Crowding at the front of marathon packs

We study the crowding of near-extreme events in the time gaps between successive finishers in major international marathons. Naively, one might expect these gaps to become progressively larger for better-placing finishers. While such an increase does indeed occur from the middle of the finishing pack down to approximately 20th place, the gaps saturate for the first 10–20 finishers. We give a probabilistic account of this feature. However, the data suggest that the gaps have a weak maximum around the 10th place, a feature that seems to have a sociological origin.