Athletics Club member , Thami Binda , carried a large banner of Selemela with his Comrades race number attached over the finish line in commemoration of their fallen Comrade .
3 PHANTOMS
I collaborated with Andrew Collier , a data scientist and fellow Green Number holder , on this one . Andrew coined the term “ phantom runner ” in a blog post identifying cheats from the 2014 event . Essentially , this is where one participant runs with two chips , resulting in a ‘ phantom runner ’ whose time is recorded at each split but there is no photographic evidence of the runner being there . ( Aside : A number of people have been caught cheating via this method over the years . Wits statistician Mark Dowdeswell has also diligently detected and reported phantoms over the years .)
Andrew has written code that compares runners ’ split times with each other and then does a cumulative calculation of the difference in timing mat splits . There are many people who will end with exactly the same finish time , but very few who
The only runner who missed all eight timing mats was actually the late Moeketsi Selemela , whose number was carried over the finish line by his brother , Thabang , and a clubmate , to honour his memory
would go over all eight timing mats together , at exactly the same time . So , we looked for two specific cheating methods : 1 . Where a runner runs the entire race with two numbers . 2 . Where a runner takes over a bailing runner ’ s number during the race .
Andrew and I could find no evidence of cheating via either of these methods in 2022 . All the runners who had crossed all ( or many ) timing mats at the same time were enjoying each other ’ s company on the road to Durban . In past years , there were always a few phantoms , but I guess it is a lot more obvious running with two large race numbers than with two small chips , so hopefully this method of cheating is now extinct .
4 BAD SEEDS
This is the proverbial ‘ petty theft ’ of Comrades cheating , but like having your mobile phone stolen , this type of cheat is a major irritation to the honest runner diligently running their qualifiers and earning their seeding . I have not deliberately gone out to try and find qualification cheats , but several people contacted me with details of cheating , so I have passed these on to the race referees .
A couple of examples are :
• An elite female athlete that posted a 2:45 qualification time at a small marathon where there is no evidence that she ran in the race . It is possible ( although unlikely ) that this was a data capture error , and she ran 2:45 at another marathon .
• One special idiot who drove a substantial portion of the Arthur Creswell 52km ultra , posted the splits on Strava for the world to see , and used the race as his qualifier . He got in a car before the 36km marker and started running again around the 49km mark , and thus posted kilometre splits of less than a minute per kay from 37km to 48km !
If it ’ s not on Strava it didn ’ t happen ? Sometimes if it ’ s on Strava it didn ’ t happen either – this cheat , who used the Arthur Creswell 52k as his qualifier
5 BANDITS
Bandits are people who run in someone else ’ s number . At Comrades , this would normally be because a runner cannot run due to injury or some other reason , and gives ( or sells ) their number to someone else to run in . There have been reports from other races of spectacular banditry backfires , most notably when the bandit ‘ removes their own mask ’ by winning the race and outing themselves !
The pre-race registration process at Comrades is rigorous , meaning that any banditry would have to be deliberate and pre-meditated . I have mixed views on banditry ( perhaps a topic for a future column ), but with Comrades , where each finish counts towards Green Numbers and there is a meticulous record kept of every finisher , it is very clear that banditry is both against the rules , and ethically wrong . Still , I am sure that there were some bandits at Comrades 2022 , but unless Big Brother-level facial recognition cameras are installed , they are very difficult to detect . The best way to unmask bandits is for fellow runners to raise a red flag when they see someone in the results whom they know did not run . finish time ( based on submitted qualifying time ) with the runner ’ s actual finish time . The traditional equation to predict a recreational runner ’ s Comrades time is marathon time multiplied by 2.5 . The chart below lists the people who beat the prediction by the largest amount ( for runners that submitted an ultra marathon qualifier a distance adjusted marathon qualifier time was calculated based on the table below ). I have done some cursory checks like comparing the race photos to the gender , running club and age of on the largest “ beat the prediction ” runners , and there are a handful of runners that either use remarkably powerful anti-aging night cream serum , or they ‘ banditted .’
The one stat that I used to detect potential banditry was comparing predicted Comrades
25