Posts Tagged ‘cheating’

See, Teamwork DOES Help Your Running

Liu Shuling was the first woman across the finish line at the Yellow River Estuary International Half-Marathon in Shandong, China. And she owed it all to her friend, Wang Xueqin. That’s because Wang switched places and bib numbers with Liu sometime during the race. Race officials examining videotape footage caught the exchange and banned both runners for two years.

Though there have been many marathon cheaters before, this may be the first recorded instance of a ringer winning a major road race.

Friday Five: Reasons Biggest Loser Daris’s 5k Time Is (Mostly) Legit

For those of you who don’t watch The Biggest Loser, last Tuesday’s episode featured the contestants running a 5k with some local citizens in and around the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas.

One of the contestants, 25-year-old Daris George (pictured at left at his original weight), was shown completing the 5k in 21:04, an astonishing 6:46 pace, especially considering he still weighs 214 pounds after losing 132 pounds.

His finishing time was so good, in fact, that it triggered a response from the online running community, who remembered the Dane Patterson marathon scandal.

Quite a few forums questioned whether Daris’s time was possible (see here, here and here), but after some thorough research, I think it’s clear that Daris’s speed is almost entirely legitimate. Here are five reasons:

1) The Biggest Loser producers are not that stupid. They got hammered for the marathon fiasco. It’s hard to believe they would falsify Daris’s results to no good purpose.

2) His age and training regimen. Despite his original unhealthy condition, Daris is 25 years old and has been working out all day, every day, for about 4 months. When I went to Air Force officer training school at age 23, I was underweight and unfit. I ended up averaging 33 miles a week and completed the required 1.5 mile run in 9:10. And our physical training wasn’t nearly as intense as that on The Biggest Loser. So while his pace is still amazing, it’s not out of the question.

3) He ran back along the course after finishing. An eyewitness account by blogger Thin in 2010 contains quite a bit of behind-the-scenes information that isn’t all that flattering to the program’s “reality” (“Since this is ‘filming,’ the director had us do the ‘START’ three times;” and “I was smiling during my interview and I now know WHY the contestants always cry on the show! That man [a producer] was trying to get me to cry!”), but it does confirm that Daris finished the race fast enough that he was able to travel back along the course and meet up with other runners.

4) He ran a 21:43 5k road race the following month. Daris ran in the Arbuckles 2 Ardmore Race for Mercy 5k in Oklahoma on March 28. He finished 6th with a time of 21:43. That’s independent verification of his speed (unless you believe this is some sort of huge Biggest Loser conspiracy), but it is slower, even though he presumably was even more fit in March than he was in February. The answer to that appears to be…

5) The Biggest Loser producers measured a short course. We don’t know what the show’s standards were for measuring the 5k course, but it’s unlikely they went to the trouble of using a Jones Counter, which is the approved device for certification, or that they used tangents to measure. While this is only anecdotal, The Running Woman has a post claiming the course was short:

“Daris’s time would be pretty darn great for a 5k.  And OK, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that the Garmins of my DRC [Dallas Running Club] buddies that clocked 2.8 miles were right – he still finished with a respectable pace of 7:30/mile.  But it annoyed me that they kept calling it a 5k when it wasn’t a 5k!  Grrr.”

Mystery solved, I think. Daris’s adjusted 5k time would be 23:21 – still impressive but much more believable, and it fits better with his 21:43 the next month.

When Underwear Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Wear Underwear

The International Swimming Federation ruled that competitive swimmers cannot wear anything underneath their swimsuits, for modesty’s sake or otherwise. The decision came days after Sweden’s Therese Alshammar lost a world record performance when officials learned she was wearing a second swimsuit. The rationale was that a second suit provides increased buoyancy.

This made me consider hypothetical equivalent situations in the world of running:

* A runner is disqualified when it is discovered her maxi pad has wings.

* A runner loses a bronze medal for attaching propellers to his nip guards.

