MARATHON ROSIES ARE STILL COMING UP : In the Long Run, Some Cheat

Several years ago in Hawaii, a man began a marathon, took a break to go home and eat breakfast, re-entered the race well along the course, finished, then immediately died of a heart attack.

As cautionary tales go, this has been regarded as the strongest possible. Yet, still they cheat.

Sunday, Los Angeles Marathon organizers will have more than 24 cameras positioned along the course to serve as video checkpoints, lest a runner think to take a short cut, a taxi or any other conveyance, then die of a heart attack.

Moreover the high finishers will provide a urinalysis after the race to assure, well, organizers aren’t sure what. They’re just trying to stay one stride ahead of a group so competitive that fair play can no longer be taken for granted.

And still they will cheat.

It may be important, right off, to suggest that this phenomenon is not entirely new. They cheated well before Rosie Ruiz introduced the New York subway as a mode of marathon transportation.

In the very first modern Olympic Games, for instance, Spiridon Belokas covered some of the marathon distance in a carriage. His punishment--he was stripped of his shirt and ostracized--evidently was not a sufficient deterrent for subsequent offenders.

In 1904, New Yorker Fred Lorz “ran” a 3-hour 13-minute marathon and was photographed with Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter. But his gold medal was held up when it was discovered that he had hitched a ride in a car for 11 miles.

And so on. Yet the incidence of marathon cheating, or at least detection, is way up lately. In last fall’s New York Marathon, which touted the same vigilance as the Los Angeles run--they have the same technical consultant--no fewer than 24 runners were charged with cheating and disqualified. There may be comfort in the fact that this works out to 1 in 1,000, but organizers remain baffled that anyone--even that 1 in 1,000--would cheat, when usually all that’s at stake are bragging rights.

Neil Finn, who promotes the America’s Finest City half-marathon in San Diego, recently had to disqualify an age-group finisher for cheating. “I don’t get it,” he said. “We don’t even offer prize money.”

And then there is the Manufacturers Trust Hanover Corporation challenger series, a 3.5-mile road race open to corporate teams. It is meant as a kind of intramural run for the semi-fit, the equivalent of the company softball game. Barbara Paddock, the company’s director of special events, nevertheless has found that policing and videotaping are now necessary. Runners will no longer be allowed to submit their own times. Past discrepancies have just been too great.

“This was supposed to be for fun,” she lamented.

For some, it still is. But interviews with marathon organizers suggest that more and more are running a lie. All too many runners are popping out of portable toilets midway through the race, way too refreshed. All too many are hopping aboard buses, sneaking in at the halfway point, short-cutting loops in the course, doing, in other words, whatever it takes.

“So far, we haven’t found anyone who purposely maimed a competitor,” saids Alvin Criss of The Athletics Congress, the United States running federation. “But don’t be surprised if we do.”

Criss believes that they have found almost everything short of that, although he is quick to add, not usually among the high-profile marathoners. “People in the first 10 are largely unable to cheat,” he said. “They’re under so much scrutiny.”

Instead, it’s the age-group competitors, people in the middle of the pack. Somehow, their times increase an improbable 15 minutes a year.

Or, sometimes just as bad, decrease. “Here’s a man who could run a marathon in 2:11 and now he’s doing it in 2:32,” he said. “Now what might you make of that?” Criss, though unable to prove it to legal satisfaction, has reason to believe that the man was pacing a woman who had a chance to finish in the prize money and, moreover, that he was doing it for pay.

Oh, the things you hear!

There’s a story from a New Jersey marathon in which a young boy’s mother carried the child in a bicycle basket in parts of the race. In another race, a young girl was disqualified because her brother was pacing her and her father was yelling at her. She was in tears. The girl was 9 years old.

Any of those incidents, even if you cannot accept them, you may be able to understand. Cheating for a piece of the prize money is the athletic equivalent of fudging on your income tax return. And the Little League parent syndrome has been around a while.

But what of grown men and women who, with nothing to gain, pollute race results with their blatant cheating? At the San Francisco Marathon, Director Scott Thomason disqualified 8 of the top 100 in 1985 and 10 of the top 100 last year, including the top 2 in age-group competition. “They inevitably are not cheating for the prize money,” Thomason said. “I have yet to encounter anybody bogus who did it for the money. It doesn’t seem to matter in these cases.”

It doesn’t figure, either. In New York, one of those disqualified was a 44-year-old millionaire, a man whose campaign of deception was hardly spontaneous. Allan Steinfeld, the New York City race coordinator and technical director for the Los Angeles Marathon, said the man had been lowering his personal best in marathons from 10 to 15 minutes in each of the last three years. Unbelievable. He not only failed to appear on video checkpoints in the 1986 race but he also was also invisible on the 1985 tapes.

You may ask why. We cannot tell you for sure, but divine what you can from the following examples.

First, consider Rosie Ruiz, the sad case whose legacy of cheating, however badly she did it, has put her into national folklore.

It is widely believed that Ruiz, a 26-year-old office worker when she won the women’s bracket of the 1980 Boston Marathon, never intended to win. She meant to cheat, was under some pressure to cheat. But she never meant to win. She got off at the wrong subway stop is all.

