Well, this is unfortunate! Here's a video of the final seconds of last weekend's Tokyo-Hakone relay marathon. Watch as—with less than 200 meters to go—longtime frontrunner Natsuki Terada makes an accidental wrong turn and loses the race. Ouch.
http://tv.gawker.com/5724891/japanese-runner-makes-wrong-turn-at-the-end-of-a-marathon
He doesn't lose. He kicks back into 10th place and takes the last seeded spot. The guy who falls down is the 11th place finisher who Terada catches.
Toronto Runner:
Correction; he didn't lose the race. He was not in the lead for the race. The race was won by Waseda University quite a while earlier. In fact, that particular runner's school, Kokugakuin University, barely made it to the top 10 which is the final spot for the automatic qualifier. The fourth guy in the pack, from Josai University, was the one who missed out the qualifying spot. So, in other words, the guy who took the wrong turn was as happy as can be at the end. If I remember it correctly, that was the first time Kokugakuin made the automatic qualifier in quite some time and it was a big deal to them. If Brett sees this thread, he can probably give us a better detail.
Did he commit Seppuku afterward to save his family from the shame and dishonor?