21.5 How many runners get medals?

Figure 21.9 displays the distributions of finishing times in the 2019 Comrades Marathon for females and males separately. It looks rather as if a set of skew distributions has been stuck together, each one ending at a particular time limit.

Figure 21.9: Finishing times in the 2019 race for females (above) and males (below), dotted lines mark limits for awarding medals other than gold

The vertical scales of the plots differ, as fewer women took part. The same intermediate boundary effects can be seen in both histograms. Some runners clearly wish to finish within certain target times. Dotted lines have been drawn to mark times governing the awarding of medals other than gold. The top 10 of each sex get gold medals. Men finishing under 6 hours but not in the top 10 get a Wally Hayward medal and women finishing under 7.5 hours but not in the top 10 get an Isavel Roche-Kelly medal. Every finisher gets a medal, and details of all the medals can be found in Wikipedia (2022).