On L.A. Marathon’s New Fast Track, In-Line Is Out

Last year, for the first time, the Los Angeles Marathon offered in-line skaters the chance to whoosh around the city. There was the guy with a glittery red cape. A woman wearing an Army helmet. Another guy who had hooked himself up to a para-sail. Groups of skaters churning along with ski poles. Still others throwing flowers, making like Tiny Tim on wheels.

Afterward, one of the skaters described the rush of skating through the city streets: “It’s like having your Harley full throttle on the open road.”

But this year, dude, there won’t be any in-line skaters in the L.A. Marathon, set for next Sunday. The first time was the last time.

This year, the race is about being serious--especially for the 38 paid runners wooed by the marathon to be serious about it. Officials are offering double the prize money and have pumped up appearance fees.

The 38 are elite athletes who will be running for the honor of Los Angeles. And for the honor of Bill Burke.

He is the president and co-owner of the Los Angeles Marathon, and annually he rides in the pace car, a convertible that leads the field for 26 miles and 385 yards.

Burke waves at the more than 500,000 people who line the course, and he relishes the applause that washes over his car and the field, delighting in the entire ride until the car goes across the finish line and he looks up and sees the time: 2 hours, 11 minutes; 2:12; 2:13; and last year, sigh, a pedestrian 2:14:16, by winner El-Maati Chaham of Morocco.

Only the 2:14:28 winning run by Joseildo Rocha in 1993 in 87-degree weather was slower.

Chaham earned $15,000 and a car, which explains the time. The purse put Los Angeles below marathons in Pittsburgh, Houston, Cleveland and other cities.

Pittsburgh, Houston and Cleveland?

“When you think about sports in L.A., you think about the Lakers, right?” says Burke. “You think about the Dodgers. You think about winners, the best. That’s what we want.”

What he has gotten, though, is more along the lines of the Clippers.

Burke is drawn to show biz, and when he thinks of Los Angeles, he thinks of the Grammys and the Academy Awards. When he thinks of Cleveland, he thinks of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Burke prefers not to think about Pittsburgh and Houston at all.

At the same time, he admits that few care as much about the winner of his race running faster than 2:10, to him the Holy Grail and something of a benchmark of a fast men’s marathon. Nobody has ever run L.A. faster than Martin Mondragon’s 2:10:19 in 1989, even though the course has been tweaked a few times since to make it easier by avoiding some hills.

*

The marathon’s primary sponsor, Honda, doesn’t particularly care about the winning time. When the company’s advertising boss, Eric Conn, speaks of the race, he talks about the full field of 19,000 runners, the crowds lining the course and the charitable aspects of an event that raises more than $1 million. He never spends time belaboring the field or dissecting winners’ performances.

But because of the time, Burke finds it hard to hold his head high among the nation’s top race organizers.

It’s something he has frequently communicated, and last spring, after a story in The Times described the race as a carnival and quoted elite runners’ criticisms of it, he met with his partner, Executive Vice President Marie Patrick, and with Director of Operations Nick Curl.

It’s an annual post-race debriefing, but this time the message was different. Recalling the meeting in a recent interview, Burke said he told his troops: “ ‘If we don’t get more serious about the race, we’re going to lose the [newspaper] sports section.’ We either had to restructure the budget or sit down with some major sponsors” who could help attract better runners.

This time, Patrick--who consistently has been more concerned with the 19,000 or so runners that form what she calls the “back of the pack,” where “every runner is a star,”--agreed.

“We had started as a marathon, and we wanted to stay a marathon,” Patrick said. “If we had wanted to be an L.A. festival and also have a race, we could have done that, but we wanted to be a marathon.”

Not just a marathon. From the meeting emerged a five-year plan to meet an ambitious goal.

“What I would like in the next three to five years is to really make it a Big Three,” Burke said, blue eyes gleaming as he ticked off the cities: “Boston, New York, Los Angeles.”

Then those eyes clouded when he admitted that, if Boston and New York are the Big Two, “we’re down in the mire somewhere.”

Getting out of that mire would get Patrick what she wants: more expansive coverage in magazines that chronicle the exploits of the running community. “Boston and New York get two pages,” she said. “L.A. gets one. We need to build up the front end of the race. I want those two pages.”

