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Ariana Grande over runners at the New York Marathon
This year, more than 60,000 people officially competed in the New York City Marathon. That seemingly included one man who had a brief brush with fame by high-fiving Ariana Grande during the race, but he’s been banned from competing in it after he was caught forging the bib number of someone who actually paid to run.
The New York City Marathon is one of the most prestigious 26.2-mile races on the planet (it’s one of the eight that comprise the World Marathon Majors), and each year, tens of thousands of people flock to the Big Apple to compete in the race that takes runners through all of its five boroughs.
There are a few different ways to qualify if you want to get in on the action.
That includes hitting a time threshold at designated races, participating in a program where you commit to a series of events over the course of a year, raising money for a charitable cause, or being one of the approximately 1% of applicants who win the slots up for grabs in a lottery (all of those routes are also accompanied by registration fees north of $250).
It’s not that difficult to sneak onto the streets and run most (or all) of the course, which is apparently what one man did before inadvertently blowing up his own spot after bragging about crossing paths with a celebrity.
A runner who high-fived Ariana Grande during the New York City Marathon was banned from entering next year for forging the bib they were wearing
This year’s New York City Marathon was held on Sunday, November 1st, and 61,146 of the 61,529 people who started it officially finished.
A couple of days after it unfolded, a runner named Mike Clarke shared a video that he filmed while running toward Columbus Circle on 59th Street, one that captured him unknowingly high-fiving Ariana Grande, who was posted up on a sidewalk across the street from Central Park.
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The video has been viewed more than six million times on the Instagram account where he chronicled his training efforts in his quest to break the 2:30 mark in NYC. According to the Strava data he posted, he fell short by coming in at 2:36:55, but that’s not the number you’d see if you looked up his bib number online.
According to the New York Post, Clarke’s bib number was 4207, which actually belonged to Nicolas Bourot, who serves as the Chief Security Officer for a banking group in France and finished the marathon with a time of 3:23:23 (he told the outlet he’d waited a decade to get the chance to compete).
Clarke was largely unrepentant, saying, “At the end of the day they can call it unfair or cheating the system but for me it was to push my limits while running for this goal and have fun while doing it.”
He added that he picked the number that ended up being Bourot’s as a tribute to a friend who passed away and said he was able to run the entire race thanks to the forgery that was convincing enough to gain access to the starting pens. He was photographed posing with a medal after finishing, but he claims he ended up giving it to a kid.
The organization that oversees the marathon used to deploy spotters who were tasked with tracking down illegitimate runners who managed to infiltrate the race, but that practice was eventually abandoned. Clarke will have to illegally enter again if he wants to run the race next year, as officials confirmed he will not be allowed to compete in 2027 due to the fake bib.