Ron Kantowski suggests ways to expedite winners’ pay

Saturday, Dec. 1, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

I distinctly remember Jemima Jelagat, the women's champion of last year's Las Vegas Marathon, running past me about six or seven miles into the race. It was cold and the wind had started to blow and she had this pained expression on her face, as if her running shoes were laced too tight.

Man, I remember thinking. You couldn't pay me enough to run a marathon.

What I should have been thinking is you can't pay me anything, at least not for 11 months, to run a marathon. Then I would have known what it's like to run 26.2 miles in Jelagat's shoes. Or Joseph Kahuga's.

The Kenyans each won $15,000 for winning the men's and women's divisions of last year's marathon. Kahuga also earned a $50,000 bonus for winning a male vs. female challenge in which the ladies were given a head start.

They didn't receive their checks until last week.

Maybe they were in the mail. The last time I checked, Nairobi was one of the few destinations not on Southwest Airlines' weekend getaway schedule. At least that would explain the delay.

In the old days, when the marathon was run by Al Boka and local volunteers out of an old Asics box, the winners were lucky to get a souvenir T-shirt at the end of 26.2 miles. Then again, they weren't promised much more.

All we keep hearing is how these out-of-town promoters and directors are going to transform the marathon into a world-class event. Or at least a reasonable facsimile of Boston or New York or Chicago.

Getting the bureaucrats to string up some of that yellow crime scene tape down the Strip, so the participants could run down it at the crack of dawn without getting run over by a taxicab, was a good start. And there's no debating that the new Las Vegas Marathon (although they're not calling it that this year, because Zippo or Zappos or one of those other po's has finally coughed up some sponsorship money) has added a lot of professional polish to the dusty old Las Vegas Marathon.

But how can it pretend to be big time if it takes 50 weeks to come up with the cash to pay the winners?

Normally, from what I have learned, it should take about six weeks to pay off the winners, two months tops if there's drug testing (six months, if Barry Bonds is running).

Marathon officials basically blamed the delay on growing pains, the biggest of which was the race's makeover. They had a bad year, they said.

Hey, so did the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They had such a bad year they even changed their name. But the players still got paid.

There are two things marathon officials can do to prevent this scenario from reoccurring and taking another credibility hit.

First, I would look into hiring Floyd Mayweather, the boxer, as treasurer. He's good at stacking $100 bills into neat little piles, a couple of which could be set aside for whichever two Kenyans win this year.

My second proposal requires some arithmetic. It costs $105 to register for the marathon; $95 for the half-marathon. More than 15,000 runners have preregistered. For the sake of this argument - and to make sure Floyd gets a little something for the effort - let's just say they're all half-marathoners who paid $95. Multiplied by 15,000, that's $1.4 million.

I would then take $164,000 out of the kitty - the advertised total race purse - and pay the winners before they head back to the Great Rift Valley.

Then, and only then, should the race organizers take $20 out of petty cash to tip the guy at the airport who shines their loafers on their way out of town.