Tuesday, November 4, 2014

The Trouble with the Berlin Marathon

The Berlin Marathon, being a Mega-Marathon (over 30,000 participants), has the power to really sway the predicted cutoff time.

To date, the predictive analysis has applied an even weighting to all of the top 25 feeder marathons. It has been suggested that due to the unusually low (lower than the previous year) number of participants, and subsequently BQ'ers at the 2014 Berlin Marathon, the predictive cutoff is unfairly skewed because of the Berlin Marathon.

This year's Berlin Marathon had over 7,000 fewer participants than last year. The BQ rate was similar (percentage of finishers who met the minimum BQ standard); however, the total number of Boston Qualifiers was 1,239 fewer. Full Berlin Marathon analysis is here.

Taking a look at two data sets that were available (2009 and 2014), it is apparent that the European contingent at the Boston Marathon is less than 5%.

Representation by Continent for the 2009 Boston Marathon
Continent
 2009 Participants
 Percentage
North America
 21,345
94.7%
Europe
 810
3.6%
Asia
 214
0.9%
South America
 102
0.5%
Oceania
 48
0.2%
Africa
 27
0.1%
Grand Total
 22,546
100.0%

Representation by Continent for the 2014 Boston Marathon
Continent
 2014 Participants
 Percentage
North America
 28,969
92.8%
Europe
 1,447
4.6%
Asia
 420
1.3%
South America
 197
0.6%
Oceania
 136
0.4%
Africa
 41
0.1%
Grand Total
 31,210
100.0%

For the mean time, the Berlin Marathon will be excluded from the Predicted Cut-off for the 2016 Boston Marathon.

Once data is available from the 2015 Boston Marathon, I will calculate the actual percentage of feeder race participation to more accurately weight each of the feeder marathons.


No comments:

Post a Comment