Rosie Ruiz died last month, but it’s possible she never will go away. Her one audacious public act more than 39 years ago—briefly hoodwinking officials and spectators into believing she had won the Boston Marathon despite having run only the last 1/26th of the race—established that her name would live in infamy.
Proof was in the prominent obituaries by all the major news outlets. All afforded Ruiz what P.T. Barnum, another celebrated hoaxer also persisting past his expiration date, declared was more important than bad publicity: They spelled her name right.
“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon winner who wasn’t,”… (Washington Post)
“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon course-cutter who was stripped of her victory….” (Associated Press)
“Rosie Ruiz, famous for cheating in the 1980 Boston Marathon…” (Sports Illustrated).
“Rosie Ruiz, whose name became synonymous with cheating…” (New York Times)
In her 66 years, she never ran a marathon. Yet Bill Rodgers, the 1980 men’s Boston champion who reigned as the world’s best practitioner of that event in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, once called Ruiz “the most famous marathoner of all time.”
Unheard of until she crossed the Boston finish line on April 21, 1980, Ruiz instantly became a household name. A punch line. In the chaos of a 4,900-runner field—448 of them women—the question wasn’t necessarily “how?”—how was a non-competitive 26-year-old able to pull off such a scam?—but “why?”
“I just don’t understand,” Rodgers said then.
These days, the male and female Boston champions each are paid $150,000 in prize money. But in 1980, all the winner got was a laurel wreath and a bowl of beef stew—a decades-old tradition in its final year before Boston’s cuisine evolved toward post-run treats such as yogurt. Not until 1986 did Boston offer prize money.
Boston being the oldest and most celebrated race of its kind, Rodgers was the rare soul who parlayed consistent dominance into a financial benefit with eponymous running gear and a Boston running store. But Ruiz, even had her surprise breakthrough been legitimate, hardly was in line for any windfall.
So why would she have risked the thoroughly predictable scorn that surfaced immediately with her vague, evasive and essentially clueless post-race comments? Fellow runners and officials were astonished—in fact, offended—by her complete lack of knowledge about training or the Boston course and an inability to summon any details about her participation.
Eyebrows were raised higher by her failure to have been spotted at any checkpoints along the way, and just how she had produced a Boston women’s record time that required averaging five-minute, 30-second miles for 26 consecutive miles when she previously had claimed her best time for a single mile was 5:30.
But she showed up at a New York press conference four days later wearing her winner’s medal and insisting she deserved it, even as a Delaware newspaper published a story by an author named Marty Craven that he had met Ruiz jogging in Central Park the previous month, and “she told me she knew this girl who cheated in the New York Marathon by taking the subway, and I started to tell her how easy it would be to cheat in Boston….I think the friend she was talking about was really her.”
In fact, it was.
Ruiz never gave up that medal. She never acknowledged her dastardly deed, and never responded to any of several invitations to run subsequent marathons. Still, with the news of Ruiz’ death, Canadian Jacqueline Gareau—the real Boston winner in 1980, her victory officially acknowledged a week after the race—told Canada’s National Post that she “forgave [Ruiz] completely. It’s not a big thing for me.”
“Why she never apologized—that belongs to her,” Gareau said. “Maybe she was not completely right in her mind. I’m just hoping she’s forgiven herself. Hoping that, on some kind of way, that she was okay.
“You know, she was part of my life.”
And, in a way, immortal.