The winner of a marathon in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia had her time scrubbed from the books after officials determined her splits suggested she didn’t run the entire race.
On Saturday, Tabatha Hamilton was the women’s winner of the Chickamauga Battlefield Marathon. When the 31-year-old from Trenton, Georgia broke the tape, she appeared to have completed the course in two hours, 54 minutes and 21 seconds (2:55:39 gun time). However, the runner-up, Lillian Gilmer of Nashville, thought something didn’t add up. Gilmer told Runner’s World that she got suspicious when Hamilton told The Chattanoogan that she “threw the hammer down” for the second half of the race after running “really slow” early on, and that her time was “six or seven minutes” faster than her previous best performance in a marathon. Gilmer didn’t think that an elite-level marathoner would talk that way. She was also suspicious when Hamilton claimed to have run the first half in 1:36:51. If that were true, Gilmer said, Hamilton would have been five seconds behind her at the halfway point of the race–and if anyone had passed her, she would have known about it.
Gilmer was concerned enough to contact the Chattanooga Track Club, which sanctions the marathon, about her suspicions. However, race officials were already conducting their own investigation. While Hamilton’s overall time wasn’t out of the ordinary for a female marathoner, the track club discovered a huge red flag in her splits. Based on data from checkpoints around the course, they determined Hamilton had run the first half of the race in 2:06:51. That meant she supposedly ran the final 13.1 miles in 47:30. If that time was to be believed, Hamilton’s second half time would have not only easily beaten the world record for a woman in a half-marathon, but would have also destroyed the record time for a man in a half-marathon. Eritrea’s Zersenay Tadese won the 2010 Lisbon Half Marathon in 58:23; Hamilton’s time would have been over 11 minutes faster than Zersenay’s time.
Co-race director Sherilyn Johnson didn’t know anything about the furor until Sunday morning, when she discovered several emails questioning Hamilton’s time. However, she and her colleagues didn’t take long to resolve the matter. They spent most of the afternoon reviewing the top 12 finishers’ times. When they looked at Hamilton’s splits, Johnson said that “everything we looked at showed she did not complete the marathon.” Hamilton was disqualified, and Gilmer was declared the winner by default. Hamilton is adamant that she ran the full race, but Johnson stands by the decision.
Hamilton’s past times don’t suggest she could have run a marathon in just under three hours. Ever since Rosie Ruiz tried to steal a win at the 1980 Boston Marathon, officials at races throughout the country have added computerized checkpoints to ensure no one can try to claim to win a race without running the entire course. So it’s very easy to assemble a runner’s profile. According to her race history at Athlinks, Hamilton’s fastest marathon time was 4:25:09 at a 2009 race in Memphis. She ran three other marathons in 2010 and 2011, none faster than 4:50. As the saying goes, the numbers don’t lie.
The moral of this story–if you’re going to cheat, don’t do it in a way that your performance is too good to be true. Especially when there is raw data to back it up.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
