This Day in History: Anti-Cheating Technology for Marathoners

On this day, April 21, in 1980 Rosie Ruiz cheated at the Boston Marathon. Ruiz notoriously jumped into the race 1 mile before the finish line. She ‘completed’ the marathon in 2:31:56, landing her in first place for the women’s division that year. Her win drew suspicion because she was unknown in the running world and had a stark improvement from her New York City Marathon completion time. That combined with the time being the 3rd fastest marathon time in history for any women led officials to study photos of the race (to check if she was the true winner). Ruiz did not appear in any race photos until the very end, and she was stripped the title.

Ruiz’ actions began a movement to instill better controls on race day that would prevent future racers from cheating. In honor of this day in history, I will highlight one of the most effective race technologies born out of the need to preserve the integrity of the sport.

The most common marathon technology used is RFID tags which ‘check in’ as runners go over mats throughout the course. The tag collects a time stamp of the time the mat was cross and wirelessly transmits that information to the datacenter. Those times are used to score the final results of the race. However this is not exactly new technology; it has been around since 1996. Although last year the marathon introduced disposable RFID tags which helped ease the bottleneck at the end of the race (of returning tags). The chips cost ~$1/chip and were distributed to the runners when they picked up their bibs before the race.

The RFID technology checkpoints help prevent runners from entering the race late or leaving the race to cut corners. Runners like this technology because they get a more accurate time of their run from start to finish. Family and friends like it because they can get text messages of a runner’s progress as he/she crosses those check-points (though this system is not 100% accurate yet).

This example proves that while cheating at any level of athletic competition is unacceptable, sometimes great technological advances blossom out of bad situations. Ref. history.com, youtube.com