Sheffield Half Marathon is a shambles

[JFKvsNixon 11]

Blummin eck. Stop digging.

 

No, dig away. The posts are comedy genius.

[Tigerfan 10]

Just seen the news clip on bbc

 

Margaret lilley saying it turned from a race into a run.

 

looked like a race to me.

 

feel sorry for the winners etc first three trained all year planning schedules etc to be at the peak race performance and end up with nothing

 

Bet the water sponsors be queueing up next year.

 

like someone said earlier there being no such thing as bad publicity and all that

Edited April 6, 2014 by Tigerfan

[Pegasus 10]

Just got back from watching the Sheffield Half Marathon. The start was a bit of a shambles, firstly the start was delayed by half an hour which stretched out for a further 20 mins and then the announcer said it was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances relating to safety reasons. The event had to be cancelled, "sorry everyone"

 

Even the Police looked confused, at this point some of the runners at the front of the start, shouted come on and urged everyone to start. Leaving the safety car behind and the Police outriders....Power to the people or what? All the runners flooded through the start, I didn't see any Police trying to stop any runners.

 

On the way back through the Don Vally Bowl those people employed by the organisers where as confused as everyone else until they were told that the run was going ahead as they couldn't stop the runners.

 

We got the tram and picked up the runners in town, from what we could see there was very few incidents the Police, Medics and Marshalls had to deal with if any.

 

However, questions need to be asked as this (reported by the BBC) apparently is a "private event"?

 

Who is Margaret Lilly and who does she represent?

 

The BBC reported that it was "her event"?

 

We returned to the Don Valley Bowl and just about all of the competitors were finishing we didn't see anyone who decided to not to run because it had been cancelled.

 

Are they going to rearrange the competitive run?

 

Will those who didn't run get their money back?

 

You would have thought that top of the organisers' check list would have been the water? To have been delivered at least a good 48 hours before if not the week before?

[JFKvsNixon 11]

No, please make him go away.

 

I feel sorry for the runners whose enjoyment and hard work it may have spoiled.

Lots of the volunteers who will be just as disappointed.

The crowd if it spoiled their day out and any charities that missed out.

 

It will be old news soon. Fortunately nobody died or suffered injury.

 

Sheffield will get over it.

 

The people who I knew that entered the half marathon completed it, so it wasn't ruined for everyone.

[PeteM01 10]

The people who I knew that entered the half marathon completed it, so it wasn't ruined for everyone.

 

I will be happy with it if they give out the chip times. They might not be 'official' times but they will certainly be of interest to the participants.

[Happ Hazzard 10]

Were the SHM to be run professionally, who would pay all the costs?

Sponsors..

[I1L2T3 10]

2 issues I would like to know the answer to.

 

1,Why did it only come to light when the race was about to start surely everything should have been checked and re checked well before that.

 

2,Why was the PA system not checked before so that race organisers could communicate with runners.

 

The second in particular is pretty basic surely?

 

Just been talking to a relative who ran. Loads of people got to the finish line without even knowing the race was cancelled - the PA system at the start wasn't working properly so loads didn't know it was cancelled. More worrying he saw several people collapsed and being attended to by paramedics. It would be terrible if those collapsed runners had run without knowing there was no water and then got into trouble.

 

Also some info on behaviour of the police - they were trying to set up road blocks initially and even went as far as preventing some of the leading runners from continuing past about one mile.

[Fudbeer 12]

Am certainly not in the blame game but to me whoever was responsible for organising it has made some pretty serious errors which have brought a fair bit of embarrassment to Sheffield and just blaming the water company is not acceptable.Who was in charge of making sure they delivered on time?Again basic project management.

 

---------- Post added 06-04-2014 at 14:14 ----------

 

Just been talking to a relative who ran. Loads of people got to the finish line without even knowing the race was cancelled - the PA system at the start wasn't working properly so loads didn't know it was cancelled. More worrying he saw several people collapsed and being attended to by paramedics. It would be terrible if those collapsed runners had run without knowing there was no water and then got into trouble.

 

Also some info on behaviour of the police - they were trying to set up road blocks initially and even went as far as preventing some of the leading runners from continuing past about one mile.

 

You are correct I did not know it was cancelled till the end.

[sheff71 10]

2 issues I would like to know the answer to.

 

1,Why did it only come to light when the race was about to start surely everything should have been checked and re checked well before that.

 

2,Why was the PA system not checked before so that race organisers could communicate with runners.

 

The second in particular is pretty basic surely?

 

Embarrassing for the city that likes to believe it's the City of Sport - absolute bare minimum checks should have ensured the water supply (and any other H&S essential equipment) were in place well before the runners arrived, and you would've thought all checks with the supplier that the water was already in the area at the latest yesterday.

 

There will certainly be a lot of fingers pointing at the people on the organising committee, and why someone wasn't tasked to ensure this was done.

 

As for SCC - they may not directly organise the event as others have clarified, but you'd like to think that when they do allow such a lot of road closures across the city, that the council at least have someone monitoring that everything is going okay (as the council would have greater experience in organising large events). Presumably the council had certain requirements the volunteers needed to fulfil before allowing the event to go ahead.

 

If they don't currently do that, i'm sure for any future non-SCC run events, they will ensure they are kept upto date with events to make sure such a fiasco doesn't happen again.

 

 

The other side of this is the people that just ran anyway. Given that the event was officially cancelled (so the organisers weren't liable for anyone dying of dehydration on that 13 mile course), by letting the runners do it anyway, if any of these fun runners had a heart attack or some other mishap, would the police have been liable for not stopping them? If it was safer to let them just run anyway, and that the runners were presumably running knowing that any injury/illness was on their own head, then it seems daft to have cancelled at all! It's not like the runners were suddenly safer because it was an unoofficial event.

 

Hopefully none of the charities have lost out on too much money raised from this - that would be the real shame of it.

 

Daft question... could they not have just postponed the start until sufficient water was sourced elsewhere - how much water do 5000 runners need that they couldn't acquire in the supermarkets! Is it just because Makro and Costco were shut until 11, and they couldn't be bothered to wait?

[JFKvsNixon 11]

Am certainly not in the blame game but to me whoever was responsible for organising it has made some pretty serious errors which have brought a fair bit of embarrassment to Sheffield and just blaming the water company is not acceptable.Who was in charge of making sure they delivered on time?Again basic project management.

 

I think that the fact that a lot of the runners refused to give in, and the spectators all chipped in and helped, will prove to be a positive story.

[999tigger 10]

Am certainly not in the blame game but to me whoever was responsible for organising it has made some pretty serious errors which have brought a fair bit of embarrassment to Sheffield and just blaming the water company is not acceptable.Who was in charge of making sure they delivered on time?Again basic project management.

 

---------- Post added 06-04-2014 at 14:14 ----------

 

 

You are correct I did not know it was cancelled till the end.

 

I thought youd do a 24/48hr check to see everything was in place. You dont know how much the water company dropped them in it. It could have been with very little time to fo o.e an hour beforehand so they had very little time to react. Am sure it will all come out in the wash.

[Goon 10]

I also ran the half this morning. The most frustrating part was the lack of communication once we were lined up for the race. I was quite near the front but never really suspected a problem until I had to run around a stationary lead car and Radio Sheffield car. We were just glad to get going as we had been stood for nearly an hour. A runner told me it had been cancelled and assumed that we wouldn't be able to run far until we were turned back. Of course, that didn't happen and nor should it have, nobody was breaking any laws.

 

The best part of the day was the local businesses and local people handing out water as well as runners sharing water throughout the race. That was really nice to experience.