By then she was the victim of her own lie, a small lie that got bigger and bigger and took control of her life.

By some accounts, it started with the 1979 New York Marathon, which she had vowed to run in fewer than four hours. She was well intentioned, but some distance into the race she realized that she couldn’t even finish. Stumbling, her ankle in pain, she took a subway back to the medical tent, which happened to be at the finish line. She offered herself for medical care there, but her number was somehow removed and taken to the computer trailer.

Later she was mailed a congratulatory note for finishing the marathon in fewer than four hours. And so it began. Some believe it was all calculated from the beginning. Others believe she was victim of an inadvertent deception gone out of control.

The kindest scenario continues: Friends then persuaded her to run the Boston Marathon. She did and, pressed to do well, jumped in late in the race. Too late and too far ahead.

People were immediately suspicious of this woman who had worked up neither a thirst nor a sweat. Later, an incredulous Frank Shorter asked what her training splits had been. She asked, “What are splits?”

Here’s another example, closer to home. The man, whom we needn’t identify, was recently disqualified in a 35-39 age-group competition in Southern California. As with the New York millionaire, this was not a casual con. For whatever reason, this man had thoroughly plotted his fake ascendancy as an age group runner. As with Ruiz, the lie eventually assumed a life of its own.

Caltech track coach Jim O’Brien remembers the man coming into his office to introduce himself.

“He began talking about his accomplishments, and the times, quite frankly, were excellent for his age,” O’Brien said. “I was skeptical at the beginning, but he mentioned races I had been in. I looked it up. Boston for a couple of years. In Chicago, he did a 2:16. On paper he looked legit. His talk was certainly convincing enough. He reads the magazines, knows who’s running what, keeps up with national class races. He was not ignorant of training principles.

“Nevertheless, he doesn’t practice. We did one workout, day before we were to race, were jogging along at a 7-minute mile. He ran a mile and a half and had to go home.

“Another time, we’re running, and I have a stress fracture. I’m doing the workout in pretty severe pain, yet I had to stop several times for him. He complained of congestion. After 3 of 11 miles, the workout was aborted.”

O’Brien entered the Boston Marathon along with the man, yet never located him in the field, even though he supposedly ran a 2:24. “He was nowhere to be found,” O’Brien said. “I told him after the race at the party, and he just kind of shunned it off.”

The man’s times were suspicious. So Ken Young of the National Running Data Center was called in to check the runner at a San Diego road race. Videotape replays and eyewitness reports could not locate the man at the start of the race.

Promoter Neil Finn says the man didn’t leave the hotel with the rest of the runners. He further believes that the man ran from the hotel to a spot four miles away in Balboa Park. There, the course becomes a long, uphill pull and runners are looking downward. It’s a perfect spot to jump into a race unnoticed. The man didn’t show up on videotape until a check point shortly afterward, at 12 1/2 miles.

The man denied it, even threatened legal action. But he has since postponed two TAC hearings in San Diego to review the charges, and a check for travel expenses there has yet to be cashed.

Why did he do it? Not for money. Although he was a member of New Balance’s grass roots program, which provides shoes and on occasion modest travel money, the man was always careful to finish out of the prize money. “He had been very slick,” O’Brien said. “All he won were a lot of awards. But he was definitely living in a fantasy world.”

Speculates Finn: “The recognition builds. Their self-esteem rises. And they start believing it.”

Alvin Criss plays the armchair psychologist when he says, “If you believe that the older (age-group) runners are doing it to perpetuate their lives, you can believe that if you win, you will never die.”

Even if you cheat?

Of course, it’s not only the older runners. Thomason has disqualified teen-agers, and another promoter disqualified a 9-year-old boy who had finished a three-hour marathon. It cuts across all ages and socio-economic strata. Thomason has been struck by how many well-to-do men he must disqualify. Attorneys are particularly nettlesome as they tend to threaten litigation so reflexively. None, however, has followed through. “You’ve got to be right,” Thomason said.

Still they will cheat. A man enters a portable toilet along a part of the course that loops back on itself--that has, in other words, two-way traffic. He emerges and heads the wrong way, effectively cutting a mile or two off his run.

“Hard to believe that you can get that disoriented in a Port-A-John,” Thomason said.

At New York, the course loops back and parallels an earlier stretch half a mile away. Runners can and do save themselves nine miles. Also at New York, where runners wear tags that are bar-scanned at finish and start, public transportation to and from the race is free to tag-wearers, who aren’t expected to carry pocket change. It is possible, of course, to ride that same public transportation during the race. “We make it easy for them,” Steinfeld said.

The Los Angeles Marathon similarly is a tempting course; runners can take a shortcut down Highland Avenue and cut off part of a loop from Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. Of course, they’ll probably be on Allan Steinfeld’s candid camera if they do.

Still, of 15,000 entrants, some will cheat. “What you have to remember is that these are real people,” Criss said. “Also, taking into consideration that there are three reasons to run: for fitness, for money, to prove something deep and abiding.

“Any time you have the last two, you’re talking the Seven Deadly Sins.”