What is the value in winning or placing in your age group in a marathon? Or a 5k, 10k, or 1/2 marathon?
Obviously the value that individuals place on this varies widely, to an elite it means nothing, but to many, it means a lot! I would be curious to get Roderick's opinion as the originator of this thread and former admirer of Frank's.
Pick an arbitrary number, $200 value for winning an age group, $150 for 2nd, and $100 for third, $75 4th, $50 5th, $45 6th, $40 7th, $35 8th and so on down to 10th, that would be $750 a race that he has defrauded his fellow competitors. Obviously, someone who has never won an age group in their life and missed out on winning it at 70 because Frank cheated, I would say the value might be more than $200! You missed out on the experience of receiving the award, the accolades from friends and family, etc.
Derek has listed 44 marathon's that Frank has "ran". Those are just marathons, how many more 5ks, 10ks, and 1/2's has he cheated in? Let's just pick the number 50. Using the "value" of $750 lost for the top 10 participants in his age group that he cheated them out of, that would be $37,500! Of course, some of these races wouldn't have had 10 participants in his age group, but regardless, Frank has cheated a lot of people out of experiences that do have value, value that cannot be recovered with retroactive DQ's...
What about the wasted time on the part of the races looking into his cheating? Or the timing companies? Or us here on Letsrun...