There’s an absolute in putting together a competitive race: Money equals time. The best runners go where they can earn the most money, and they feed off each other during races to produce the best times.

Boston spends more than $1 million annually to put together its field, the world’s best. New York spends much less, but offers the city’s ancillary commercial opportunities as part of the package.

“We create stars,” said Ann Roberts, who assembles the field for the New York Marathon. Boston’s winners go to the White House. New York’s winners go on the David Letterman TV show.

New York has the race Burke wants to emulate, so much so that he has hired Roberts to put together this year’s L.A. Marathon field.

Armed with $400,000 worth of free plane tickets, free hotel rooms and appearance money, performance bonuses and a purse that has been doubled from last year to $150,000, she has wooed top runners--at least eight of whom have run marathons faster than 2:10.

Among the field are Kenya’s Simon Lopuyet, with a personal best of 2:08:19; Portugal’s Manuel Matias, 2:08:33; and Mexico’s Alejandro Cruz, 2:08:57.

“I’m very impressed with what they’re doing this year,” said Amby Burfoot, executive editor of Running World, one of the magazines Patrick so wants to impress.

Much of the increased perks and prize money has come from a new sponsor that, without such a commitment, would have taken its money elsewhere.

And without that money, Burke’s five-year plan would just be a sheet of paper.

“We tried to look at all sides,” said Art Rogers, president of Saucony, an athletic shoe and apparel company in Peabody, Mass., that signed on with the marathon in January for five years, committing both money and a stable of elite athletes who run in Saucony shoes.

*

Los Angeles “has been what we call a ‘people’s race.’ New York, I still feel and others feel, is a people’s race. It’s friendly. You can get into it [without meeting a qualifying time]. But New York does a fabulous job of working with elite runners too. We saw potential in Los Angeles to do both: Be a people’s race and have an elite field.”

The potential has always been there, and this is not the first time in its 13 years that Los Angeles has tried money to lure runners. But the race has never spent in a consistent way, in part because of Burke’s desire to have an instant return on any investment.

“They’ve been all over the ballpark with prize money and appearance money,” said Mark Plaatjes, winner of the 1991 race. “They need to commit to one thing or the other and stick with it until they see if it works.

“When they do, word spreads throughout the running community: Go to L.A., there’s good money there. But they’ve never given it a chance.”

The L.A. Marathon spent about $500,000 to put together an elite field of mostly Americans for its 10th race, only to be thwarted by wind, rain and Rolando Vera, an Ecuadorean who let the pack cut through the weather and then pulled away late in the race and won in a ho-hum 2:11:39.

Burke and Patrick spent $100,000 to bring in Portugal’s Rosa Mota for the 1989 running, a few months after she won the Olympic marathon in Seoul. Mota jogged around the L.A. course in 2:35:27, finishing second to Zoya Ivanova of the Soviet Union.

“That was a check that I hated to sit down and write,” Patrick said.

Thus burned, purses have gone down and appearance money has dried up for the front end of the race, and celebrated in recent years were the likes of the Running Elvises, guzzling beer and munching pretzels the whole way.

The race has become more renowned for its festival atmosphere and quirky winners--pace-setting rabbit Paul Pilkington found himself alone halfway through and kept going and going and going to win in 1994; Lornah Kiplagat won the women’s division last year when it was ruled that the apparent winner, Nadezhda Ilyina, had cut several corners.

A bicycle tour was added and then, last year, the in-line skaters.

So while the bikes remain, the skaters are gone, replaced by a plan to take Los Angeles out of the back of the marathon pack and push the race into elite status.

It is the product of a 13-year education for Burke and Patrick.

“To say I knew nothing about marathons when I started would be an accurate statement,” Burke said. “For the first race, we got the guy who won Long Beach [Ric Sayre, the first L.A. Marathon winner, in 2:12:59]. I thought that was a big step. He came. I had no clue that there were guys out there who ran faster by 20 minutes than this guy.”

Actually, there aren’t. But there are guys who run two minutes slower and win the L.A. Marathon. Burke found one last year and now wants to replace him with somebody, anybody, who can run a sub-2:10.

There’s a $25,000 bonus waiting for anyone who does it.