Don't think so, not sure if you read the actual article. This was ladies who had their race number receive a top10 and then get an invite to an awards dinner that evening.
Obviously they didn't pitch and two and two were put together. Also loads of tipoffs, your name is printed on your bib and that's often a giveaway if Arthur is Martha.
The Running Mann is a data nerd, and now he's on the TTOM board there's a way to actually have some proper investigation into what's going on. I casually went through the top100 females, and just picked the ones who got a top result from a late starting batch. pinged 4 more. So essentially at least 6% of the top ladies were a man running in their entry without substituting. This is an easy one to trigger from photo evidence, but I figure there will be a huge amount of people who ran in someone else's race number (bib bandits) - imagine how many male-male swaps there are that fall under the cracks.
That reminds me, here's his classification of race cheats, we really could do with a cycling focused blogger like this!:
There are generally seven acknowledged types of cheating:
Tag Teaming (running Two Oceans as a relay race with a buddy)
Taxiing (covering a portion of the route in a vehicle)
Phantoms (one runner, two timing chips)
Bad Seeds (submitting an incorrect qualifier or getting someone else to run your qualifier for you)
Bandits (running in someone else’s number)
Ritchie McCawing (entering from the side / joining the race along the route)
Suppositories (batch jumpers who push from behind into places they don’t belong)
One of the push factors for this is that this event is massively oversubscribed. It sold out 17 000 in a day last september, but subs closed 43days before the event. Despite plenty of warnings, people still take the risk because they have an actual entry they can't use. Potentially subs will be run differently next year, but the event was on notice from CoCT because of the 2025 disaster.
CTCT used to be sold out, they would also close subs early but now that they are below limits they make a plan!
I guess you have to, too late to admit the truth!!
