Five days after the 130th Boston Marathon, the Boston Athletic Association has not released age-stratified medical-tent outcomes from Monday's race. [1] The field included 21 starters aged 80 and older in a roster of roughly 30,000; John Korir's winning 2:01:52 is the course record and the third-fastest road marathon ever run; start-line temperatures sat in the upper 20s with 37-degree wind chill at the course. [2] The paper's Wednesday read tracked the cold-start frame against the peer-reviewed prediction that a cold race runs well below a warm one's 8-9% medical-load rate. Day Five finds the prediction unverified in public data.

The transparency case is that BAA holds both numerator and denominator for the 80-plus cohort. Its own entrant demographics put the cohort at 21 runners. [1] Its own finish-line and course medical-tent logs, staffed by 1,800 volunteers organized around Mass General Brigham preparedness, record the encounter counts for each medical trailer. Five days is long enough to compile an age-stratified summary. The 2024 warm race produced 77 hospitalizations; the 2015-2019 peer-reviewed baseline sits at 8-9% of the field medical-encountered. [3] A 2026 cold-race number below that baseline would confirm the model. A number at the baseline would not.

The operational question for the 80-plus cohort — the twenty-one runners who completed the race at wind chills down to 37 degrees — is legible and specific: how many encountered the medical tent, for what, and with what disposition. Those numbers exist. Their release calendar does not.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago