Army West Point Cheated at IC4A Championships

I hope you people feel better about yourselves for badmouthing a student athlete without the full story. If the OP was so upset, then he should have contacted the army coach. These athletes decided to give up running at other colleges to serve in the military. How many of you people can claim that?

Secondly, you are operating under the assumption that teams/athletes care about who wins this meet. As mentioned above, no one cares about who wins the overall meet or who wins individual events. All everyone cares about is running a fast time. Ben jogging the 5k and racing the 10k only means that he decided to go for a fast time in the 10k. Nothing more. If Army truly cared about winning the meet. Then they would have brought their whole team. Also, if you are upset that he took a spot in the 5k, then you should be more upset at Iona for taking two spots with pacers.

Additionally, the idea that Ben ran the 10k to protect his 10k time is absurd. I don't even know how an athlete could sabotage a whole heat of runners. Also, it wouldn't make sense for him to do this at IC4A's. There has been extremely few runners that have qualified in the 10k at this meet in recent years. Who would he be defending against??

I understand you people are trying to protect the integrity of the sport and the meet, but you should be ashamed of yourselves for bad mouthing an athlete and an entire program based off incomplete facts and assumptions.

No one is saying he sabotaged anyone, however he did run the 10k with the intention of protecting his spot on the regional list/better his time. If the race went fast, he would have the goal to win and protect his spot. It ended up being too slow anyway so the race ultimately meant nothing to him. If people care about him giving up his medal I'm sure he would willingly give up the worthless thing. He also didn't run from the front and slow it down, he just gradually moved up and made a move late in the race, so it's not like he tried to slow others down. It was an honest race with or without him in it.

Fault definitely goes to the coach here.

HE (and his coach) should be ashamed for the shenanigans he pulled. I couldn’t care less about the meet team or individual winners, just that the runners have some semblance of character.

Is this a universal rule? For example in CIF there is no honest effort rule until you reach the state meet. This is NCAA and not high school obviously, and am curious if every meet has an honest effort rule?

stupid. who cares? why waste your energy on this? Yea maybe he took someone else's spot who otherwise would have ran faster but IC4A is no where near what it used to be. get over it and move on! many more races to run!

Who is dady today?

He didn’t take a spot. His entry in no way impacted other teams’ entries. He did not benefit in his 10k from running a 5k before it.

who cares about that wrote:

If you wanted to complain about Iona having 2 pacers in the 5k (who both dropped out) then you'd have a valid point. Can't do that in a championship meet.

Really you can.

The DQ would go to the runners that dropped out. That does nothing.

Did they race in another event after that?

Media pressure wrote:

They need to make a big deal of this on social media; otherwise it will be buried and the media cycle will move on.

I do think there is fear for calling out the troops as well on a lot of peoples' parts, plus they are worried about political blowback.

And I'm pro-Army and pro-military as anyone out there, but I think they are afraid to rock the cart here.

Rojo and Wejo need to speak up about this. I've seen them make bigger deals about much, much smaller violations.

If people don't speak up about this, this kind of cheating will only become more common.

Excuse after excuse. It's still stinks.

Honest effort is discretionary. The judgment is made by meet officials and they determined that he was qualified to race the 10k. That is the end. There is no appeal process after the meet. So he did not cheat because that is the rule.

It's discretionary as in they gave him a pass. Which I am fine with.

If he did not start the 5000, there would be no room for discretion, so he had to line up and start.

He could have run one lap and stopped claiming a calf cramp and recover to run the 10,000.

Would that have been more upsetting to the rules nitpickers?

Jaret Carpenter backed off at the Big Ten 10k in the last 2 laps once he realized that he would not place. He came back to place in the 5k. Sounds like he should have been disqualified according to some of you.

What about nearly every trial 1500 run this past weekend across the country? I watched many guys cruise the last 100 looking around. Those are clearly not honest efforts.

Have any of you participated in track and field. "Trials count too", you are either mentally impaired or a total troll. It is a rule that makes a difference in meets. Slowing down at the end of the race is clearly not what anyone is talking about. Starting slowly and using a race as a warmup for the sole purpose of trying to satisfy the rule (which he did NOT) is unethical and against the spirit of the competition and more importantly the honest effort rule. If you cannot understand that then I am sorry but you are not very smart or you do not understand the sport. At the VERY least, the coach did something unethical. I could somewhat understand if the athlete did not understand that especially if Coach Smith explained otherwise but you better believe the coach knew what he was doing was wrong and he did it anyway.

Here we go with the "How dare you criticize the troops" bit along with some handwaiving that the rule is stupid and shouldn't be followed.

Should have been a DQ. Dishonest work by the coach.

You can not compare the second 5k in his 10k to a regular 5k on the track. Like a relay split, you get a running start.

learn history wrote:

Petrella should give his gold medal to the kid that got 2nd in the 10k.

That is so whiny and pathetic. The 2nd place guy shouldn't get a gold because he didn't earn a gold. He got beat, what does it matter that the other guy was doubling. This isn't grade school. On a side note, 30:06 is an awesome time for an Army cadet (standard army issue ammunition for about 50 years and when my dad was in Vietnam was the .30-06 Springfield).

Hacker ran 15 minutes in the 5k at the Big Ten Championship and Hirsch ran 15:20. what if they ran the 10k after it and went 1-2 and ran 28:30? You idiots would all be demanding that they be disqualified. But the 5k was their last event. You don't wait until the last event to see how they perform before making the call. What about when guys run 4 minutes in a championship 1500 when they can all run 3:38? They all have violated the rule. You guys are a bunch of babies for wanting to DQ the guy.