Organisers admit “we got it wrong” on decision to only publish times for the top three finishers

Edinburgh Marathon organisers have made a U-turn and decided to publish full results from this year’s events online, saying they were wrong to have restricted access.

Originally only details for the top three finishers were available following the event on May 25. Only official entrants with a log-in password were able to access further results.

Organisers GSi Events had explained their decision to do this on the event’s website, stating: “All your personal data and information, including your running times, are treated with great respect. As such your result information is exclusively available to you within your My Details account after you have completed the race.”

This caused problems for runners wishing to make public their times for rankings and verification for entry to other events and also jeopardised its status as an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Bronze Label race, with the IAAF s road race regulations for Gold, Silver and Bronze Label events stating:

3.9.1… Real time splits and final results should be made available to media, spectators and online.

3.12.2 Official Results for all participants should be made available on the race s website within the shortest possible time.

As AW understands, governing bodies Scottish Athletics and the IAAF, rankings website Power of 10 and the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races (AIMS) were all concerned and planning to discuss the matter with GSi.

But since then, organisers have advised that feedback has been taken into account, with participants having been asked to choose what is done with the results, which race director Neil Kilgour advised in a statement on the event website people did in their thousands.

“We have listened and we got it wrong,” read the statement. “We value our runners and we now know that only publishing your results within your My Details account was the wrong decision … from now on all results will be fully available on the event website after each race. Full and final results will continue to be submitted to relevant parties for the purposes of verification of entries to other races and for ranking systems.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and stress that this has caused many of you who have been waiting to use results to update your rankings or enter other events. Thank you for bearing with us while we sorted this out, we hope that we now have this right for this year and future years. We can assure you that we will continue to listen to feedback that our runners give us.”

The now-available results include times for 8623 participants of the full marathon and 9654 for the half marathon.

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