Virgin Money London Marathon places

23 November 2017 - By Marc Underdown

For those of you who were there on Tuesday will know that I announced who the VLM Helen Rollason charity place was being awarded to. We received three applications from Becky Booty, Hayley Ellen and Tanya Nash, and all of them put forward a good application.

Three of us looked through the applications, and all of us agreed that the place should be awarded to Hayley Ellen, so congratulations to her!

Mixed with this positive news, I unfortunately had to break some very disappointing news to Andy Lager. In the last few days, it has become clear that the race organisers have changed the criteria for how they award places to affiliated running clubs. Whereas previously a club needed to have 100 members with race licenses to receive two places, they now need 150. Whilst we met the former criteria, we do not meet the revised one. We only found this information out by chance, and no formal announcements were sent to clubs.

To make this change so late in the process is extremely frustrating and we were not the only club that had already announced their ballot allocation. Naturally Andy was disappointed and I fully empathise with him and share his disappointment. I offered to delay announcing the charity place, but he did not wish to be considered for that place.

We understand that the Essex County Athletic Association chairman will be writing to the VLM organisers to express their disappointment with this change and it is likely we may do this ourselves as well.