Q on KL wrote:
Hi,
I've never run or attended a marathon. Can someone tell me how common DQs are? How common is it for someone to voluntarily DQ himself? Without knowing marathon culture, I guess I assumed DQs (especially among the top tiers) were pretty rare, yet this has happened several times to Kip... why don't race directors just bar him from participating?
I review results for a 3600 entrant marathon, have done so for about 10 years, make the final call on DQ's, additions, etc for this race. Most years this race has had about 5-8 DQ's. In an average year about 1/4 of them contact me after unofficial results are posted, but before I have had a chance to really dig into the data, to tell me they didn't run the whole course and need to be removed from the results. Most of the rest don't get in touch after I remove them from the results, which I interpret to mean that they know that they didn't run the whole thing.
In ~10 years there has only been 1 person who I DQ'd who argued she ran the entire course. With splits of 1:51/1:24, a missing chip split at mile 20, a previous pr in the 4:15 range (which looked suspect when I reviewed the chip splits from that race and found she had missing splits there as well - making her previous verifiable pr something in the 5:00 range) it seemed like an easy DQ to make. Of course, it didn't hurt that a friend of mine saw her walking backwards on the course at mile 25 then saw her running towards him 10 minutes later on her way to the finish line. It also didn't hurt that when she called to ask why she had been pulled from our results one of the first things she said was that she needed the result from our race for her BQ. That's a red flag for sure.
As for Kip, we would not bar him from competing, in fact I'd love to have him back at our race. We'd monitor him the whole way to find out if he is capable of the times he says he is. Barring him would be easy, but proving he's not capable of the times he says he is would be more fulfilling for a lot of us, if for nothing else than just to say "I told you so."
Above someone noted that the NY Times supposedly says 400 people get DQ'd at NYC, Boston and Marine Corps every year. That sounds really high to me and I'm not able to find a reference through a quick google search. Would you happen to have any backup for that info? No doubt with the size of those races they're going to have more DQ's than other races, but total I'd expect maybe in the dozens. Maybe I'm too trusting?