Joasia Zakrzewski, a Scottish ultramarathon runner, has been disqualified for using a car during a race in Manchester earlier this month. Zakrzewski was apprehended after GPS data revealed she was traveling a mile faster than humanly possible.
On April 7, the 47-year-old athlete finished third in this year’s GB Ultras Manchester to Liverpool race. GB Ultras director Wayne Drinkwater, though, told the BBC on Tuesday that she had obtained a “unsporting, competitive advantage during a section of the event.”
Race organizers received a report that Zakrzewski had cheated, and after checking GPS tracking data, they discovered that she had “taken vehicle transport” for 2.5 miles (4km) of the 50-mile (80-kilometer) journey.
According to the data, Zakrzewski ran a mile in 1 minute and 40 seconds. One of the runner’s pals told the BBC that she felt “genuinely sorry” for cheating and that she did so because “the race didn’t go according to plan,” and she “was feeling sick and tired and wanted to drop out.”
Zakrzewski is an experienced runner who won the 48-hour Taipei Ultramarathon in Taiwan in February, covering a world-record 255 miles (412km) in two days. She won a silver medal for the United Kingdom at the IAU World 100km Championships in the Netherlands in 2011, and bronze medals in Qatar in 2014 and the Netherlands in 2015.
She is now the Scottish 24-hour record holder, the British 200k record holder, and the Scottish 100 mile record holder.
According to Drinkwater, the incident involving Zakrzewski has been forwarded to the Trail Running Association and UK Athletics for further inquiry.
Zakrzewski is hardly the first distance runner to benefit from internal combustion. Frederick Lorz, the 1904 Olympic marathon winner, was disqualified after it was revealed that his manager drove him for the final 11 kilometers of the race. Rosie Ruiz’s gold medal from the 1979 New York City Marathon was cancelled after it was determined that she rode the city’s subway for the most of the race and just ran the last 800 meters.
