Cheating is not the only way

Before this week I hadn’t heard of Natasha Argent. I kind of wish I still hadn’t. On Monday morning, she came to my attention as having suspicious split times at the previous day’s London Marathon. Being a (very) minor celebrity, related to a slightly less minor celebrity, she was deemed newsworthy, and by Tuesday her dodgy marathon times made it into the Sun, Mail and Metro. To cut a long story short – much as she did the marathon – she had somehow avoided running around 12 miles of the 26.2 mile race, and 'finished' in well under four hours.

If this hadn’t come within a few days of the Manchester Marathon fiasco of 24,000 runners being cheated of a valid marathon times (see my previous blog), it might have passed by without comment from me. After all, she was not the first, and will not be the last, to cheat in a marathon in one way or another. But I was still smarting from my lost Manchester personal best, so Ms Argent’s case affected me deeply. I wondered why she had skipped those 20km, then posed with her finisher’s medal in the full knowledge that she had not earned it. I was brought up to believe that cheats never prosper. Of course that’s not entirely true. But it is true that when cheats got caught the social media backlash can be painful. And if one chooses to cheat in one of the world’s most closely observed athletics events, and the world’s largest charity fundraising event, one will most likely be caught. In this case, it simply took a Runner’s World reader to run 50 lines of code over the marathon results to identify Ms Argent’s implausible split times.

When I first saw those splits, it was perfectly clear she had not actually run the marathon. Looking at her finishing straight pictures, it was clear they were not of a person who was powering to a 3h44m marathon finish, but they were taken less than four hours after the race started. Of course the London Marathon has since confirmed the obvious, and she has been removed from the results.

It would have been easy to write an angry rant blog earlier in the week, but I resisted the temptation. After all, there was little to be gained from pointing out the obvious fact that someone had cheated, perhaps hadn’t realised how easy it was to spot their deceit, and now would face the consequences of embarrassment (presumably) and trolling (definitely). I wanted to do something more positive, and came up with two things: a lesson and an action.

First the lesson: If you want to know the truth of a story, educate yourself.

I value a free press, but it comes with numerous downsides. I have long known that one can’t rely on the media for knowledgeable, accurate, non-biased reporting. The Argent cheating story provided excellent evidence for this.

As a seven-time marathoner (yes, I’m still counting that Manchester run; I’m told the 100 Marathon Club will accept it), including London, I know a fair amount about marathon running and timing. Enough to know that those writing in the Sun, Mail, et al knew little about either. Here is a list of the mistakes made in this week’s reports about Ms Argent:

• Confusing the 20km point with halfway

• Confusing Ms Argent’s 40km split with her finishing time

• Confusing London Marathon’s timing system with the App designed to give spectators live access to timing information (the latter may have been a little unreliable (though I had no difficulty tracking 15 runners from start to finish on my phone), but the former worked perfectly.

• Implying that TOWIE and/or Take Me Out fans outed Ms Argent online; it was in fact marathon fans (see above)

These are all errors that would have been perfectly clear to an experienced marathon runner, but perhaps all the marathoners on the editorial staff of those publications had taken Monday off to recover from their own Sunday marathon exploits. Perhaps.

So, don’t rely on reporters to deliver to you all the facts of a case, nor to get those facts right. Do your own research. Use your own judgement, discrimination and analysis. As I say, educate yourself. The Twitterverse will thank you for it.

That’s the lesson; next the action.

Ms Argent was ‘running’ for a charity, London Youth. Reports of how much money she had raised varied from c.£500 to £2500. What she certainly did raise was a bit of a media storm for London Youth, which had to field questions on her performance – she herself appeared to have gone into hiding, or at least made her social media accounts private, which apparently amounts to the same thing these days. There was no reason to believe that London Youth were in any way to blame for Ms Argent’s actions, but being associated with a notorious cheat, which is what she was rapidly becoming, was hardly helpful to their fundraising effort, and did not exactly set a great example to the youths they try to help. So as a counter-measure, I set up a JustGiving page – Honest Runners for London Youth – on which any genuine marathoners, or runners of any distance, can donate to London Youth. It’s an attempt to show that runners by and large have great integrity; it’s a largely honest sport, in which what one gets out in terms of times and medals, is directly related to the amount of work one puts in. If you have a couple of quid available, please do make the effort to donate. Show people that #realrunnersdontcheat.

I really have no idea what Ms Argent was doing between passing the 20km mark 2h 17m into the race, and passing the 40km mark only 48 minutes later, but I do know she certainly wasn’t running 20km at world record pace. And I do know one mistake shouldn’t come to define a person. Maybe next time she comes to the media’s attention, it will be for something admirable, and maybe next time they’ll report it accurately.