Detecting Marathon Cheaters: Using Python to Find Race Anomalies
As a runner myself, my YouTube feed recommended a video where two models got caught cheating in a half marathon. You can see all the details in the video but basically, someone found out their split times don’t add up. In non-running terms, this means that if you split up the race into segments, she achieved unrealistically fast times for specific segments. If a runner would take the bus or a shortcut, the total time might not show it, but the segments would.
This got me thinking; it’s pretty easy to automate this right? Driven by curiosity, I started looking for a race to see if I could find some suspicious activity myself…
The idea is simple; get all the results from a race (including the splits) and see if there are anomalies. The two main anomalies would be;
However, there are some ethical considerations. Even though I dislike cheaters, it is not much more than a pretty harmless ‘crime’, if you could even call it that. As long as no prize money or other reward is involved, the cheater is only fooling themself. I asked some friends’ opinions on marathon cheating and it varied from “unacceptable” to “who cares”.
