Sunshine Coast Marathon Medals Cleared From a Brisbane Dock Just Days Before the Race

The finisher medals for Sunday’s Sunshine Coast Marathon Festival were released from a Brisbane shipping dock this week, four days before a record field of 16,500 runners is due on the start line, after organizers warned participants they might cross the line with nothing waiting for them.

Atlas Events, which owns and runs the festival, emailed entrants late Wednesday to say the medals might not make it. The container carrying them, along with event T-shirts, had reached the Port of Brisbane on Tuesday and was sitting on the dock. The situation was first reported by the ABC, whose Sunshine Coast bureau spoke to both the event and the port.

Managing director Jason Crowther told Sunshine Coast News that telling people early was an easy call. “Our runners have supported this event for 14 years, and they deserved to know what was happening,” he said.

The shipment was ordered months ago and was due at the Port of Brisbane on July 3, Crowther told the ABC. The shipping company blamed problems at the point of origin and a typhoon.

The typhoon accounts for part of the gap. Typhoon Bavi made landfall in eastern China on July 12 with winds of up to 40 meters per second. Ningbo, the world’s third-busiest container port, suspended container collection and delivery from midday on July 10, and Shanghai had begun clearing berths at its Yangshan and Waigaoqiao terminals the day before. The consultancy Linerlytica, cited by the shipping trade publication The Loadstar, put the disruption at close to 2 million TEU of containership capacity delayed, with North Asia accounting for 54 percent of congestion across all container ports and the affected gateways needing roughly two weeks to clear. A second storm, Typhoon Noul, began interfering with schedules in Fujian and South China from July 23.

None of that reaches the week before July 10. The container was already overdue when Bavi formed, and neither the event nor the shipping line has said what the point-of-origin delay involved.

“To not get a finisher medal is not acceptable from our point of view,” Crowther told the ABC. “We don’t take this lightly.”

The Port of Brisbane identified the container and moved it after receiving a media enquiry from the ABC. Executive general manager Brendan Connell told the broadcaster that senior staff “disrupted their own days” and that other work was “put on the backburner” so the box could be found and released. He was direct about how far that goes. “This isn’t a scenario we could repeat every day, it isn’t something that we can ordinarily influence,” Connell said.

Sunshine Coast Council says the region will host the marathon events at the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and describes the festival as an established platform for showing the coast can deliver races at that level. Australian road running has grown quickly around it: the Sydney Marathon drew more than 80,000 ballot entries for 35,000 places in its first year as a World Marathon Major.

Medal supply has caught out bigger events. The Edinburgh Marathon Festival ran out of finisher medals mid-event across a weekend of roughly 35,000 participants and mailed replacements afterward, and the Great North Run handed its 60,000 finishers medals engraved with the wrong city and river. What goes on the ribbon draws scrutiny because it is the part of an entry fee a runner keeps, which is why the Los Angeles Marathon spent race week defending a decision to award finisher medals to runners who cut the course at mile 18 in the heat, and why the Boston Athletic Association announced its 130th-running medal months in advance.

The festival starts at Alexandra Headland on Sunday on the single-lap marathon course introduced last year, running out through Twin Waters and Mudjimba. Entrants range in age from four to 84 and come from 42 countries. The 10K and the 2K sold out, and total attendance across the weekend is expected to pass 30,000.