Challenge Budva-Montenegro post-race controversy – Shock DQS for Ditlev
The first edition of Challenge Budva-Montenegro has ended with post-race controversy with the disqualification of the proclaimed winner Magnus Ditlev from Denmark.
Challenge Family released a statement confirming that the Dane Magnus Ditlev had been disqualified after his victory due to an unintentional course cutting action, after following the lead bike, which became apparent in the final stages of the race.
If it was so apparent one questions why did it take so long after the race for officials to determine something was suspect. More to the point how on earth did the lead bike not know the course run circuit.
We cannot see Ditlev is to blame in the fiasco. If the offical lead vehicle, which is there to lead the race, goes in one direction, then any athlete will tell you, they will absolutely follow it. In the mind-set of the athlete, one would think of DQS for not following the lead bike – what if there was a late official course change.
I think all the athletes in the race knew this to be the case and all would have done exactly what Ditlev had done and followed the official lead bike. Hence, why those athletes who finished behind Ditlev, decided to share their prize money with Ditlev.
During the race itself athletes and coaches were, nonetheless, finding Ditlev’s lead time incomprehensible. At the half-way stage of the run the German, Patick Lange was bewildered when informed that his time deficit to Ditlev had increase to 7:27 which prompted him to question out loud “How is this possible?”
Well, it wasn’t! but it was far too many hours after the event when race officials examined Ditlev’s large margin at the finish, to establish he did not complete the entire 21.2 kilometre run before disqualifying the Danish competitor.
For all intent and purposes, it did look like the officials realised the error during the race and applied a 5-minute penalty with Ditlev’s race time given as 3:46:29 a differential of 5 minutes than that registered on the finishing line clock. This gave a more realistic time deficit of 1:52 minutes with Lange taking second place
Recap of the race:
During the men’s swim, Mattia Ceccarelli of Italy led with a 23:09 split, which gave him 16 seconds lead on Ognbjen Stojanavic, 19 seconds on Lange, 21 seconds on Frommhold and 50 seconds over Ditlev.
On the bike, Lange and Frommhold rode up to Ceccarelli, but at the 15 kilometers mark, Ditlev rode into the lead. At the 30-kilometer mark, Ditlev extended his lead to 1:12. When he arrived at T2, Ditlev finished the leg in 2:06:00 with a 4:33 lead on Ceccarelli, Lange and Frommhold.
So far so good.
But it is on the run section where officials should have been alerted to the time discrepancy with the deficit between Patrick Lange, his closet rival and Ditlev growing to 7:27 even though the German was running the second fastest marathon of the day with Ruedi Wild of Switzerland being the fastest runner.
Once the disqualification was sorted out, Patrick Lange of Germany won the race in 3:48:21 by a 2:22 margin over Ruedi Wild of Switzerland and 3:06 over 3rd place finisher Nils Frommhold of Germany.
In issuing the DQS to Ditlev, Challenge Family justify the decision under objective rules, but in this case, it appears an absurd usage of a rule. Ditlev appears to be not so much the guilty party but the victim. Would not a better resolution have been to calculate the time for the unintentional course cutting and adjust the finishing times accordingly.
However, we are where we are – hopefully a lesson learnt.
