UPDATE ON MARCH 1sT, 2011
We received this note from a reader:
Hi,
So I'm attaching a couple of pictures. The first 1 is of me (wearing the black stocking cap) running with my friend Kevin Ballantine (wearing the white headband), who was trying to break 3:00 and finished with a 3:04, and our other friend Danielle Crockford (in red), the women's winner who ran a 2:59. The 3:00 pacer, Brian McMahon (wearing the yellow shirt in the Litton pic), told me Litton never passed him either.
I dropped off the pace of Kevin and Danielle around mile 5 and ran the half in 1:32:59 and Litton never came by me through 12 miles (where the half and full courses split off).
None of us recall being passed by Litton and yet note the picture of him, late in the race, past mile 20, where he has somehow gotten in front of Danielle and Brian.
Here are links to pics of Litton walking across the finish line at Charlotte Thunder Road:
I exchanged emails with the race director who confronted Litton about this race, but as Litton hit all the mats and denied cheating, the director did not have enough evidence to DQ him.
ok this isn't funny now
ReplyDeleteIt was almost sort of amusing when it was other races but this one was my first marathon. I ran, limped, and stubborned my way though this and am quite smug about it. I'm by no means an elite runner. In fact, best to focus on the fact that I finished and not look at the time but damnit I did it, all 26.2 miles plus the walk to the train station.
this means war
Did the RD think to ask their "lead" cyclist if he say a soft, all=black wearing, middle-aged man in the lead at any point from the start to mile 20? How does someone like that "elude" you at the start of the race?
ReplyDeleteGood point - it looks like there's a cyclist there at mile 20...who is he/she?
ReplyDeleteHaving run Thunder Road myself, I would say the photo of Kip in front of that pack of runners is probably on Hawthorne Lane near the 24.5 mark or so. If you do a Google street view at approximately 1094 Hawthorne looking toward the northeast you can see that grey building in the background and that rolling dip in the terrain. Not that it matters that much other than it puts him at a specific distance a lot closer to the finish line than originally indicated by your contributor.
ReplyDelete...And one more thing, and this is purely speculative, but that part of the course does kinda double back on itself there... So if he managed to hit the mat at 20 it would make sense that from there he could pretty quickly and easily hoof it on foot to cut the course and in all likelihood pop back onto the course near the 24 mile mark. Doing so probably would take five minutes tops... "As the crow flies" those two marks are pretty close to each other.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing to realize is that not only would the girl in red and the pacer in yellow have had to be passed by Litton as shown in the photo above - the two of them finished with a faster gun time, which means they would have had to have passed Litton between the point of the photograph and the end of the race.
DeleteIt looks like Kip ran 6:11 pace from mile 13.1 (the Halfway point) to mile 20. But I don't think Kip Litton could even hold 6:11 pace for a 5k road race. Good indication something's not right with this performance. Shame on the Charlotte RD for not pulling the trigger on this friggin circus clown David Kipling Kip Litton
ReplyDeleteYou gotta hand it to this guy: anyone can run a marathon ( at least finish one) but it takes gonads and skill to fake out the Boston Marathon when Rosie Ruiz couldn't do it and those were the days before shoe transponders.
ReplyDeleteThis guy mystifies me... all of a sudden I am obsessed. He's definitely pathological.
ReplyDeleteI just read this and I noticed myself in the photo behind kip. I am the guy in the blue shirt and black tights. I ran negative splits and was not passed by anyone the whole race. That girl is the womens leader with the pace bike. I finished 30 seconds ahead of Kip. He definitely jumped in. That race was small enough that I would have remembered being passed. No way!
ReplyDelete