Here's a good story about a mess. Received from Gordon Rogers.

Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco

This is almost unbelievable. How can the fastest runner not be the winner?

Both SF and Nike are getting well-deserved bad publicity.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/20/BAUC13L3GQ.DTL

The silliest part of this whole story is that they have a separate "elite" start for women who can't run faster than 3:06.

I think this is a great story! It appears that there may be more runners who are able to run quality times, but either don't go through the paperwork to become recognized as "elite", or don't have the connections.

I doubt there are many people who can compete with the "elites", but this is a very good example why you shouldn't have separate starts for the citizens and elites.

Nike had a point, though, that it was a separate race. I'm glad they learned something from this experience. It should make other events aware of separate starts, too.