British athlete got disqualified after tracking data gave away shocking 'secret'
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Facebook/Twitter/@nuddypants
This year’s Olympic games were pretty dramatic, with a lot of athletes being disqualified, but last year, there was one unbelievable scandal an athlete can now never escape from.
Dr Joasia Zakrzewski, a British athlete who has broken records, found out the hard way that cutting corners comes back to haunt you.
Having just come in third in a high-profile race from Manchester to Liverpool which spanned 50 miles, she decided to post online her victory.
She showed off her trophy as well as data from her running app on X, formerly Twitter.
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It would at first, appear to be inconspicuous.
That was until other athletes peeked and noticed an alarming discrepancy.
Her data was from Strava, a running/cycling app designed to track your pace and distance, which showed a 2.5-mile (4km) anomaly during the GB Ultras Manchester to Liverpool race.
During that stretch, she was somehow travelling a mile every 1 minute 40 seconds while maintaining a low heart rate of 94bpm.
Even though Dr Zakrzewski had recently completed a 255-mile (410km) race in Taipei and competed for Scotland in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, her data wasn’t right.
Her tracker led to an investigation which it was discovered that the runner had only gone and hopped in a car for a section of the high-profile race.
But she was quickly backed up by a friend claiming Dr Zakrzewski had become ill.
Speaking to the BBC, the friend said she had been feeling unwell before the race after arriving in the UK from Australia hours earlier: "The race didn't go to plan. She said she was feeling sick and tired in the race and wanted to drop out."
Well, rules are rules and Dr Zakrzewski was stripped of the third-place trophy, and UK Athletics reviewed her data too.
Race director Wayne Drinkwater told Sky News that he’d been passed the data after being told that an athlete had an ‘unsporting, competitive advantage during a section of the event.’
He told the broadcaster: "The issue has been investigated and, having reviewed the data from our race tracking system, GPX data, statements provided from our event team, other competitors and from the participant herself, we can confirm that a runner has now been disqualified from the event having taken vehicle transport during part of the route."
Because of this discovery, her place was later awarded to Mel Sykes.
She tweeted about the incident afterwards, writing: “The audacity of uploading the data, complete with trophy photo, makes this worse!!”
Dr Zakrzewski tried to explain her actions to the BBC, saying race marshals told her to keep on running when she arrived at a checkpoint by car.
She explained: "When I got to the checkpoint I told them I was pulling out and that I had been in the car, and they said 'you will hate yourself if you stop'.
"I agreed to carry on in a non-competitive way.
"I made sure I didn't overtake the runner in front when I saw her as I didn't want to interfere with her race."
But Drinkwater hit back: "After the event, there was no attempt by Joasia to make us aware of what had happened and to give us an opportunity to correct the results or return the third place trophy during the course of the subsequent seven days."