More Than 2,000 Runners Left Off Bloomsday List

Sat., May 8, 1999

From Staff Reports

Turns out more than 2,000 Bloomies weren’t included as finishers in previously published race results, but their names will be listed in print Sunday.

Initially, organizers said between 300 and 400 runners weren’t counted because of a mishap at the finish line. A batch of finishers who clocked times between 40 minutes and an hour were misplaced after a worker was cut and bled on the tags.

After that discovery, organizers found another 1,500 names had been lost due to a computer glitch, Bloomsday committee member Steven Jones said. The finishers’ tags were entered into computers, but the information was lost.

“It was people more toward the end, the walkers, for some reason,” Jones said.

Corrected results for top finishers - with corrected Corporate Cup and age-group standings - will be published in Sunday’s Spokesman-Review. The results also will be available on the paper’s Web site: www.spokane.net.

For the 1999 Bloomsday race, 47,215 runners finished from the 53,747 who signed up. The rainy, chilly weather made for the lowest count since 1986, when 45,541 finished. That race 13 years ago was the first time more than 40,000 runners finished.

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