the stats man wrote:
Well, according to his own blog post. It is less than 0.1% of Boston qualifiers who fall into this category. A tenth of a percent.
Mary Akorn wrote:How big of a 'growing problem' is this? It seems like it is a very, very small problem for Boston.
Not correct on the 0.1%. We took a small sample of the Boston runners. It was about 4% of those. If it's 1% for the remaining, you are looking at over 400 runners. Could be more. And that's just the ones with 100% certainty. That percentage was a little understated - some of those runners reviewed turned out to have exemptions.
From the blog..
In total:
1409 runners reviewed - 54 results deemed invalid (Additional runners were detected that were not validated prior to sharing the data with Runner's World
- either at the qualifier, or at Boston (3.8% of runners reviewed in total deemed invalid)
12 cut course at qualifier
33 bib swaps - someone qualified and sold/gave bib to another runner
11 others - Did not qualify legitimately - either someone else ran the qualifier under their name or race results were modified.
We did review the runners that we felt statistically had the greatest probability of cheating through the methods outlined above. Conservatively, I think the lowest conceivable estimate of those entering Boston using one of the methods of cheating above is roughly 200 runners. My best estimate at this point, is that there were up to 400 entrants that ran Boston without a legitimately obtained bib. For 2016, an additional goal will be to review runners outside of the flagged group to better estimate the overall rate of cheating.