Rosie Ruiz Was a Marathon Champion ... for a Moment Ms. Ruiz, who died this year, stunned everyone when she won the Boston Marathon. But ...

Rosie Ruiz

(b. 1953)

She stunned everyone when she won the Boston Marathon. But it didn’t take long to uncover the truth: She cheated.

By Sam Dolnick

On April 21, 1980, at the Boston Marathon, the fastest men finished first, and then, at 2 hours, 31 minutes and 56 seconds — an amazing time, a world-class time — the first woman crossed the line. She was wearing a bright yellow shirt, damp with sweat, and short white shorts with blue piping. The TV announcer didn’t know what to say.

“On the right, Rosie Ruiz from New York! A shocker! Nobody had noticed her at the checkpoints. Nobody had thought about her when the race had begun! A total stranger to the experts!” He drawled the word for effect.

Race officials placed the ceremonial crown of laurels on her head and a man in a suit fastened a gold medal around her neck. Rosie Ruiz, a 26-year-old secretary from New York with little running experience to speak of, was a champion. For a moment, before it all went so famously wrong, she looked ethereal, almost divine. With the crown perched atop her pixie haircut and her rosy cheeks glowing sun-dawn pink, she was Artemis herself descended from the heavens to the scrum of the Boston streets.

Then the nervous sneezing began.

“We’re here with the women’s winner,” Kathrine Switzer, herself a racing legend, said as she stood with Ruiz for the celebratory TV interview. “She’s getting a case of the sneezes.”

Sneeze.

“Rosie Ruiz?” She mispronounced it “Roo-ezz.”

Sneeze. Ruiz tried to answer Switzer’s simple questions, but her story stuttered and swerved. She said this was, astonishingly, only her second-ever marathon, that she wasn’t a member of any running club, that she had no coach, that she trained herself. She sneezed a few more times. The hints of polite skepticism in Switzer’s voice grew as she flashed her eyebrows at the camera. “Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals?” she asked. The exchange is painful to watch. “Someone else asked me that.” Nervous smile. “I’m not sure what intervals are.” A look away from the camera and an earnest, desperate turn to Switzer: “What are they?”

To confirm their suspicions, marathon officials examined thousands of race photographs, scanning for any sign of her. Nothing. (This was before every heartbeat was monitored and archived in the cloud, every sneaker step geo-located and mapped.) It would take eight days before race organizers officially declared their findings: Ruiz, of course, had cheated. She had not run 26.2 miles in 2 hours and 31 minutes. She had not run the race at all. Ruiz had jumped onto the marathon course about a mile from the finish line, ahead of every female runner. She jogged only the final stretch.

Ruiz at a news conference after questions about her race arose. Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Details of Ruiz’s life quickly trickled out: She was born in Cuba in 1953 and came to America when she was 8. After growing up in Florida and moving to New York after dropping out of college, she worked as a secretary at a commodities-trading firm that specialized in precious metals. Officials soon discovered that her performance in the New York City Marathon the year before — she came in under three hours — was also a charade: she stopped running early and took the subway to the finish line. (That was the recorded performance that enabled her to qualify for Boston.) The organizers had given her special permission to run in New York because she was recovering from a brain-tumor operation.

Weeks after the race, Boston officials brought the real winner, Jacqueline Gareau, a Canadian runner, back to town. There was a makeup ceremony, a limousine tour and a do-over of her crossing the finish line, without Ruiz or any of her competitors, as a smallish group of onlookers performed a re-enactment of cheering. Jacqueline Gareau’s name is not as well-known as Rosie Ruiz’s. The world is not a fair place.

Ruiz’s life after the marathon was hard. She was arrested in 1982 for stealing cash and forging checks from a real estate firm where she worked. The next year she was arrested in Florida for trying to sell cocaine to undercover cops. She married and divorced. Periodically, reporters would track her to a new address, hoping she would come clean. It never happened.

She lived another 39 years after the race. When the curious brought it up, she slammed the door. When neighbors asked if she was “that Rosie,” she told them they were confused.

She met Gareau, the real winner, once, in Miami some time after the race. Gareau proposed a truce and told Ruiz that she wasn’t angry. Ruiz responded defiantly: “I ran that race, and I’m going to run it again.”

Somehow, despite the jokes and the arrests and the divorce and the infamy and the irrefutable evidence, Ruiz never publicly admitted that she cheated. All that time, she said she held onto one thing that she believed was rightfully hers. Hidden away, in an undisclosed nook that she said was safe, was her gold medal.

[Read The Times’s obituary of Rosie Ruiz.]

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor for The Times.

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Throughout history, many athletes have gone beyond the rulebook and pushed the limits in order to win a competition.While fair play is instilled in all kids taking up a new sport, some are willing to win at any cost.Here's a list of athletes who eventually got busted for using dubious methods, excluding the more obvious ways of cheating such as match fixing or using performance-enhancing drugs.
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1. Cuban runner Rosie Ruiz won the 1980 Boston Marathon besting her previous mark by a whopping 25 minutes, but further investigation revealed she had used the underground service.
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2. On June 16 1983, boxer Luis Resto destroyed then-undefeated Billy Collins Jr. but evidence was found of him tampering with the gloves, having removed the padding and adding a plaster bandage instead.

3. Russian Boris Onischenko was caught using an electric switch on his way to defeating all his fencing rivals during the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
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4. In 1989, Chilean goalkeeper Roberto Rojas used a flare thrown from the stands to injure himself in the face so that their match against Brazil would be suspended.

5. Figure skater Tonya Hardings husband and bodyguard hired a professional thug to injure her main competitor Nancy Kerrigan, prompting a lifetime ban.

6. In the 1985 British Open, David Robertson kept arriving at the green earlier than his peers in order to put his balls closer to the hole, but he ended up being banned from the European Tour for 30 years.7. In the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, Spain cruised to the mens basketball gold medal but it was proven that only two of the squad members were actually disabled.

8. IFK Goteborg goalkeeper Kim Christensen shrunk his goal by moving the posts closer together in a match in 2009.
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