From small races, to large races, maintaining a permanent historical record of your results is an important part of the process of managing a running event business. Often, when race organizations go out of business, or discontinue a particular event, the event site is taken down, in addition to removal of the race results. A similar issue can occur if a race timing company goes out of business, where historical results were kept. Some organizations even fail to post results online, or remove past years (after a specific period of time), which is, in my opinion, a big negative.
While there are many timing and registration sites, like Runsignup, Raceroster, Active, and many other smaller organizations, after a certain amount of time, results still seem to disappear, or are very difficult to find. However Athlinks.com is a great site for organizers to utilize for posting results, uploading their results to, in which to maintain a permanent record of results, and additionally a great site for race participants to search for old results at. Additionally, race participants can also submit the results via Athlinks as well, and can create a profile and claim individual results to maintain a historical list of their race times. Athlinks maintains race date, race name, distance, bib number for most, and often split times as well.
In conclusion, it is highly recommended that running events, in particular half marathon events of all sizes, submit their race results (for all years) to Athlinks. Race participants are also highly encouraged to submit missing results to Athlinks. All in all, Athlinks is the largest historical record of race results on the web, for running, walking, and triathlon events, and is good practice for all race owners, race organizers, and race directors to submit their results to.