The Boston Police Chief has stated that there will be an additional 9,000 runners for the 2014 Boston Marathon. The Boston Athletic Association has said they are working with the towns along the route and will not yet state what the final number of runners will be.
This is great news for all the runners – it will allow the over-5,000 runners that were stopped from finishing after the bombing to participate again without taking from the other spots (they were guaranteed entry for 2014). Of those 5,000, chances were that many of them would have applied for entry again this year, so that means that it effectively adds another couple thousand of open spots.
I am assuming that they will be opening a lot more charity slots as well. My guess would be that the biggest block of charity spots will be for the OneFundBoston. I am sure there will be no shortage of runners wanting to run on behalf of the One Fund. They should offer more information on the final cap number and the proportion of slots available for charity runners.
Source: Runners World
