Chaos / Disaster at DIII Nats - Officials miscount # of laps in 5k (again) and there are two different winners!!

Here is what I think they should do. I'd honore the 4800 results. The runners apparently were told every lap it was 1 lap short from the get-go. When the bell rings, you race. That's what they did last week and should do this week as well. If you are a coach, you should tell your runners moving forward, follow the lap counter/bell.

I just got some more info and it seems as if the top 3 at least were pretty far separated at 4800.

[quote]A top DIII coach texted:

the score board posted the top 3 times as 15:53?4? And Reagan maybe 15:58?9? And Sophia as 16:04?5? "

So give those people 1-2-3.

If there was a pack behind them, then either give them the results at 4800 or maybe average the points out.

Let's say there was a tight pack for the 6 other 5 potential scorers.Just average it out ((5+4+3+2+1)/6) = 2.5 each for the team battle.

Either do that or re-run the race. You can't go off of the 5000 results if people stopped and it was totally different.

Wouldn't think they would count 4800 meters as official results even if due to official errror. Once had a hs team third leg run 5 laps of 4 x 800 with most of teams in race as official would not let them hand off and even though we still ran fastest time, all teams running 5 laps were DQ'ed.

Team that won ignored officials and stopped at 4 laps.

Cheadle was the winner.

She slowed to a walk, then started to run 15m into the true last lap, when Regan went by her. It seemed like Regan, who was 15-20m behind when Cheadle slowed down, saw the chaos and realized that she should keep running.

According to the results website no one was given a time, and it looks like they used places at 4800m.

1 Lucy Cheadle SR Washington U. NT 10

2 Amy Regan JR Stevens Institute NT 8

3 Sophia Meehan JR Johns Hopkins NT 6

4 Abrah Masterson SO Cornell College NT 5

5 Laura Mead SR Wis.-La Crosse NT 4

6 Frances Loeb SR Johns Hopkins NT 3

7 Gabrielle Pepin JR St. Thomas (Minn.) NT 2

8 Bridget Gottlieb FR Johns Hopkins NT 1

9 Adrian Walsh SO Middlebury NT

10 Catie Campbell JR Mount Union NT

11 Nicole Zeinstra JR MIT NT

12 Megan Costanzo JR North Central NT

13 Lucy Ramquist SR Wis.-Eau Claire NT

14 Savanna Gornisiewicz SO Amherst NT

15 Kelley Riffenburgh SR Haverford NT

16 Ashley Curran SO Connecticut College NT

-- Elaine McVay SR MIT DNF

I was on the backstretch. Person I was with turned to me midway through the race and said "get their halfway split when they come around here." I looked at my watch and it was 7:3X and I said, "they still have a lap to go for halfway." He replied: "then how come the announcer just said they had less than 13 laps to go?"

So that traces back the miscounted laps until at least the halfway point.

No one noticed this and said anything? In a sport full of OCD number-obsessed people, no one thought to say anything?

Though it is unfair to many of the participants involved, I don't see how the final results are anything other than people's 25 lap times.

Those should be the fair results. The lap counter started at 24 from the gun and was off a lap the entire race. Some knew it was wrong but in the heat of it you have to go with the lap count. Some stopped, and those behind got to keep running without losing time. Results as posted last night for full 5k:

Regan - 16:40

Cheadle - 16:46

Masterson - 16:47

Meehan - 16:59

Mead - 17:04

Pepin - 17:07

Campbell - 17:16

Gottlief - 17:18

Walsh - 17:19

Loeb - DNF

An Observer wrote:

I'd agree with you, but based on the announcer and everything they were being told they had (n-1) laps left when there were really n from at least 3800 meters in. It wasn't like they went by at 4400 thinking they had three laps left then the bell rang at 4600: They'd been on track for finishing at 4800 from at least 3800, if not before.

because the race was 5000 meters, not 4.8 km.

not the 20th century ..... wrote:

How hard would it be to have the runners wear a chip and put a timing mat at the finish line and a monitor that would tell how many laps each runner has completed?

only use officials who can count.

You didn't do anything either. It's called the "bystander effect" - everyone else thins someone else will do it:

The NCAA did the right thing. They went with the 4800 results (that's been confirmed to me) and the people were very spread out at 4800. Maybe one or two of those people change spots but the result now is pretty close to what would have happened 200 later.

rojo wrote:

Here is what I think they should do. I'd honore the 4800 results. The runners apparently were told every lap it was 1 lap short from the get-go. When the bell rings, you race. That's what they did last week and should do this week as well. If you are a coach, you should tell your runners moving forward, follow the lap counter/bell.

What if they figured it out by the finish after you had kicked and said, whoops, 1 more lap to go.

No, you run the scheduled distance, which was 5000 meters.

_____'s angels wrote:

Though it is unfair to many of the participants involved, I don't see how the final results are anything other than people's 25 lap times.

I'm no detective, but I think I see Cheadle's name in 13th place.

That's the start list, randomized.

I was standing 20 yards past the finish line with the Stevens coach. He was reading Amy R. Her splits each lap. She was clearly hearing him and fully aware of exactly how many laps she had in the 5K. It was odd when Cheadle moved at 500 meters and I believe Amy was surprised by that move. In retrospect it makes perfect sense as Cheadle must have thought there was only 300 left. I believe Cheadle likely would have won anyway, but Amy R. was undoubtedly aware of the actual laps and when officials physically stopped her at 4800 she knew it was short.

The sound system at JDL is very bad as it just sounds like background noise and while I was vaguely aware at 1K that the announced was off on laps, I had no way to know the lap counter was off (it is one sided) u til the official rang the bell.

What a waste for all the runners.

rojo wrote:

The NCAA did the right thing.

It was the "right thing" to miscount laps, ring the bell early, and use the 4800 results? Seems to me that counting the laps correctly and using the actual 5000 results would have been the right thing to do. I've never trained as an official, though, so I guess I could be wrong.

The real question is how many girls were about to PR and got cheated? And depending on the answer to that question, there may have been a couple girls who got robbed of School Records. Absolutely inexcusable for the officials in a national championship to mess that up. This wasn't a judgement call (i.e. a foul in the long jump, a false start, etc...) this was pure inability to count to 25. And now it's happened two weekends in a row at National Championship events. No wonder people don't take our sport seriously.

I agree with another poster. Now that we have chip timing in road races, seems like a simple solution to have 5K (and maybe 3K) runners wear chips to verify the number of laps if the officials are going to be incompetent.

I did do something. When I realized the lap counter was definitively wrong and they rang the bell early, I started screaming to Cheadle and others that they rang the bell early.

By the way, the myth of the Kitty Genovese murder has almost no relation to the reality.

This type of thing doesn't happen in swimming.

Which was wrong wrote:

because the race was 5000 meters, not 4.8 km.

Do you remember the USATF national meet where the officials accidentally left the barrier at the water jump in the women's steeplechase at the wrong height (http://projects.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/sports/trackandfield/16233961-41/story.csp)? Do you think all of the results for that should have been null and void because they didn't run a by-the-book Women's 3000m steeplechase?

And in basically any other sport, the officials trump almost anything. It doesn't matter if they make a bad judgment call or mess up in some other way. Their word is law. That's a little less true nowadays with video reviews and such, but it's still one of the major principles of sports.

Sisson's quote from after her race also shows that many athletes do this as well in track. She very well might have stopped a lap early if the officials told her to.

Anyway, if you can find something in the rules that explicitly supports your position in the case of an official messing up, I'll be swayed. If not, this is just us slinging mud based on differing positions and won't be solved by an internet argument.

If a record had been set in that race, you can bet your butt USATF would invalidate it.