Marathon time warp aids Mexican politician

Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo disappeared midway through the Berlin Marathon on Sunday before reappearing nine miles later, winning first in his age group and shaving an hour off his personal record.

Race organizers brag the course is fast; a world record was set Sunday.

But rather than applaud Madrazo’s victory in the “men’s 55-and-over” category with a time of 2 hours, 40 minutes and 57 seconds, the Reforma newspaper is renewing a suspicion that has dogged Madrazo his whole career: Did he cheat?

Madrazo finished third in the 2006 election, largely because voters questioned how he acquired mansions, Florida real estate and luxury cars during a lifetime of holding elected offices with the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

Maybe he was just hitting his stride Sunday, but many Mexicans are questioning how Madrazo, a veteran marathoner, could have cut his best time on the 26.2-mile, or roughly 40-kilometer, race by about an hour without cheating.

It’s going to be tough for Madrazo to defuse the suspicion, thanks to the Germans’ obsession with accuracy. Runners carried a microchip that recorded their times at stations located every five kilometers along the course.

Madrazo ran his first 20 kilometers, taking him to the marathon’s halfway mark, in a respectable 1:42:42. He was on track to beat his best times this year, 3:39 at the London marathon, and 3:44 in San Diego. Not bad for a guy who turned 55 in July.

But he must have slipped into a Berlin Triangle somewhere along the Potsdamer Strasse. There’s no record, according to German race officials, of him passing the 25- or 30-kilometer stations, leaving 15 kilometers of the race with no record of his passing.

“The System Fell, Madrazo Wins,” blared Thursday’s front page headline in Reforma, echoing a rallying cry from the 1988 presidential election that the PRI is widely believed to have won by fraud.

In that election, opposition politician Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was leading Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the candidate from Madrazo’s then-ruling party, when government officials declared the national computerized vote counting system was malfunctioning. They closed off access to the vote counting to opposition party representatives. A week later, Salinas was declared the winner.

The arithmetic in Madrazo’s marathon case is a lot simpler than tallying a national election. He ran each five-kilometer segment on record in an average of about 25 minutes, according to computerized timers, compared with the about 14 minutes run by race winner Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia.

But between kilometers 20 and 35, those missing from the race’s computer record, Madrazo appeared to run every five kilometers in fewer than eight minutes, faster than the 34-year-old Ethiopian winner, who set a world record for a marathon of 2:04:26.

When Madrazo was recorded passing kilometer 35, he was close to the front of the pack. A video at the finish line shows Madrazo with arms held out wide as he easily glides to victory in his age group. He was 146th out of more than 40,000 runners.

A Madrazo spokeswoman denied any irregularities.

“It’s absurd to think you can manipulate a marathon race as important as the Berlin Marathon. It’s not a street race, it’s a marathon of international prestige,” said Addy Garcia, who also served in Madrazo’s presidential campaign. “I don’t believe it’s possible to cheat.”

Running is Madrazo’s passion, Garcia said, and the former politician spends most days preparing for races.

In a 2006 interview with The Times, Madrazo said the discipline and training from his many marathons helped him outlast rivals and win his party’s presidential nomination. He eliminated his closest opponent in the primaries by accusing him of graft.

“Politics is an endurance too,” he said. “You learn you have to push through after hitting the wall, to dominate pain, to not give in to pain or blisters, to recover yourself so you can triumph. Low blows don’t matter, you keep running.”

Madrazo, who retired from the public spotlight after his humiliating finish in the 2006 presidential election, will have plenty of calls to return when he arrives in Mexico today.

“The media call Madrazo the king of cheating and manipulation,” Garcia said. “But if that were true, we would have won the presidential election.”

--

sam.enriquez@latimes.com

Cecilia Sánchez and Maria Antonieta Uribe in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.