Rosie Ruiz fakes winning the Boston Marathon - April 21st, 1980

On this day in 1980, a 26-year-old New Yorker named Rosie Ruiz cheated her way to victory at the 84th annual Boston Marathon.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that proves there's more than one way to
make history. I'm Gay Bluesier, and in this episode, we're
exploring a scandal that took the running world by storm
in the time when someone won the Boston Marathon without

(00:23):
actually running it. The day was April one. Came out
of nowhere, ahead of all the other women. I just
saw someone stumble out of the crowd in front of me,

(00:44):
across the street. This was on Commonwealth of probably about
a half mile from the finish choosing track clothes and
wearing a number. But I thought someone had just sort
of stumbled into the race. Maybe somebody was a little
crazy or something. A twenty six year old New Yorker
named Zie Ruiz cheated her way to victory at the
eighty four annual Boston Marathon. She crossed the finish line

(01:07):
in first place with a time of two hours, thirty
one minutes and fifty six seconds, the third fastest time
in the history of the marathons women's division. Ruiz was
awarded a medal and a silver bowl for her victory.
She was also crowned with a laurel wreath, and that's
when things started to get suspicious. Despite having just run

(01:28):
a twenty six mile race in seventy degree heat, Rosie
Ruiz had barely broken a sweat when she was crowned
the winner, Her hair was still neatly styled, and she
didn't even seem that tired. There was also the fact
that no other runners remembered seeing Ruise until the final
mile of the race, when she appeared to come out

(01:49):
of nowhere. These are regularities led to a formal investigation,
and eight days later, Ruiz's time was invalidated and her
title was revoked. It turned out she had cheated in
the world's oldest and most famous long distance foot race,
but whether she had always meant to do so is
a different question. Ruise was born in Havana, Cuba, on

(02:14):
June twenty first, nineteen fifty three. She moved to Florida
as a child and later attended Wayne State College in Nebraska.
Three years later, she left before finishing her degree and
moved to Manhattan, where she took a job as an
administrative assistant at a trading firm. In nineteen seventy nine,
Ruise made her first foray into the running world by

(02:37):
competing in the New York City Marathon. She placed twenty
fourth in the race, finishing the course in just under
three hours, an impressive feat. The following year, Ruiz submitted
that time in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
The New York race would later be used to call
her victory into question, as her winning time in Boston

(02:59):
was a full twenty five minutes faster than her time
in New York. That kind of improvement isn't out of
the question, but it would take an awful lot of
training and discipline, and by Ruiz his own admission, she
had only joined a running club one week earlier, and
her only other training had been running around Central Park.
She also seemed to have little technical knowledge of long

(03:22):
distance running. When quizzed by a skeptical Katherine Switzer, the
first woman to run the Boston Marathon, Ruise didn't even
know what it meant to run intervals. Take a listen.
It was a fantastic race. I really entered into finish.
I didn't enterprise myself. It is my second marathon. Most
of the time in your first ever marathon, and where

(03:43):
was it? It was two hours and fifty six minutes
and thirty three seconds in New York last year. In
the New York City Marathon last October. Yes, and so
you improved from two hours and fifty six minutes to
two hours and thirty one minutes. Like I said, I've
trained myself. I enjoy running very much. I'm Joryland. This
is running, and lately I have been training very hard.
Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals? Um?

(04:04):
Someone else has me that I'm not sure what intervals are. Well,
intervals are are track workouts that are designed to make
your speed and proved dramatically. And if you went from
a two fifty six to two thirty one, one would
normally expect that you do a lot of speed work.
Is someone coaching you or advising you? Uh no, I
advised myself. And how old are you? What about any
of your pass races? Do you hold any other records

(04:26):
or performances? This is my second race and I didn't
think I was really gonna do this good here. I
really didn't. Rosie Ruez the mystery woman when he we
missed her at all our checkpoints. She came through the
finition of Fantastic two thirty one. We have to confirm
that time at this point, but she was way ahead
of a world class field here today in the Boston Marathon.
Thank you, Rose, Thank you. You can hear the suspicions

