Seven Hong Kong Streetathon runners are still unable to find their belongings amid a chaotic bag collection that resulted from a Wi-Fi system failure, according to the event organisers.
Andes Leung, CEO of RunOurCity, which organised the Kerry Hong Kong Streetathon, apologised for the mishap on an RTHK radio show on Monday morning following public backlash over the Sunday event.
A total of 18,600 runners took part in the marathon, which featured a new route spanning from the Island Eastern Corridor in Fortress Hill to Yau Ma Tei.
Viral online photos showed runners searching for their belongings as bags lay strewn on the ground after the race. Some participants likened the experience to finding a needle in a haystack.
Explaining the chaos on Monday, Leung said a new system was introduced this year, requiring runners to scan a QR code in their race pack to locate where their belongings were stored.
But a Wi-Fi signalling error caused a system failure, and staff resorted to arranging the bags by bib numbers, Leung said.
“We have seven cases… [of people] who could not find their belongings,” he said in Cantonese.
“We have the contact details of all of them… if in the end, we still cannot find [their bags] or for whatever reason, they cannot be found… we will reach out and communicate with them.”
He added, “We recognise our shortcomings, but we need to identify the right solutions.”
‘Technical issue’
In a Facebook post on Sunday morning, shortly after the race ended, the organisers thanked participants for their patience and apologised for the inconvenience.
“Due to a technical issue with the baggage storage system, longer queues have formed at the baggage collection area, resulting in extended waiting times,” it said.
Photos of numbered plastic bags scattered on the floor and of participants combing through them went viral.
“Kerry Streetathon is crazy. [They] just sloppily threw our bags on the floor,” one Threads user wrote in Chinese. “There are no staff helping and the [bags] are not categorised by number.”
Major Canto Traits, a meme page, posted a side-by-side photo showing a messy collection point at Cainiao – a package logistics company – and runners searching for their bags after Streetathon.
Some people also criticised Streetathon for closing its comment sections on Facebook and Instagram.
Around 20,000 runners registered for the streetathon this year, the highest number in its history, organisers said.
Streetathon started in 2014 with around 5,000 runners, and has been held every year since, except in 2021 and 2022, when the event could not be held due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is not the first year the event has faced criticism.
Last year, volunteers sent some half-marathon runners the wrong way, causing them to run an extra nine kilometres.
In 2023, poor track instructions led some marathon runners to mistakenly run into the half-marathon track.
