London Marathon runner accused of cheating by taking a short-cut says he has 'done nothing wrong'
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Version 0 of 1. A runner accused of cheating in the London Marathon by jumping over a barrier to take a short cut has denied the claims against him. Jason Scotland-Williams, 34, achieved a “miracle” time and finished the second half of the race just three minutes shy of the world record for a half-marathon, acing Olympic champion Mo Farah’s time and placing him in the top six per cent of athletes on the day. He triumphantly crossed the finish line with a time of 3:08:47, putting Mr Scotland-Williams in a highly impressive 2,162nd place. Online forums have been awash with speculation that the model from West London could have jumped over a barrier at the half-way point on Tower Bridge and re-joined the race in its latter stretches – slashing 10 miles off the route. But Mr Scotland-Williams, who was running his sixth London marathon for deaf-blind charity Sense, last night said he had “done nothing wrong”. "I’m a personal trainer. I train every day, seven days a week, for the past seven years. Nobody thinks maybe I just trained hard”. The secret to his remarkable time? He claims he paced himself through the first half of the race and “let himself go” in a sprint to the finish. He added: “All along the route are stewards and people watching. There’s no way you can cheat”. A spokesman for the London Marathon said that race organisers were holding at investigation into Mr Scotland-Williams, who ran the race in a sense bib and a V for Vendetta mask. And a representative from Sense charity said they would be “very disappointed” if the allegations against Mr Scotland-Williams were true. The mystery echoes a controversy from four years ago, when it emerged that a runner thought to have recorded the fastest time for a pensioner in the London event had taken a 10 mile short cut. |