Boston Marathon organizers are investigating MULTIPLE cases of stolen bib numbers that were used by unregistered runners in Monday’s race!
We reported earlier on a North Carolina woman who had her bib number used by at least two Boston College alums and now another bib bandit has been ID-ed!
Chelsa Crowley, an online fashion writer and wife of Dennis Crowley, the CEO of popular app Foursquare, was caught wearing a bib ID that didn’t belong to her!
34033 was registered to Kathy Brown, who was running the Marathon in order to raise thousands of dollars for multiple sclerosis. But when she looked at her official marathon photos online, she noticed several of the shots were of Chelsa Crowley!
Crowley had not only printed out a forged bib, she wrote her Twitter handle on it!
That’s how Kathy tracked her down!
Take a look at Chelsa’s past tweets leading up to the day of the race too.
On April 4th, she was still looking for a way to register, tweeting:
Then right before Marathon Monday, Dennis tweeted out a photo of them together. Another Twitter follower asked:
As you can see, Chelsa knew she had to keep her counterfeit bib a secret.
WCVB-TV in Boston spoke to Dennis Crowley who admitted that his wife DID steal the bib number but she only did it so that she could run with him. The couple both competed in last year’s marathon but got split up after the bombings.
Dennis was automatically allowed to run again since he never finished last year.
And while this may seem like a case of ‘no harm, no foul’ to some, Kathy Brown is upset that someone would try and pull a fast one on such a sacred Boston tradition, especially one year after the tragic events of the 117th running.
Brown explained:
“I put that work in it and it wasn’t fair that someone else didn’t have to do that. I understand she wanted to support her husband and wasn’t thinking of me, or wasn’t disgracing my charity. She just wanted to help her husband. But there are ways you can do that, there were probably 25,000 charity numbers, anyone could have done that. But I just think everyone should have gone about it the right way and done it the fair way that we all did.├óΓé¼┬¥
In previous years, anyone caught with a fake bib number was banned from ever running the Boston Marathon again. Hopefully Chelsa enjoyed competing this year, since it will probably be her last.
[Image via Twitter.]