The Telcel Marathon is one of the largest and most talked about sporting events in Latin America. This year the distance of the race was 42 kilometers and 195 meters through the territory of Mexico City and the number of participants reached 32 million 640 thousand participants. Successful completion of the required standard grants the right to participate in the legendary Boston Marathon.
After the race, the organizer began to receive numerous complaints from participants at the start. According to the runners, many used public transportation or even cars parked along the route to shorten the route.
The organizers checked tens of thousands of electronic tokens to track the location and detected a violation of the regulations by the participants: they did not have the necessary markings at the checkpoints (every 5 kilometers) of the marathon, which forced shorten the distance. or using third party transportation. The commission did not carry out a specific control and decided to take harsh measures: about eleven thousand people were disqualified. Some of those banned decided to challenge the result, claiming that they were facing a device malfunction. But even after punitive methods the scandal could not be avoided, since the number of annulled results amounted to 36 percent of the total number of speakers.
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Soon, the organizers of the eminent competition, awarded the World Athletics gold prize, issued a statement:
“The Mexico City Sports Institute announces that it will begin to identify those cases in which the participants of the City Marathon demonstrated an unsportsmanlike attitude during the event and will cancel their time in the protocol. “This great event represents not only an exceptional celebration for all the inhabitants of the capital, but also an occasion to reaffirm the eternal values of sport,” the statement reads.
The management’s position is quite clear: no one wants to cast a shadow over World Athletics, turning the triumph of sport into a springboard for fraud and unsportsmanlike conduct. To be fair, cases of cheating in marathon races are not uncommon, especially in Mexico. According to statistics, the number of offenders at Telcel increases every year. For example, in 2017, 6 thousand deceivers could be detected, and a year later this figure approached 13 thousand. Despite this, most runners regularly complain about malfunctioning electronic chips provided by the organizers.
Sometimes even celebrities are caught cheating. One of the main scandals in the history of the race turned out to be the performance of presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo. Before the presidential elections, a politician with a reputation for corruption decided to participate in the popular race to increase his popularity. He failed to win the vote and a year later the activist was caught cheating at the Berlin Marathon.
The fifty-year-old politician ran the marathon in 2 hours and 41 minutes, and after a double check it turned out that Roberto had magically covered the distance of 15 kilometers in 21 minutes. Long before the investigation of the circumstances, Madrazo explained with a story that he was a descendant of the Mayans and Aztecs.
