Mississauga’s dark side

It’s a place that doesn’t have a name. For those not in the lead but ahead of the main pack it can be the loneliest place on Earth. Eric Labelle and Ian Reid were there. Three minutes off the lead, nearly one minute behind third and for all intents and purposes – certainly, according to the organizers of the race – they may as well have been orbiting the dark side of the moon.

The Mississauga races provide a cyclist escort for first-, second- and third-place athletes but after that runners are on their own. It’s a good policy.

Unless you’re fourth.

Anyone who has attempted to navigate the final kilometres of a race has a visceral understanding of the unique sort of hell that only the Mississauga course can provide. Winds coming off the Lake and varying surfaces (pavement, concrete, wooden bridges) can mess with your rhythm, especially when fatigued. But the hell began early in the race for a couple of runners caught in no-man’s land. Within the first 30 seconds, Reid and Labelle were on their own.

“The marshalling in the 10K was not the greatest,” Labelle said. “Around 300m after crossing the Credit River, if it wasn’t for last minute marshalling, me and Ian Reid would have been detoured badly.”
The race didn’t end well either.

“Around 9.4k,” Labelle continues in an understated tone typical of many of Canada’s best runners, “the marshals didn’t tell us where to go, resulting in me and Ian [Reid] taking an unknown shortcut. I jumped down a few stairs to get back on course.”

In a long-distance race, rhythm and focus count for a lot. Anyone who watched Brazilian Vanderlei de Lima’s commanding lead evaporate immediately after he was accosted by a defrocked priest at the 2004 Athens Games knows exactly what I’m talking about.

In a rush to be all things to all people and by choosing to create an experience rather than marshal a race, the 10K would be merely the prologue of what would become a comedy of errors in Mississauga. Just over 12 hours later, the first-, second- and fifth-place runners would be taken off course in the marathon. For lead runner Dagim Yeshitela it was nothing short of heart breaking.

“This never happened to me and I have never seen it happen to any of my friends,” Yeshitela said. “I was wondering what I can do and whom I can talk to. I trained hard for the race.”

Certainly the scorching 1:03:24 he ran to win the 2010 Scotiabank Waterfront half-marathon made running a 2:13 well within the realm of possibility. It’s easy to imagine Yeshitela’s grin the instant he crossed the line and looked up seeing his time. It would have been the culmination of every runners dream: breaking the tape, setting the course record and more sublimely, realizing he had a whole other gear. Moments later, he would be told that he had gone off course and that he would neither be considered the winner nor the course-record holder.

Yeshitela’s confusion is palpable, “if I went wrong direction, which I have no idea, it should be the responsibility of the officers who were leading the race. I hope somebody will understand and things will be corrected. This is not fair to put me in such a situation. I worked hard to win.”

It may be small consolation to Yeshitela but the second- and third-place runners both agreed that he was the winner in the purest sense and therefore, should be awarded the prize. As of Tuesday, Organizers of the race had yet to reach a consensus.

Several years ago, the leaders in Ottawa’s National Capital Marathon were taken off course by an errant marshal. The leader, like Yeshitela, set the course record and despite not running the full distance, still received prize money. This is the right thing to do. The longer Mississauga deliberates, the greater the harm to the integrity of their race.

Four years ago, a prominent guest speaker addressed an enthusiastic crowd girding themselves for the challenges they would face in the Mississauga Marathon the next morning. The courage required to start and the courage needed to finish, he said, made all of them winners regardless of the quality of their respective efforts.

As Dagim Yeshitela waits for word from the organizers, the fastest runner on Sunday may be the only one who didn’t win.