(04:48):
already being raised in that clip, and it wasn't long
before race officials, spectators, and even fellow participants began to
call Ruiz's victory into question. In the week the followed
Boston Marathon, officials reviewed hours of race footage and hundreds
of photographs, but they found no sign of Ruise during
the first twenty five miles of the race. They also

(05:12):
conducted dozens of interviews with other competitors, as well as
spectators and even journalists, but again, no one remembered seeing
Ruise until she crossed the finish line. It seemed that
Ruiz hadn't run the majority of the race, and it
only jumped in ahead of the other runners in the
last half mile. With all the evidence against her, marathon

(05:33):
officials made the decision to strip Ruise of her title
on April twenty nine. That same day, a Canadian runner
named Jacqueline Garou was declared the real winner of the
women's division. She was given a new medal that had
been made just for her, as Ruise actually refused to
return the original. After her disqualification was announced, Rosie Ruise

(05:57):
maintained her innocence and even offered to a polygraph test
to prove she was telling the truth, but the public
didn't see the need. The scandal in Boston had compelled
the New York City Marathon to launch its own review,
and it quickly found that Ruiz's twenty fourth place finish
in that race had also been faked. In reality, Ruise

(06:18):
had quit the New York Marathon after injuring her ankle
at the ten mile mark. She then hopped on a
subway for the remaining sixteen miles and then walked to
the finish line, where she was mistakenly assigned a time
by a confused volunteer. Once her deceptions were public knowledge,
Ruise lost her job in New York and had to
move back to Florida. She was never charged with a

(06:42):
crime for faking her marathon wins, but she did have
some brushes with the law in the following years. In
two she was convicted of embezzling sixty tho dollars from
the real estate company where she worked, and a year
later she was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover detective.
She received a combined total of eight years probation for

(07:03):
the two offenses, and also served about a week in jail.
She continued to live and work in Florida until twenty nineteen,
when she passed away from cancer at the age of
sixty six. Back in Boston, race officials learned from the
scandal in nineteen eighty they implemented tighter security measures to
thwart would be cheaters, including video shot at secret locations

(07:27):
throughout the race, and eventually computer checkpoints along the course.
In that way, Rosie Ruiz left a lasting impression on
the sport that came to define her life. It's not
the legacy of a first place champion, but it is
a legacy all the same, because she never admitted to
any wrongdoing. We don't know why Ruis cheated in either

(07:49):
New York or in Boston. Some accounts suggests that her
boss had been so impressed that she qualified for the
Boston Race that he offered to pay all her expenses
if she ran in it. This likely would have made
her feel pressure to deliver a fast time to make
his investments seem worth it. If that's the case, Ruise
probably meant to jump into the race somewhere near the

(08:11):
middle of the pack, but when her calculations were off,
she wound up joining in the lead ahead of the
other four hundred and forty eight female runners. Jacqueline Garow
later said that she felt pity for Rosie Ruise but
didn't harbor any ill feelings against her, and that's pretty
much how I feel too. Ruise set out to commit

(08:32):
a relatively low level act of fraud and wound up
stumbling into a much larger one, one that turned her
into a reviled national figure and insured her worst moments
would be talked about for decades to come, eventually, even
on podcasts like this one. In principle, stealing first place
is just as bad as stealing three hundred place, but

(08:55):
in terms of public scorn and humiliation, one is going
to draw a much stronger response than the other. I
don't think Rosie Ruise meant to put herself on the
world stage, and once she got there, she definitely didn't
enjoy it for any longer than a minute at most.
That's enough to warrant at least a little sympathy for me.

(09:15):
But if that's not the case for you. Maybe you
can at least relate to Rosie's disinterest in running twenty
six point two miles all in one go. That's just
too far. I'm Gabe Lousier and hopefully you now know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
You can learn even more about history by following us

(09:37):
on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at t d i HC Show,
and if you have any comments or suggestions, you can
always send them my way at this day at I
heart media dot com. Thanks to Chandler May's for producing
the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
back here again tomorrow for another day in history class

(10:00):
and it be aptant to the