Jason Arday's marathon challenge and football claims found to be true after his death
Claims made by Jason Arday, who was the subject of a relentless media campaign over many aspects of his work and life and who was found dead on Friday, appear to be true, a Middle East Eye analysis has found.
These include the Cambridge University professor's claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days for charity and that he played semi-professional football, which both became central talking points in recent attacks on the late academic.
Certain other claims the sociologist made, which were widely denounced as false, have not been proven untrue, or appear more complex than some media discourse has suggested.
Arday, 42, was found dead in south London last Friday. Earlier this month he had resigned from his role as a professorial chair at the University of Cambridge, and from Jesus College Cambridge, where he was a fellow.
Cambridge announced an independent investigation into Arday's appointment on 6 August following plagiarism allegations.
Extensive media coverage, which continued after Arday resigned, highlighted allegations - often presented as facts - that the academic had fabricated large parts of his life story.
Particularly mocked was Arday's claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. But Arday does in fact appear to have completed the challenge.
On 16 June 2010 the Richmond and Twickenham Times, a London newspaper, reported that Arday, an "energetic lecturer", was set to "push his body to the limit by running the London Marathon route every day for 15 days followed by a run from Piccadilly to Teddington and back again for the second part of the challenge."
He was raising money for two charities, Shooting Star Children's Hospice and homeless charity Shelter.
Clapham-based Jason Arday completes 30 marathons in 35 days for Shelter and the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice | Richmond and Twickenham Times
— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) August 17, 2026
In total, Mr Arday has raised more than £100,000 for charity since he began fundraising when he was 17 https://t.co/r02kscp4mZ
“I felt I needed to do something to help people in this situation by supporting Shelter’s work with homeless and badly housed families.”
At the time, the article said, Arday was studying for a master's degree in physical education.
"I’ve been training for a few months now and I feel confident that I will complete all the marathons within reasonable times, but I’m under no illusion, it’s going to be tough."
'In 2010, I was with Jason on the last of the 30 marathons he ran in 35 days...And these runs were true. He wasn’t an ordinary person. He was extraordinary'
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Sarah Carney, old friend of Jason Arday
The news outlet My London ran a story saying Arday, a "Richmond College teacher" aged 24, was "taking on the challenge of a lifetime by attempting to complete 30 marathons in 35 days between 19 July and 22 August."
The article said: "Jason has been training since November and follows a gruelling schedule, running seven miles from 4am to 6am and another seven miles between 10pm and midnight. In between, he teaches at the college."
On 20 July 2010, a Richmond and Twickenham Times article reported that Arday had completed his first marathon.
"Jason Arday set off from Clapham at 6am yesterday to run the 26-mile course, which took in the sights of central London and Teddington, before finishing in Putney," it said, and published a photo of Arday running.
A Your Local Guardian story on 13 August then reported that the "end is in sight for an energetic lecturer who has nearly reached his target of running 30 marathons in 35 days."
'Tremendously inspiring'
Shooting Star's director of fundraising and marketing, Kim Darton, cycled alongside Arday on his 24th marathon, which was done in the early morning.
He was quoted saying: "I stayed with Jason throughout and we shared life stories through the night. I am stunned by this splendid man, and found my moments with him tremendously inspiring."
On 25 August, according to the Richmond and Twickenham Times, Arday completed his marathon "after enduring daily ice baths and a hairline fracture to his leg".
Arday's claim that he finished his challenge despite having suffered a hairline fracture to his leg would be widely mocked in the press in the last weeks of his life. Some outlets characterised the injury as a "broken leg", which is different from what Arday was claiming.
The article by the Richmond and Twickenham Times quoted Arday as saying: "In the final two miles of the final marathon, there were 50 people alongside me.
Not that it ever really mattered, but Jason Arday did actually play semi-pro football as he said he did.
— Nels Abbey (@nelsabbey) August 16, 2026
And even if he didn't, nothing he did or said warranted the mass-murderer-worthy press hysteria and hounding to a very predictable death that he was subjected to. https://t.co/01YDLpvVqV pic.twitter.com/zO6LAMMghB
"It was surreal, running through the centre of London - cars were stopping for me, people were cheering."
said: "It is a real privilege to have someone so unique and inspirational fundraising for our charity."
After his death, Sarah Carney, an old friend of Arday's, told the Socialist Worker: "By the time I knew him, he’d already raised loads of money for charity. He organised lots of events.
"In 2010, I was with Jason on the last of the 30 marathons he ran in 35 days," she recalled.
"Lots of people participated because he did the same route every day. A lot of the other students would meet up with him and run some of the way with him.
"A whole bunch of us ran with him for the second half of his last marathon. We all ended up in Sloane Square, in Chelsea. I’ve got photographs of him with the various T-shirts he wore, emblazoned with the charities he’d been raising money for.
"I can only vouch for the things that I know to be true. And these runs were true. He wasn’t an ordinary person. He was extraordinary."
