About

How I got here

In 2022 I created Um Golpe Por Dia (A Scam A Day), where I warned people in Brazil about digital scams. It is now more than half a million followers on Instagram and close to eight hundred thousand across social media. So taking something complicated and explaining it on video is not new to me.

Then I put together three things that were already mine: the auditing experience, the knowledge of technology and data, and the love of running. This project became close to inevitable.

What the system does

Races publish each runner's splits. When someone's splits show they covered one stretch far faster than everything else they ran that day, or that they never passed a checkpoint they should have passed, that leaves a mark in the data. The system checks every result in a race, not a sample, and applies the same test to everyone in it.

Why I do this

For integrity, honesty and transparency in the sport. A race is a promise: everyone covers the same course, and the result means the same thing for everyone. When somebody cuts the course, that promise is what breaks, and it breaks for the people who ran every step of it.

The next step, which is this site

Working with that data, I realized it is good for far more than finding who cut a course. Your splits tell the story of your whole race: where your pace fell away, what it cost you on the clock, and how normal that was for the people who finished alongside you. That is what this site is about. It is not about catching anyone, it is about you understanding your race and your progress as a runner.

The full method is here.

The audit does not run on this site

None of the audit's verdicts are held here and none are shown. No runner carries a mark, there is no list of suspects, and there is no count of how many were flagged at a race.

The investigations do exist, and they are published separately, case by case, as something I decide to publish, never as a field on a race page or on your result.

How I work, and what I don't do

I do this in the evenings and on weekends. I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with running, and for now nobody pays me anything for it. That makes the work slow. It also means I am not under pressure from a client with an interest in how my analysis comes out.

I avoid taking money from races, timing companies and results platforms, to minimize conflicts of interest.

I don't publish any runner's name, and I don't hold one either: nothing in my data has a name column, not on this site and not in the analysis behind it. In my analyses I also don't show the bib number or the finish time, and I never show enough splits for anyone to add up and reach the finish time. I always try to make identifying a runner as hard as I possibly can.

I get things wrong sometimes. When that happens I correct it in public and say what changed.

Where to find me

I post videos almost daily, in Portuguese at @umgolpepormilha and in English at @raceauditor, on social media.

To reach me: contact@raceauditor.com

If you organize a race, there is a page for organizers.