it in 2016 or '17 and I watched the TV replay a few days later; they interviewed a guy getting a massage in the finishing area and asked him how it felt to run 42 km and he said he actually only ran 21 km, his friend did the first half and he did the second half. And they continued to congratulate him on running 42 km like three more times throughout the interview. In that case someone probably hit all the checkpoints, but the point is that very few people actually run start to finish.

I don't know what you expect to learn from a journalist...?

Tell us more! Is this in a hamster wheel, or a hamster ball?

Long ago on these boards I invented the concept of the hamster-wheel track. Saves a ton of space, and in a race the winner makes the losers fall on their faces.

I wonder if this was just some long-time accepted thing - where if you couldn’t finish the race it was considered OK to just hitch a ride to the end and cross the finish - and now they’ve started to crack down on it. Sort of like how it used to be acceptable to bandit Boston (and many of those people started well after Hopkinton), until it wasn’t.

The winner Hector Garibay Flores (from Bolivia) ran 2:08:23! The guy ran 2:07 at Seville ... 2:08 @ that altitude stretches the bounds of credulity, until I looked it up and apparently he was born & lives in Oruro, Bolivia 🇧🇴 which sits at over 12,000 feet! 🤯

https://euro.eseuro.com/tv/927356.html

Yea! A lot of people are not giving enough credit. This guys is 35 yrs old and barely started running in 2019! He used to be a soccer player who took up running after a soccer injury. This guy is going to do great things in the next 5 yrs!

It's just interesting to me as a cultural thing. Here you sign up and pay big bucks so you can say you ran the whole marathon. There it seems to be different. Maybe it's just fun to get outside, enjoy the city, etc.

Calling this a cultural thing is like calling the Las Vegas massacre a cultural thing.