Playing semi-professional football
Another claim derided online in the past few weeks was that Arday played semi-professional football. In fact he played for two semi-professional clubs, Walton and Hersham FC and Lewisham Borough FC.
He was listed as a goalkeeper in Lewisham Borough FC's first team, MEE has found, and was referenced in a report on a match in October 2018.
The writer Nels Abbey posted a video on X last week showing Arday singing in a changing room surrounded by other players.
Local media also reported in 2011 that Arday planned to run 300 miles in three days on a treadmill to fundraise for homelessness charity Shelter.
"He will attempt the challenge at Fitness First in Clapham Junction on August 10 and 12 - and on August 11 will be at Latchmere Leisure Centre in Battersea. He aims to be on the treadmill from 6am to 10pm every day," Your Local Guardian said.
Arday claimed to have raised more than £5m ($6.8m) for charity, which has also been ridiculed. Yet he often described this in collective terms, rather than suggesting he alone raised the sum.
He told the Guardian shortly before his death this month that the money had been raised through "many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period".
Byline Times found this week that the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with had a combined gross income of more than £1.4bn to £1.5bn, suggesting his claim to have of £5m in collective fundraising is plausible.
Arday was also accused of falsely claiming to write a book. It was reported this month that biographies of him online said he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.
But although the book has not been published, it does have a publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, and has been described as being a forthcoming title.
Other claims Arday made about his life have been questioned, including - perhaps most significantly - that he could not speak until he was 11 years old, besides "bits of words and... various noises out of context".
Some former schoolmates said he made jokes and entertained other pupils.
But other former schoolmates recalled Arday "not speaking and being regularly removed from class for additional support".
Caroline Russell-Clark, a mother of one of the schoolmates, said she remembered Arday having "serious learning difficulties", and that "I do not remember him speaking until he was playing in the same football team as my son aged 14-15."
Plagiarism allegations
Although questions still surround some of Arday's public claims, which in some cases have changed over time, it appears the impression created in much press coverage and online commentary that the academic invented enormous parts of his backstory is wrong.
The root of the scandal surrounding Arday, however, concerned allegations of plagiarism.
These stemmed from accusations by the academic Dr Nathan Cofnas, published on Substack, about Arday's PhD thesis.
Cofnas is a proponent of "racial realism" and wrote in February 2024 that without affirmative action, "blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment".
'My writing is a lot better, purely because I can afford a proofreader to read through everything I’ve done'
- Jason Arday
Arday completed his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015, which investigated it over plagiarism claims earlier this year.
The university concluded in March that the citation issues in the thesis were the result of "honest and reasonable error", and that textual overlap with other work was "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time".
It said Arday's supervisory team had been "depleted" and that he had received only one formal supervision during the PhD.
MEE has examined Arday's thesis, entitled "An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research."
Most of the citation issues investigated by the university in a section on literature review involved textual overlap and similarities with work by academic Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.
Notably, Arday extensively cited Zwozdiak-Myers in other sections of the thesis, and seemed to acknowledge that he drew heavily on her work: "findings were situated within categories and dimensions of mentoring and reflective practice, which helped to navigate and facilitate the purpose of the study.
"Ideas for this were generated from the work of Pollard (2011) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2012), with regards to their conceptions of reflective practice."
However, in the past two months Arday has been accused of further plagiarism, which he denied.
These allegations included that he had reproduced quotes from interviews conducted by other academics and that quotes from his interviews were repeated in different papers.
Responding to some of these accusations in an interview with the Times last month, Arday said: "At the stage I’m at now, if I write something, I can afford a proofreader... You’ll see there’s a very big difference between the work I wrote post-2021 and the work I’ve written up until now.
"My writing is a lot better, purely because I can afford a proofreader to read through everything I’ve done and sharpen up the language."
Numerous academics called for an investigation into his work earlier this month.
Tributes paid to Arday
At a vigil in Trafalgar Square on Monday, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy told a crowd of around 30,000 mourners: "I’m going to look around you and look at how many people have come tonight.
"That tells you what Jason meant. He held doors open behind him. He kept them open and thousands of us walked through. That is why this place is full tonight."
'He always had good ideas, always genuinely interested in the experiences of young people who would not usually be seen in research'
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Dr Rebecca Syed Sheriff, Oxford University
Dr Rebecca Syed Sheriff, an academic at Oxford who worked with Arday, described him after his death as "kind, wise, warm, fun... He was just incredibly friendly. He loved sport - rugby sevens, football (we always planned to go to a match together), and was very supportive (if a little unreliable) of me, colleagues, early career researchers."
She added: "He was great at doing interview training for the young people - he did some hilarious role-playing where he interviewed me using different styles.
"He always had good ideas, always genuinely interested in the experiences of young people who would not usually be seen in research."
When Arday resigned from his role at Cambridge earlier this month, he stressed the move should not "be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me".
Cambridge's chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, said this week that Arday had been subject to a "racist feeding frenzy".
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