[glyxbaer]

I find this a bit strange and maybe it's a cultural/US thing, but the races I have competed in (Germany) always had two trophies: overall male winner and overall female winner. Which would easily eliminate this issue. TIL that this is not the same everywhere.

[ultrarunner]

As I said upthread, it's just a poor choice by a race director. The way you mentioned is how we do it too. They could have chosen to give trophies to the overall winners, to the last place finisher, to the 4 median finishers, or any other silly combination, but they chose what they did and Runner's World wrote an article about it.