Chris

1. The London Marathon publishes rankings even way down in the thousandths. Any man who took part has distorted those rankings and unfairly disadvantaged a woman.
2. No man should have been allowed to enter the women’s race. The London Marathon is a UK Athletics officially sanctioned event and the LM organisers have breached its participation rules by allowing men into the women’s event.

Russ, what you’re offering here is a variation on the ‘but it’s only a few men, why can’t you just leave them alone’.

The point is, fairness is fairness. If you have a category whose entire reason to exist is to give fair sport to women, who as a class cannot compete fairly against men, then you cannot allow men to compete in that category under any circumstances. If you do, then you abolish the category.

Fox News can get stuffed. They have their own reasons for saying what they say and I don’t care about them in the slightest. However, any man who ran in the women’s category took a place in the entry ballot from a woman. Simply entering the race was an act of theft. Taking a place on the finishers table robs every woman who finished after him of their rightful result, however small a difference it made. And holding a women’s participation medal is a lie in service of an entitlement he did not deserve and which the rules said he should not have.

If he actually does hand his women’s participation medal back and get himself deleted from the table, then that goes some way to restoring fairness. Although somewhere, there is a woman who was not allowed to run in the London Marathon this year because the organisers gave her place to a man. I wonder what, if anything, he would be prepared to do about that.