Roady wrote:
NYRR is a business, plain and simple. I fully expect them to pocket as much of the revenue as possible. In addition, they will try to limit the amount of appearance fees and prize money they have to pay the elites. At the end of the day, unless a special interest group puts a ton of pressure on them to give a large portion of the revenues to charity, not running the NYC Marathon is a huge cost savings for NYRR. Personally, I hope they get their pants sued off. Road races have become big business, much the same as college football. They say it's about the fans and the athletes, but that's a sales pitch. I feel for the area affected by the hurricane as much as anybody, but the race should not have been cancelled. Postponed maybe, but not cancelled. The company that supplies those generators that ended up in the NY Post has plenty of them to go around. The reality is that the affected people/areas may/may not have the money or the resources in place to pay for them. NYRR does. Whether the race was run or cancelled isn't going to change this. Last time I checked, Sandy is not Katrina. An entire city was underwater with Katrina, looting was occurring, tons of people who didn't evacuate were still trapped in their homes days after the storm had passed. NYC isn't experiencing this. Sorry for the rant, but you aren't getting your money back and NYRR is going to keep as much of it as possible. And the police aren't going to get as much overtime pay as a result.
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You are correct it's a business and should be treated as such. Poor decisions by CEO Wittenberg , failure to understand the scope of the situation , lack of a plan B , not informing the runners of the risk of cancelation prior to travel , poor judgement that a donation might appease the general population's resentment towards the race . Mary failed as CEO and is in any business she should be fired or step down.