* A runner’s photo finish victory is taken away because her pointy sports bra exceeded established limits.

* Pre-race ice baths cause controversy over whether shrinkage reduces drag and gives runners an unfair advantage.

* US Track & Field rules thongs do not provide an actual slingshot effect.

* Victoria’s Secret and UnderArmor to merge after third date.

NBC’s Biggest Loser Damage Control

Stung by The Biggest Loser marathon controversy, NBC’s Al Roker interviewed Dane Patterson and trainer Jillian Michaels on The Today Show this morning. Here is the full segment. It still seems as though NBC and Patterson are more upset about getting caught and having to deal with the stink than sorry about trying to deceive their viewers.

Biggest Loser: I’m Keeping the Medal

The Los Angeles Times TV blog quotes Dane Patterson:

“The medal was given. I would not give that back. I’m proud of it.”

Also:

“In my mind I ran the full 26 miles.”

Cool. In my mind, I’m running Boston next month.

Runner’s World Weighs In On Biggest Loser Scandal

The parent company of Runner’s World publishes Biggest Loser books and has a financial interest in the show’s image, so it was only a matter of time before we heard from them about the Dane Patterson marathon fiasco.

Runner’s World interviewed Patterson and others associated with the race.

By the time Dane reached a water stop past mile 16, they’d fallen way off pace. He was exhausted, and a sub-six-hour finish was not going to happen. One of the producers proposed driving Dane and Carli up the road.

“I was irritated,” Dane said, “but I just wanted to make everybody happy. I knew the show wanted a finishing shot.”

In my view, neither NBC nor the producers on site have any excuse for what they did. All of this idiocy simply to get a finish line shot. They could have used footage of Patterson celebrating with his family afterwards and made no mention of how far he ran, what his time was, or whether the course was still open. No one would have cared.

And how could NBC broadcast a show ostensibly about health and fitness and no one questioned the 3:53 caption at the end of the show? Did they fire all their fact-checkers during the writers’ strike?

As for Patterson himself, he must have been really dehydrated to think that climbing in a van at mile 17 was a good idea. But he’s not making it easy to give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter how apologetic he is now. Here are some of the things he told Runner’s World:

* “At the time I didn’t think it was a big a deal, but it was a bad decision. I understand that now. I realize how important that 26.2 miles is for runners.”

* “Honestly, I will cherish that medal for doing 23 miles.” (Patterson wasn’t disqualified until after he received his finisher’s medal. No one, so far, has suggested he give it back.)

* “Plus, at mile 17, it’s not hard to talk a 280-pound guy into taking a ride.”

Next week on The Biggest Loser: Tara swims the English Channel! Don’t miss it!

Biggest Loser Contestant Pulls a Rosie Ruiz

It isn’t often you get both the reality-TV and running worlds angered about the same thing, but the scandal involves Dane Patterson, who was voted off this week’s episode of The Biggest Loser. Each episode ends with an update of how the eliminated contestant has fared since leaving the show. Patterson, who set a show record by losing 100 pounds in eight weeks, was shown completing the Arizona Desert Classic marathon with his wife on January 31. A caption read that Patterson ran the marathon in 3:53.

I watched the show and thought it was strange, because the televised footage didn’t seem to show them traveling at a sub-9 minute mile pace. It certainly seemed to be an amazing feat, considering Patterson was still in the 300 lb. range.

As it turned out, it was too good to be true. Race participants revealed on various web sites and blogs that the Pattersons actually completed the marathon in 5:53, but only after being driven in an NBC van over an extended stretch of the course so that they could cross the finish line under six hours. Race directors were notified the same day and the Pattersons were disqualified. None of this was mentioned on the NBC broadcast.

NBC issued a statement, and is conducting an investigation. Meanwhile, the press is starting to run with the story, and the NBC Biggest Loser message board already has a couple hundred comments under the heading, “The Great Marathon Debacle.”

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times weighs in with the latest version of what happened.