We’ll be brief in light of the slew of Western States related articles we’ve already written. Haven’t had your fill? Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing more in other outlets soon. Anyway… we’re here to announce the results of our 2010 Western States Prediction Contest. Before we move on, we wanted to thank Mitchell Goodman for being the programming brains behind this contest.
As Bryon Powell crunched the final numbers by hand, we’re only posting the results of those who accumulated 50 or fewer points. (For a refresher on the rules, check out the contest entry page.) Read on to find out who won the contest and what they win, who did the best at picking the men’s and women’s fields individually, and our on observations on the contest.
The Winners
Wow! Last year’s winner, John McAlister, won with 16 points. This year that would have put him in a tie for 15th! The combination of more contest entrants, better picks, and more routine weather with many fewer dropouts made this year’s contest a much tighter competition…. just like the race itself.
No more waiting… except to thank Montrail and Mountain Hardwear for providing the great prizes for the contest. Without them, the only thing to come out of the contest would be bragging rights! On to the winners!
Jane Larkindale (10 points) wins a pair of Montrail Sabino Trail, a Mountain Hardwear Refueler short (men) or a MH Pace(r) short or skort (women), and a Mountain Hardwear Wicked Lite performance shirt. What makes Jane’s win remarkable is that she only picked one of ten scoring positions dead on and that was Geoff Roes for the men’s win. She received one point each for picking Anton Krupicka for 3rd, Kilian Jornet for 4th, Nick Clark for 5th, and Gary Robbins for 7th in the men’s race, and on the women’s side, Tracy Garneau for 2nd, Joelle Vaught for 6th, Annette Bednosky for 7th, and Angela Shartel for 8th. Her only scoring 2 point pick was Nikki Kimball for the women’s win.- John Medinger (11 points) wins a pair of Montrail Sabino Trail and a Mountain Hardwear Refueler/Pace(r) bottom. John took fourth in last year’s contest by virtue of losing a tie breaker. This year, he won a tie breaker to take second by correctly picking Tracy Garneau for the women’s win and only being off by one spot with his pick of Andy Jones-Wilkins in the men’s masters race. Medinger correctly picked Garneau and Roes for the overall wins as well as Meghan Arbogast for second women. Clearly this Western States Board member knows his race!
- Mike Chastain (11 points) wins a pair of Montrail Sabino Trail and a Montrail hat. Mike lost the tie breaker to Medinger by 1 point as he was one spot off in each the men’s and women’s masters races by picking Andy Jones-Wilkins and Meghan Arbogast. He did, however, nailed his picks for Geoff Roes (M1), Anton Krupicka (M2), Zach Miller (M5), and Annettte Bednowsky (F8). Mike tied for the best score in picking the women’s field last year.
The Overall Contest Field
Below are all 107 individuals who scored 50 or fewer points. Last year, only 46 accomplished that feat.
[A note to email subscribers only: If you can’t see these results, you need to click on the article title in your email to view the article in a web browser.]
[If you notice an error in our arithmetic, please let us know!]
Men’s Predictions
No one picked the men’s field better than David Macris who scored only 1 point there! David should go play the ponies as he correctly picked a quadfecta… if there’s such a thing. He nailed Roes, Krupica, Jornet, and Clark for first through fourth. His final scoring pick was Gary Robbins, who finished sixth, as seventh. His other non-scoring picks were Leigh Schmitt for 5th (265 pts for DNF), Eric Skaden for 6th (5 pts), and Victor Ballesteros for 8th (13 pts). Last year’s winner of this category, Jeanie Sullivan, accumulated 9 points.
Women’s Predictions
Budd Ring knew the women better than anyone else. Budd correctly picked Meghan Arbogast for 2nd, Caren Spore for 5th, Joelle Vaught for 7th, and Annette Bednosky for 8th. Budd’s lone point-accruing-pick was Tracy Garneau for 3rd (2 pts). Non-scoring picks include Devon Crosby-Helms for the win (59 pts for DNF), Pam Smith for 4th (6 pts), and Beverly Anderson-Abbs for sixth (54 pts for DNS). Last year, nine folks tied for the win with four points.
- The Group-Think Predictions based on our combined contest entries were great this year. A straight application of the Top 8 picks in both fields would have yielded 9 points for the ladies and 11 points for the men for a total of 20 points, which would beat 5 out of 6 individual contest entrants.
- The group analysis gets even more accurate if you take out the four top contenders who were known not to be starting even before the contest closed: Tsuyoshi Kaburaki, Jez Bragg, Anita Ortiz, and Beverly Anderson-Abbs. With those four removed and remaining group-think predictions moved up, the collection of iRunFar readers scored 10 women’s points and only 6 men’s points for 16 points in total. In the end, only 14 of the 200 individual entrants scored better than the group (and my scoring methodology)! Congrats to the 14 champions of our contest and to all of us for working so well together!
- Five Top 10 finishers in this year’s race entered the contest. Each picked himself to place higher than his actual finish, but two were within one place, another within two places, and a third three places off. A fifth was off by six spots.
- Only two people correctly picked both masters winners, Glen Redpath and Tracy Garneau. As it happens, the potent prognosticators were two Canadians who were running together at mile 94 and finished sixth and seventh overall, Gary Robbins and Glen Redpath. Pretty nifty, eh?!
- Dave Mackey paced Geoff Roes to the win. This was certainly in his own interest, as he successfully picked Geoff for the win.
- Personally, I only got one spot dead on, Nikki Kimball for third. Still a better effort than last year.
Final Words
Thanks to the 200 individuals who took part in the contest. We had a lot of fun bringing it to you and hope you had a lot of fun participating. We hope to bring you more fun contests in the future.
Thus concludes our analysis of this year’s Western States 100. Now where did we put that list of 2011 entries… ;-)
