It was a curious two day saga from the Dublin Marathon office this week. On this past Tuesday November 25th, thousands of 2026 Dublin Marathon hopefuls opened their emails, only to be told no place for you. All in one day. Rejected in bulk like faulty stock. Then yesterday, Wednesday the 26th, the chosen few received the opposite message. A neat second batch. A tidy process for someone in an office, perhaps, but for the wider running community it was a grim couple of days and an absolute masterclass in how not to release the results of a ballot.
The Dublin Marathon organisers told us that the idea behind this ballot system was supposed to bring fairness, calm, and transparency compared to previous years. Instead, all anyone heard on Tuesday were messages that began with bad news. You would swear the entire country was unsuccessful. People wondered if anything at all had gone right. Social media swamped with posts of no luck lads. Nothing but stories of disappointment. Many assumed a genuine glitch in the notification system. Some genuinely believed not a single person had secured entry. Many others simply received no notification at all.
Then yesterday morning, the silence finally broke. A handful of sheepish sounding posts appeared. Success emails started to land. Winner Wednesday arrived. At least for a very select club who no doubt now feel as popular as a Lotto jackpot winner.
From a PR point of view, it was a baffling set up. Why split it over two days. Why send all rejections together on Tuesday and keep every yes hidden until Wednesday. It created suspicion, confusion, and a fair dose of bitterness for something that should have been straightforward. It takes some skill to make our national marathon ballot feel like a county council screw up.
All of this, of course, comes on top of the already controversial decision to charge a €5 non-refundable fee just to enter the ballot. Dublin now stands alone in Europe in doing so. Of the big city marathons, only Tokyo, an Abbott World Marathon Major with vastly more demand, asks for a fee just to apply. London doesn’t. Berlin doesn’t. New York doesn’t. Not even Amsterdam or Paris. So goodwill was already wearing thin. And then, just to twist the knife, they followed that up with a rejection first announcement strategy that left thousands fuming.
Now some will argue that the ballot has been a PR headache from the minute it replaced the old first come system. But instead of queues at the laptop and frantic typing, we now have two days staring at an inbox like someone waiting on biopsy results. It should not feel like a high stakes romance text where you find out if you are dumped today or adored tomorrow. Here we are though.
The frustration has little to do with missing out on a run. It is the handling of it. The uncertainty. The silence for others. The strange decision to engineer twenty four hours where it looked like every applicant had failed. It left people stewing, speculating, and generally feeling fairly hard done by. Our capital's marathon is meant to build community. Instead, this episode built distrust.
The 2026 Dublin Marathon will be a roaring success. It always is. But it feels some of the goodwill is starting to slide. Ask around today and you will hear people saying it felt like a stunt. A clumsy one. A fixable one. A pointless one.
If the goal was to deliver two days of rough headlines and exasperated posts from every corner of Irish running, then job done. If not, it's perhaps time for a rethink before 2027 ballot.
For now, congratulations to those whose emails contained relief instead of rejection. Hard luck to the rest. Same again next year. Probably.