I've been absorbed in a project over the past few months and completely missed this story. Pity the dedicated LR marathon-scandal fan who wanders into p. 1 of this thread! I spent a couple of hours last night reading my way in, occasionally skipping ten or twenty pages.
It would be helpful to folks like me if somebody were able to assemble the best evidence that has been unearthed so far into a brief for the prosecution. Just a set of bullet points. If that's already been done, then please tell me (and others like me) what page of the thread that's on.
I'm a huge Ed Whitlock fan and want to be 100% sure that anybody whose times dislodge his from the top of the totem pole is 100% in the clear. With Meza, it seems, the principal evidence for the charge that he notches his record-setting times by jumping on and off the courses in question, using cars or bikes or shortcuts or some other method of getting from point to point is:
--many, many missed timing mats; missed timing mats in virtually every exceptional marathon performance
--far fewer photos of him, in virtually every fast marathon, than photos of his time-equivalent competitors in those same races.
--in the still photos of him that we do have, crossing various finish lines, he's not nearly as skinny as Ed Whitlock (fwiw, this strikes me, by itself, as extremely shaky evidence)
--in several carefully inspected video sequences, he can be seen jumping into the race from some dark location on the right side of the frame
--he hasn't run any shorter races at anything like his sub-3 marathon pace, something that would provide some basic substantiation (although not firm proof) that he has what it takes to run a full marathon at sub-three pace
--in some available video footage, when he appears in proximity to others who notch finishing times roughly equivalent to his, he's running much slower than they are.
Have I got that right? Are those the basics of the case against him? I'm simply summarizing what I absorbed from a couple of hours of moving through this gargantuan thread.