Take the money and run

490 BC, poor Pheidippides ran from Marathon to warn his fellow Athenians that the king of Persia was on his way to punish them for revolting.  He promptly crossed the finishing line, delivered the news and dropped down dead.

It seems strange to me, therefore, that two thousand five hundred and twenty years later, 36,000 would want to follow in his footsteps by entering the London Marathon.  Admittedly, Pheidippides collapsed because it was his second event in as many days, having run previously to Sparta to ask for help, only to arrive on a bank holiday and find it was not forthcoming.  However, he was a professional.  He did it for a living and with a decent pair of Nike sandals could probably have matched Kenyan Samuel Wanjiru’s amazing time of 2hrs 5mins 10secs.  In London, the vast majority are amateurs busting their heart and lungs for fun – and for charities.

There is still an element of competition within in the amateur ranks for fastest ever cartoon character (David Ross, 42, from Sutton dressed as Fred Flintstone and carrying an inflatable club throughout his three hours and seven minutes of purgatory), fastest leprechaun (Ben Afforselles from Kent) and fastest animal (Kevin Robins also from Kent), dressed as a tiger, who said he was racing against a lobster that
was also going for the record.

Indeed, Jill Christie, 27 from West London, the fastest female superhero says, “I recommend dressing in a costume because you get so much encouragement,”

Comedian Russell Howard disagreed.  He said he would “definitely not” run another marathon, because he had “a running duel with a man dressed as a banana for 20 miles and eventually he beat me,” Could have been the fastest fruit ever?  No, that was Sally Orange (real name) last year.

The main element, though, that lifts the event out of the ordinary are the thousands that punish themselves to raise money for charities.  This esprit de corps, altruism and caring is what lifts the event above the mundane and makes The London Marathon so special, yet here a dark cloud hangs over the great event.

Former Army Major Phil Packer, who sustained serious spinal cord injuries in 2008, battled his injuries and took 14 days to complete the course last year to help several charities.  In 2010 he took 26 hours and raised £1.3m for charity.

And here lies the rub.  While Phil and thousands like him give their all to help the less fortunate, the organizers seem to be pocketing millions.  In 2009, the London Marathon raised a phenomenal £47 million, cementing the Marathon’s place as the biggest one-day fundraising event in the world.

Yet journalist Ben Laurance in his TV documentary for Dispatches on Channel Four, discovered that hundreds of desperate charities are denied a place in Britain’s biggest fundraising event and of the $27 million raised in donations during the 2009 marathon less than $7 million was actually distributed to worthy causes.  So where does all the money go?

London Marathon Limited is the company responsible for organizing the event and accumulating the funds before sending them through to the London Marathon Charitable Trust. They claimed the $20m shortfall goes on staging the event but after revealing staffing costs are just $2.1m they have failed to identify where the other $18m is spent, refusing to publish their accounts publicly, citing the information as ‘highly confidential and commercially sensitive’.

Meanwhile:

• an estimated 100,000 people apply to run but only 20,000 are accepted with no refund given to those who are rejected.
• 700 Golden Bond tickets are allocated to specific leading charities while over 500 smaller foundations are denied entry
• 550 silver bond places are offered providing one place every five years, which is also ridiculously over subscribed.
• London Marathon Limited use offers of gold-dust places to seduce sponsors, an act regarded as scandalous by some charities precluded from the biggest fund raising opportunity of the year
• The £150,000 spent on travel to bring the leading athletes to the event would run most of the precluded charities for between six months and a year.

No-one doubts that the late Chris Brasher deserves to be a millionaire for bringing the Marathon to London in 1981 and taking a budget of just £100k spent on foil blankets, cups, toilets etc. to create one of the Big 5 world-events.  What people do object to, however, are directors of a company misleading its stakeholders by masquerading as a charitable people’s event before lining their own pockets.

The London Marathon is a great event so why don’t Chairman John Spurling, the trustees and the directors divulge the truth and provide the transparency their stakeholders so richly deserve?  With the livelihoods of so many charities at stake, it would be a travesty for the London Marathon to become a sporting Enron, tarnished by duplicity and deceit from those in charge

Advertisement