Clearly lots of people weren’t happy with the Dublin Marathon entry ballot.
But nobody with ties to running in this country can say they didn’t know this was coming.
When demand for entries began outpacing supply, the lottery-based ballot was introduced after the 2019 event.
For next year’s Dublin Marathon, the organisers have scrapped the preferred entry route, which had guaranteed a spot to all those who entered the previous year (whether they showed up or not).
READ MORE
This move was aimed at increasing women’s participation and the number of first-time runners.
Yet it seems to have heightened interest in the crapshoot that is any ballot, which for the 2026 event opened for six days this month.
On Thursday, the organisers announced there were a record 47,000 applications for the 22,500 places available in next October’s event.
Of these, 17,200 were successful in the ballot, with close to a 50-50 split between first-time and returning runners. The remaining 5,300 slots will be shared among charity and international tour partners, good-for-age club runners, plus the elite men and women.
[ Running groups dismayed at outcome of ballot for places in next year’s Dublin Marathon ]
Cue widespread anger and dismay among those runners who missed out. Part of their anger was to do with the €5 administration fee applied to all ballot entries to cover processing costs. For successful applicants, this fee was redeemable against the full €110 entry fee.
But with 29,800 of the ballot applications unsuccessful, €149,000 in administration fees were still collected by the organisers from runners whose name didn’t come up in the ballot.
As a not-for-profit organisation, all this money goes back into the running of the Dublin Marathon and, like everything else in this country, that price is going up. The organisers were upfront about this administration fee from the start.
The other option would have been to increase the €110 entry fee, which has been unchanged for the past three years. Imagine some of the rage if that option had been taken.
It’s all a long way from the staging of the first Dublin Marathon back in October 1980. That had a little more to do with publicity than human endeavour, in this case the idea of Louis Hogan, then a senior producer with RTÉ Radio.
While on holiday in New York in autumn 1978, Hogan stumbled upon a still-fledgling marathon happening in Central Park. He reckoned a similar event in Dublin could be used as a platform to promote RTÉ’s new pop music station, Radio 2.
Knowing nothing about running, Hogan turned to someone who did: the two-time Olympian Noel Carroll. Carroll was already familiar to RTÉ Radio listeners as public relations officer for Dublin Corporation.
Carroll’s Monday evening slots on Jim O’Neill’s Drivetime soon turned into a sort of evangelical plea for runners to sign up, some of whom knew little about the marathon distance involved.
Still they secured 1,950 race entries by the September deadline, who each paid the £1.50 entry fee.
Consider how much the New York City Marathon has also grown over the years. That event began in 1970 with several laps around Central Park, the 55 finishers there paying a dollar entry fee.
For the 2025 New York event earlier this month, there were 200,000 applications for the open ballot, which only accounts for 6,000 of the overall entry of 60,000. In 2022, there were only 82,000 applicants in the open ballot.
This meant only 3 per cent were successful this year, which is incidentally a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, Princeton, Yale and every other Ivy League college in the US.
The entry fee is also substantially higher than Dublin, ranging from $255 (€220) for New York residents to $358 for international runners (all subject to an additional $11 processing fee).
All this helped generate a record $117 million in revenue last year for the New York Road Runners (NYRR), also a non-profit organisation that runs the New York City Marathon among other races in the Big Apple.
The New York City Marathon now attracts runners from 132 countries. Many of the entrants are there with international tour operators or else running for charity. Last month’s event produced a record 59,266 finishers – breaking the previous record of 56,640 who finished the London Marathon last April.
Amazingly, of 59,662 starters, 99.3 per cent of runners successfully crossed the finish line in New York.
Still there was some rage against social media influencers who appeared to have successfully bypassed the ballot to gain a spot on the start line, as outlined in the 2,500-word breakdown of the race entry written by Joe Pompliano for the business of sport website Huddle Up.
From talking to some running coaches around the country this week, there was also some anger here about the number of social media influencers who appeared to be gaining entry to the Dublin Marathon.
There is nothing to suggest some or all of these were somehow bypassing the entry ballot, but in advance of this year’s event the organisers sent out a strict warning against the swapping of race numbers, particularly among men using women’s numbers.
“Any participant found to have sold, transferred or otherwise misused their race number will be banned (along with the recipient) from all future events organised by the Dublin Marathon,” they said. It remains to be seen how strictly this will be enforced if those in breach of the rule are actually named.
Meanwhile, after experiencing a worrying decline in the uptake of race-day entries in recent years, the Dublin organisers have reversed that trend over the last two years.
In the 2023 event, also a 22,500 sell-out, only 16,540 runners made the race start, with 16,347 listed as official race finishers – meaning around 6,000 race entries went unused, despite all paying the entry fee of €110.
Of the 22,500 for last month’s sell-out event, there just over 18,500 official finishers, meaning there were still 4,000 entries which went unused on the day.
Plenty of runners must be raging when hearing that, and the hope is anyone lucky enough to secure an entry for next year’s marathon won’t be put off in any way. Time will tell on that front.
