How to finish first and still lose two races at once (Read 711 times)

Bittersweet victory for John Crews, who was declared the winner. Because to be beaten by a guy who only ran your race accidentally is to be utterly owned by him. Still the $1,300 winning purse will soften the blow.

Can he do a retroactive registration and pay the whole fee for the full after he's done running? http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/story/1279622.html

His mistake wasn't missing the turn. It was being from Chapel Hill and running in Raleigh. Probably some Wolfpack fan hid the arrows!

I ran that half marathon yesterday. It was a fantastic event on a beautiful day. I was absolutely shocked to see someone do a sub 2:20 on that course! Remember, this is a very hilly marathon and a large portion of it is run on TRAILS! When Nicholas Kurgat finished we were all in shock. We could not believe that someone could run that course that fast! We all said “this kid has just vaulted himself onto the National(if not international scene)”. Then we find out he got disqualified. That was even more unbelievable. When I got to the half turn around point it was so very clearly marked that you could not have missed it no matter what. However, I talked to a volunteer who worked the turn around and he said that when the leaders of both the half and full came through they hadn’t even put out the cones or anything. He said the cop just kept driving and all of the runners just followed him. They got the turn around setup quickly after that but the damage had been done. Overall, I loved the race. However, it is one of the most disorganized events there is. They didn’t call a single split for the entire race I ran. They didn’t even have CLOCKS anywhere on the course. They had every mile marked. However, each mile marker except for 13 and 26 was off by more than 100 yards! They also did not stop traffic sufficiently and several people were nearly run over right in front of me. There is one person to blame for what happened at the race yesterday(He is the one seen clapping in the picture of Kurgat) and hopefully he will correct the problems for next year. It truly is a fascinating course. It is just not well organized at all.

Wow. At least it was a huge personal victory for Kurgat.

It looks like the third place runner was also disqualified. I have a video showing two runners finishing within 1 second of each other for 2nd and 3rd. However, the final results show that they 1st and 2nd place runners were many minutes apart! How can that happen to two runners if the cones were actually setup properly? My guess is that they were not setup at all.