Sunshine Coast Marathon Festival 2024

Introduction

Running event result websites never show all the cool statistics you want. They tend to show paginated tables of all finishers, with an ability to search for yourself and that's about it. Luckily for us, these tables lend themselves to being easily scraped, so I wrote a quick little script to download the results of the entire marathon festival. Let's see what interesting information we can glean from the results!

I know what everyone's most interested in is: "How do I stack up compared to the rest?", so let's get that out of the way first.

Performance

Use the filters below to see how you stack up:

Event:

Gender:

I'd love it if road race and triathlon events showed histograms like this. Now that we've looked at performance, let's look at some general race stats.

Race Participation

Let's take a look at how many people entered each event.

The Sunshine Coast Marathon Festival reported record breaking numbers over the weekend with news outlets reporting: "A record breaking 12,000 participants".

As we can see, this is almost correct but I'm only seeing 11,635 results, so I'm going to have to fact check the OurSC news outlet on that one. Nevertheless, this is still an excellent turnout.

Let's take a look at the race outcomes of all these entrants.

Of the 11,635 participants, most of them finished their respective events normally. We can see a whopping 1,703 participants in either the "Not Started" and "DNS" categories. Why these are different categories I don't know, but I'd guess they come from different recording mechanisms. Perhaps 1692 people didn't pick up their race bib, but then a further 11 who did pick up their gear still didn't show up to their race. If we assume that the average ticket cost was ~$100, (some races cost more, others cost less) then we can assume that the race made $169,200 from people who didn't even run!

Also we can see the 156 DNF's, which is remarkably low really, showing that if you start your race, you have only a ~1.5% chance of not finishing it.

I wonder how these rates change depending on which race you entered...

Now that we're looking at the individual events, we can see that if you ran the marathon, there is actually a 4.6% chance that you would have dropped out, but for all other lengths, it was less than 1%. We can also see that the rate of disqualifications is significantly lower for all non-marathon events. This makes sense since the entire festival is centered around the marathon.

Where did everyone come from?

On the results website, it shows us the country that each entrant has signed up from. I'd expect that almost everyone will have entered as Australia given the Sunshine Coast Marathon is more of a smaller less-international event compared to the Elite Label Gold Coast Marathon just down the road.

We can see that almost 2% of race entrants registered under countries other than Australia. Here is the breakdown of where the non-Australian atheletes came from:

We have great representation from a large number of countries. The way I determine an athlete's country is by looking at the flag displayed on the website. The flags seem to use ISO 3166-1 2 letter country codes (For example, "AU" = "Australia") which lets me link them to a country. There are still 2 athletes who have a blank country in the data. I wonder if these athletes somehow managed to register without a country, or if they registered with a country that doesn't have a valid ISO code. I suppose the question: "How many countries are there?" is actually very contentious with no consensus between governments worldwide, so it makes sense that we can run into an edge case like this.

Random

The race results also include everyones names, but I've been intentionally avoiding doing too much with names, because people get a little icky about using personal information, but here are the top 10 most common entrant names and gender, just out of curiousity.