Fact Check: Did 11,000 runners take part in the 2022 Cork City Marathon event???

Someone recently sent me a message about a claim by the organisers of the Cork City Marathon that  their 2022 event had 11,000+ participants. At first glance, it seemed extraordinarily high so I checked the results.

In 2022, the Cork City Marathon event did very well. While most road races were down after the pandemic, there was a big jump in numbers for the marathon and half marathon races.

However, the combined total number of finishers in all of the events was nowhere near 11,000+. 

The results for 2022 show that there were 1721 finishers in the full marathon and 3200 in the half-marathon, both impressive figures.

In the relay event, there was 473 teams. If we say that there was a maximum of 5 per relay team... which there wasn't in reality because some teams had less than 5 members... then that's a maximum of 2365.

Add together the full, half and the relay teams and we get a figure of just under 7,300. 

Was this just a mistake? 

I looked back at the Echo headline from race day 2022 and it was claiming more than 12,000 runners!

That figure is even further away from the actual 7,300 or so. How could the Echo get the number so wrong?

What normally happens here is that a pubic relations company sends a press release with photos to various media outlets after an event and the media companies just copy and paste the press release or just reword it. It would seem that the Echo didn't actually check the results to see if the figure was remotely accurate.

RTE likewise reported the inflated figure of 12,000+ so it wasn't just an Echo mistake.

As for why??? ... As can be seen from the figures above, the numbers reported was about 5,000 more than the actual number that participated. As for why? 7,300 was a jump up on the pre-pandemic numbers of 2019 and it seems strange that the organisers felt the need to inflate the number of participants by about 70%.