Lying Your Way to Victory
Rosie Ruiz was ahead of her time, America-wise.
I was talking to a woman on the subway a couple of days ago who was wearing a “2024 New York City Marathon” t-shirt. She ran the big race last year and has run another marathon since then. As I always do when I meet people who enjoy this sort of thing, I told her, “I could run one if they trained a bear to chase me the entire way.”
That’s not really true, though. If this theoretical trotting bear were behind me, I’d probably still make it about four or five miles, tops, then say, “Fuck it. I’m about to get eaten by a bear.”
Many years ago, when Jill and I were dating, my old Auburn roommate, Dan Rice, a regular runner, flew to the city from Atlanta to conquer the marathon. Dan woke up around dawn or thereabouts on race day and journeyed to the far side of Brooklyn to gather with the other competitors. Jill and I got up quite a bit later in her apartment on Dean St. and sat around for a few minutes before deciding we should walk to the end of the block and watch the runners, who were then reaching her neighborhood. We could look for Dan.
Sure enough, after about fifteen minutes of gawking at variously Spandexed people hustling past, Dan appeared before us, looking no worse for wear. He waved, and we cheered. Then he disappeared, and we went to get a couple of bagels, heavy on the cream cheese, and fortifying cups of coffee.
After eating a leisurely breakfast at the diner, Jill and I walked back to her apartment to watch the news, play with her beloved Boston Terrier, Count Basie, and generally do nothing for a while. Then we decided to take the subway back into Manhattan and hang out at my apartment on W. 56th St.
So we did. That was about a forty-minute ride, all by itself. Then we watched more TV and played with my roommate’s dogs. I also remember digging through the Sunday edition of The New York Times. After that, we figured we’d make our way over to the marathon’s finish line in Central Park, just to see what was going on.
After another thirty or so minutes of us watching runners enter the park— here comes Dan. He’d been running that entire time and still looked less winded than I did. He finished the race.
We were proud of Dan. I couldn’t quite understand why he would want to run the race, but I was genuinely proud of him. I, personally, have zero desire to run 26.2 miles without stopping.
I’ve always been athletic. I imagine I’d stand a chance of being able to run a marathon, in thoroughly abysmal time, if I were to train for it—maybe I could run it anyway—even though I’d be looking for an I.V. bottle full of saline solution when I was done. Anyone who’s ever stood at the finish line here in New York will note that lots and lots of people who look like they couldn’t stand for five hours, let alone run for that long, drag themselves to the end every year. Several marathoners I’ve known have told me that, to a large degree, finishing is really an act of will.
Exactly. That’s why I won’t be doing it.
I’d rather will myself to write a screenplay or meticulously chop and stir ingredients for five hours while preparing a fancy meal. I tend to shy away from activities that might make me cry or shit my pants—or both—before I’m finished, regardless of what sense of accomplishment they could instill in me.
None of that means, though, that I couldn’t win a marathon and get my face plastered all over the news. Not if I were really clever about it.
This is New Yorker Rosie Ruiz, 23, the winner of the female division of the 1980 Boston Marathon, gutting it out like the hero she is as she nears the finish line. Gosh! Look at the effort she’s putting in there! She seems pretty brutalized by the run, but she still finished in 2 hours, 31 minutes, and 56 seconds, which would rank her among the very top runners in the world! In fact, she had just beaten the very top runners in the world, all of whom had no doubt long dreamed of winning the Boston Marathon.
The only problem was, nobody had ever heard of Rosie Ruiz. Not the race officials. Not the TV and radio announcers. Not the sportswriters who were covering the event. Not the fans who kept up with the sport.
Nobody.
When Ruiz proclaimed after her victory that she had shaved twenty minutes off her finish time at the New York City Marathon, a reporter asked, “Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals?” Ruiz answered with, “Um...someone else asked me that. I’m not sure what intervals are. What are they?”
This is like an NBA player being flummoxed by the term “crossover dribble” and asking a reporter to explain it to him. Any world-beating marathoner would immediately know that “intervals” are a training process designed to increase speed.
But Rosie Ruiz didn’t know what intervals were for a very good reason. Rosie Ruiz was lying.
She didn’t really run the Boston Marathon. She just stepped out of the crowd in full runner’s regalia about a half-mile from the finish line—ahead of all the legitimate female competitors—and pretended she had negotiated the previous twenty-five or so miles.
No one in a position of authority realized this at the time, and Ruiz was treated like the real winner, thus making a mockery of the entire celebration. They placed the traditional olive wreath on her head and had her stand on the podium in front of snapping cameras and shouted questions. Everybody cheered like mad, and Ruiz wallowed in the glory.
The woman in the above photo knows she’s full of shit and must be wondering what she’s gotten herself into. Or maybe she isn’t worrying about it at all.
The next day, increasingly suspicious marathon officials started digging through thousands of photographs of the race but never spotted Ruiz in any of them. A couple of Harvard students then came forward and said they saw Ruiz enter the race from the crowd. They just assumed at the time that it was some goofball playing a joke...which it was, sort of.
It was also determined during the investigation that Ruiz was only allowed to “run the New York City Marathon” months earlier because she told the organizers she was dying of brain cancer! A person was uncovered who said she rode on the subway with Ruiz in the middle of that race. So Ruiz had apparently pulled the same “Look at me, I’m an athlete” charade on New York’s race officials. She didn’t pretend to win the whole thing that time, though, so nobody caught on.
A man who knew Ruiz later revealed she told him that she didn’t intend to win in Boston, either. She thought some female runners had already passed her before she hopped on the course, but they hadn’t, so she accidentally won!
Rosie Ruiz was a fuck-up.
Eight days after she was crowned in Boston, Ruiz was very publicly uncrowned...or de-laureled, as the case may be. Boston then treated the actual winner, Jacqueline Gareau, like a queen for a day, tooling her around town in a limousine and applauding her whenever possible. Had Ruiz not done what she did, Gareau would have immediately been recognized on race day for running the fastest-ever Boston Marathon by a woman.
Ruiz cried at a big press conference about all this shit—get a load of those microphones—but to her dying day (July 8, 2019), she never publicly admitted she cheated. A few months after the fiasco, she actually stumbled upon Gareau at a 10K run in Miami. Gareau graciously forgave Ruiz for what she did, although Ruiz still insisted she had run the race and planned to do it again!
Ruiz was apparently a very poor schemer who should have quit while she was behind. In 1982, she was arrested for embezzling $65,000 from the real estate company where she worked (one week in jail and five years probation). The next year, she was arrested for her part in a South Florida cocaine deal gone wrong (three years probation that time around).
If you ask me, her only legitimate accomplishment, outside of serving only a week in jail for some considerable crimes, was the subway-riding stunt she pulled in New York City. Any New Yorker will tell you that waiting for a train to show up on a Sunday afternoon can be an all-day affair. Nine times out of ten you can crawl to your destination more quickly.
You know what, though? Scratch that. The real winner in that story is the Mass Transit Authority. Good going, guys!
So Rosie Ruiz loses yet again.
You’d think that would be the end of it, as far as absurd marathon cheating goes. But, oh, you’d be wrong. In 1991, a guy named Abbes Tehami appeared to have won the Brussels Marathon, but his victory was called into question because he somehow managed to shave his mustache off during the race! It turned out that his coach started the run, and Tehami just ran the last part.
Damn! Except for that one small detail, that would’ve worked!
Hey Paul - I am honored to have made the substack page. That was a great weekend and a great experience … and I appreciated your and Jill’s enthusiasm.
Wow, she could have been president