Marathon, the 26 miles endurance race is one of the toughest sports in the world. Gebrselassie, the world Marathon record holder ran the 26 miles in 2 hours, 4 minutes and 26 seconds. Gebrselassie told radio 4′s Gary Richardson that when training for a race, he run over 100 miles a week, running 20 miles a day.

For some Marathon runners in Xiamen, South China running 20 miles a day or doing strenuous preparation to run a marathon is probably not their cup of tea because they have other plans as to how to complete the run. Marathon officials have disqualified more than 30 runners of the top 100 finishers in the Xiamen Marathon. Looking through video footage of the even, officials found that quite of a few of the runners deployed unsportsmanlike methods to complete their marathon.
Cheating methods deployed by in the race includes giving the timer chip to a faster runner who then ran with two chips, some got lift in vehicles for many miles during the run while other hire impostor to do the running for them.

Unlike say 100 meter sprint, Marathon which take the best sports men and women over 2 hours to complete leaves a lot of time for cheats to find a sneaky ways to gain unfair advantage, many years ago in London marathon, before time-recording chips were introduced, two runners tried to cheap by one running half of the marathon and the second completing the rest, they managed to swap their number successfully, they would have got away with it for one minor detail the cheats over looked, one of the men had moustache but the other did not, comparing the picture of the man who finished the race with a particular number with the man who started the race with the same number, official saw that he had no moustache at the start of the race but a full moustache at the end of the race.

Cheating in Marathon dates back a long time, in the 1904 Olympics, the gold medalist Fred Lorz was later found out to have has a lift in his managers car for about 11 miles of the 26 miles race.