Officials Mistake
 

Ok, here is one for people.

Conference championship meet. Conference rules clearly state that no substitutions shall be allowed at the meet, only scratches.

Women's 800 run, two runners from Team A don't show. The assistant coach of Team A comes over with two different runners, and says these runners will run in place of the other two runners.

The clerk allows this substitution and the two runners in question place 5th and 6th, scoring 3 points for the team. Team A wins the meet by 1 point. The meet referee, upon reviewing results with the FAT operator notices the change.

What should happen in this situation. Does the error by the clerk allow these runners to be legally entered, or at they considered illegal participants in the event, and thus disqualified from the event. To my knowledge Team B who finished second, never was aware of the substitution and never protested.

The results of the race are official when the places have been determined and results recorded (4-7-1).

Appeals regarding misapplication of the rules shall be filed within 30 minutes (2-3-3).

It sounds like the misapplication of the rules was found more than 30 minutes after the conclusion of that event. The results should stand.

The issue was that the results had not yet been recorded officially. They were noticed when the FAT operator and the meet referee were reviewing the results, apparently because something did not look right to the FAT operator, based on the information he had.

Sorry. I understood the above to mean that the referee was going over things with the FAT operator after the meet was complete.

If it happened immediately after the race, those two should not have been included in the results. I also would not consider it one of their four events for the meet because they were not properly entered and even though they were on the track, they did not really compete in the race.

It does raise all sorts of questions about what would have happened if one of them had committed interference while they weren't competing in the race.