The Rosie Ruiz of Belize? : Hoax: Marathoner finished last at Seoul and says he is an Olympian again, but country wants no part of him.

Two weeks before his scheduled flight to Barcelona, Polin Belisle sat in his Burbank apartment. A diminutive runner from the small Central American country of Belize who finished last in the 1988 Olympic marathon, he explained how he was going to redeem himself at this summer’s Games.

“I’ve trained very, very hard,” he said, sipping orange juice. “This time it will be different. I am a lot more confident. More experienced. A lot more focused.”

In the kitchen, his bride of five weeks was preparing fruit salad and smiling at her husband. She would be accompanying him to Barcelona and cooking his meals in the Olympic village. Already, she was planning the menu.

“We will have lots of beans like lentils and garbanzos,” she said. “I will buy fresh fish daily and grill it.”

The underdog athlete. His adoring, supportive wife. Bonded by love, they will overcome the odds. An inspiring real-life scenario.

But there is a major hole in the plot.

“(Belisle is) not on our team, nor was he ever told or given any indication to cause him to believe he would be a part of it,” said Joan Burrell, president of the Belize Amateur Athletic Assn.

Burrell and others say that Belisle, 26, has been misrepresenting himself for at least a year. And they don’t dismiss his alleged charade as merely an obsessed athlete’s harmless acts of desperation. Introducing himself as a ’92 Olympian, he allegedly has been soliciting sponsors, supporting himself with their money.

Some say that Belisle went to extreme lengths to protect his cover, claiming that his airline tickets to Barcelona had been given to him by the government of Belize. He later admitted that he bought them with money he borrowed from his mother.

“He had to go to the Games to make sure he didn’t disappoint his sponsors,” said David Fonseca, mayor of Belize City and general secretary of the BAAA, which selects the Belizean national team. “He doesn’t tell them the truth.”

Belize officials say Belisle has harangued them to put him on the team, that he has made dozens of international phone calls to them, the conversations often ending in shouting matches.

“He’s kind of out of his mind,” Burrell said. “Calling me in the middle of the night. Trying to pull all kinds of stuff.”

In the last two years, Belisle has been disqualified from at least two marathons, throwing the validity of all his results into doubt. And Belize officials say that he wasn’t qualified to run in the ’88 Olympics, that he duped them into putting him on their team.

Belisle, however, reacted with shock and indignation when a reporter asked him about the allegations.

Maintaining that he’s “done nothing wrong,” he said he simply didn’t know he wasn’t on this year’s team. Moreover, he contends that he’s the victim, claiming that Belize officials are getting back at him for becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in January of 1989.

“Why is Mr. Fonseca doing this to me?” asked Belisle, who has lived in this country for 17 years. “He’s hurting me very bad. I’ve been scamming no one.”

With good looks and an engaging personality, the wiry, 5-foot-5 Belisle comes across as polite and friendly, if slightly enigmatic.

“He’s a strange guy, but he makes an impression on people,” said Ed Kubinsky, Belisle’s former trainer.

Belisle says that running has always been his passion, that as a youth, before he moved to the United States with his mother, he ran in the slums of Belize City with his brother, logging five or six miles before breakfast. When he trains for marathons, Belisle says, he runs 200 miles per week.

“He gets up at 4 or 5 a.m. and runs three times a day,” said his wife Pat Medina, a Mexican national who says she is a physician. “I’ve never seen anybody with such determination. He would make a great medical student. He doesn’t need sleep. He’s totally there. He’s totally concentrated.”

And totally bogus, according to the running community.

“If I ranked him on my all-time depth chart, he’d be about 1,000th,” said Dave Kemp, Belisle’s high school cross-country coach.

The running community views Belisle’s entire marathon career with skepticism. Until he suddenly emerged in 1988 as a Belizean Olympic runner, he had been mediocre at best. At Burbank High, where he graduated in 1984, he never rose above junior varsity in cross-country.

