Eight days after the 2026 Boston Marathon, the Boston Athletic Association's results page still requires a name-filtered search to surface the 80-plus finisher cohort. The elite-winner lists and the official medalists are public; the elder-cohort artifact is not. [1]

The paper moved this question to Day Seven and noted that the data exist — they sit inside results.baa.org's database — but require filter queries that no major outlet has run as a public-health story. Boston.com and Olympics.com still lead with the men's and women's open-division winners, and the BAA's own news feed carries no separate elder-finisher narrative. [2][3]

The transparency gap is what makes the story. Mass-participation marathons in 2026 mean octogenarian finishers; the New York City Marathon publishes age-group leaderboards on its homepage, and London's organizers issue post-race age-group press releases. Boston's interface treats age-group data as searchable inventory, not as published record. The result is a public health story buried under architecture rather than facts.

Day 8 is the institutional point at which the BAA could publish without prompting. It has not. The next datapoint is the official post-race report, which has historically appeared in early May.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago