This was the case at the 50-mile event, which for 47-year-old Scottish ultra-runner Joasia Zakrewski was only 47.5 miles thanks to a couple of vehicular-assisted miles. Rightfully, she was disqualified by the race director and all finishing positions behind her were moved up accordingly. The ultra-running community is in uproar and she is facing calls for a lifetime ban from sport. The issue is outrageous but also thorny, raising some interesting questions and giving a curious insight into the mentalities of runners and cheaters in sport.
Let’s start with Zakrewski’s version of events: towards the end of the race, limping from injury and jetlagged, as well as simply exhausted from the exertion of the run, she decided to drop out of the race and recover in the support car that is there to assist and accompany competitors. But when she arrived at the checkpoint and informed race officials of this, they allegedly encouraged her to keep running nonetheless, saying “you’ll hate yourself if you stop” – so she agreed to, albeit in an apparently “non-competitive way”. But she still finished third, accepted her medal and award, posed for pictures afterwards, and didn’t say anything more until a week later GPS data found that she covered one of the miles in one minute and 40 seconds. She has since apologized, citing miscommunication with marshalls and saying fatigue, illness and jetlag prevented her from thinking straight.
Obviously, this is unacceptable. It goes against ethos of sport. It’s very clearly cheating. There are innumerable negative consequences of this kind of behaviour. But it also reveals how for athletes, for people with an inherent drive to do better than others, even with a strong grasp of right and wrong, the nasty temptation will always be there, ready to entice you at moments of weakness, and you have to work hard to supress it. If you give her the benefit of the doubt, Zakrewski’s situation is not completely unthinkable. I imagine she didn’t set out to cheat, more that in an instant of suffering she gave into the dangerous craving for the sweet relief of dropping out. Then the horror of realisation dawned on her: faced with a challenge, she had failed. Confronted with high stakes, she hadn’t lived up. Any hope of finishing an important race had disintegrated with a split-second decision, all her grafting in training had come to nothing. This knowledge is more agonising than the physical pain of competition. But rather than finding the mental strength to sit with the anguish and work through it, she chose mentally easy way out. When you’re addled with fatigue and brain fog, it seems so in reach. You know it’s immoral, but the excuses come readily and quickly. There’s still a chance for everything to go how you wanted it to go, nobody can tell, you haven’t overtaken anyone anyway. And next thing you know you’re crossing the finish line, everything went as planned and that tiny blip has been swept under the rug.
Thankfully, someone lifted the rug up, the truth was exposed, and Zakrewski has a lot more uncomfortable mental unpacking to do now that if she’d just stayed in the car. The incident raises so many more questions, on comparisons with the treatment of dopers in athletics (who are regularly allowed to return to races after serving bans), on how race organisation and communication allowed this to happen in the first place, on whether her other results should be scrutinised. But one particularly salient point to be taken from this is that being a runner and an athlete requires more than one type of mental strength: not just to train hard and push through pain, but to stick unswervingly to your morals, no matter how tempting the alternative may be.