“He worked hard but didn’t have the talent to be an Olympic marathoner,” said Kemp, who was coach at Burbank High from 1974-89.

But Belisle was selected for the 1988 Belizean Olympic team on the strength of his respectable time of 2 hours 36 minutes 18 seconds in finishing 20th in that year’s Long Beach Marathon. But, according to Joe Carlson, who was the executive director of that race, the authenticity of Belisle’s performance was never checked on video because nobody came forward to challenge it.

One of five Belizean athletes in Seoul, Belisle was cocky about his chances--”I want to win the gold,” he said in a newspaper article--but according to his roommate in the Olympic village, Belisle seemed more interested in being Mr. Congeniality.

“He’d come in late, all different hours, 2 or 3 in the morning,” said marathoner Eugene Muslar, a 32-year-old Belizean who lives in Los Angeles. “He was out partying all the time. He definitely wasn’t focused on the race.”

Belisle ran the Olympic marathon in 3:14:02, the worst time of the 98 runners who completed the course.

He claims that the Korean food he ate before the race upset his stomach and forced him to make several stops.

Others, Fonseca among them, suggest that the results were a legitimate reflection of his ability.

“The medical aspect had nothing to do with it,” Fonseca said. “That was his performance.”

He lists his best time as 2 hours 11 minutes in the 1991 Chicago Marathon, but Chicago race officials say they have never heard of him.

Belisle was disqualified from this year’s L.A. Marathon and last year’s Long Beach Marathon because his race numbers weren’t found on checkpoint reports or videotapes.

The week after Belisle supposedly finished fifth--in 2:17:39--at Long Beach, race officials received at least two phone calls, telling them to check the videos. The replays showed no trace of Belisle.

He also was not recorded at checkpoints after apparently finishing 11th this year in the L.A. race.

When Long Beach officials heard from Belisle’s lawyer last year, inquiring as to when his client would receive his $2,000 prize, they said he would be paid if he would come into their office and point to himself on the video.

“Polin came in and watched the films,” Carlson said. “I asked him to find himself, and he got up and walked out.”

When a reporter recently told Belisle about Carlson’s remarks, Belisle seemed puzzled and stunned. “They said that? . . . Oh my God,” he said.

When Belisle was disqualified by Long Beach, Carlson sent a fax to Belizean officials, but they had already been contacted by “other governing bodies,” Fonseca said, and as a result, the Belizeans have been more circumspect in dealing with Belisle.

“We’ve asked him to send documentation from all his marathons, but he couldn’t,” Fonseca said. “If his times were true, he would have gotten them authenticated.

“All Polin sends is newspaper clippings and pasted-up photocopies,” Fonseca added. “I told him several times: ‘If you haven’t done anything wrong, why don’t you clarify the matter?’ ”

Belisle said he hasn’t held a job for more than a year, but with a natural gift for gab--his halting English adding to his boyish charm--he apparently has been able to persuade people to give him money and gifts for what they say he told them was his Olympic campaign.

One such person is a Grammy Award-winning L.A. jazz musician who met Belisle two or three years ago, their mutual interest in running bringing them together.

The musician says he gave Belisle as much as $3,000 over the years, and that, although he felt he hardly knew the couple, he agreed to be best man at Belisle’s wedding May 30 after Belisle came to his house and pleaded with him.

The musician said he finally lost patience with Belisle when Belisle asked him to throw an Olympic going-away party at his house. The musician refused, he said, but one night a few days later, people began ringing his doorbell, primed to party.

“It was the party incident that made me disassociate myself with him,” the musician said.

Since learning of what’s being said about him, Belisle has issued a number of conflicting statements.

First he said he was making plans to run for Honduras in the Olympics, then later denied ever mentioning Honduras.

Then he said that Belizean officials “told me if I got my own plane tickets, they’d let me run” and would reimburse him, all of which was denied by the officials.

“He has no credibility anymore,” Burrell said. “He has been caught cheating. This is embarrassing for Belize. We may be a Third World country, but we thrive on honesty.”