The Woman Who Stole Victory In The Boston Marathon

The baffling story of how Rosie Ruiz cut the course and became a Boston Marathon legend

Making international headlines right now is Scottish ultramarathoner, Joasia Zakrzewski, facing calls for a lifetime ban for cutting the course in an ultramarathon from Manchester to Liverpool. She traveled 2.5 miles by car in a 50-mile race, which Zakrzewski attributes to being injured and wanting to drop out. She then accepted the third-place trophy when she came across the finish line, a mistake she attributes to arriving in Scotland from Australia too late and being severely jetlagged.

But at least Zakrzewski ran at least 47 miles of the race. Accepting the trophy was unethical, and it’s crazy she wasn’t caught sooner given tracking data shows she ran a mile in 1 minute and 40 seconds. She was disqualified. Cutting the course is a big deal and I get race officials and the running world have to make a big example out of it, but Zakrzeski’s sins pale in comparison to the most egregious course cutter of all time.

Likewise, this Monday was the 127th Boston Marathon, the most famous and popular marathon in America. It was also the marathon in my lifetime where I experienced the most hype — sub 2 hour marathoner, double Olympic champion, and the best marathoner of all time, Eliud Kipchoge, ran the race and was expected to wipe the floor with his competition as well as the course record. And so it was such a shock when Kipchoge was dropped and finished in sixth place.

But Kipchoge isn’t even the most famous runner in the illustrious history of the Boston Marathon. That title belongs to someone who cut the course, cheated, and only ran a half mile of the race: Rosie Ruiz.

In the 1980 Boston Marathon, Canadian Jacqueline Gareau was unexpectedly dominating the Boston Marathon’s women’s race. She wasn’t even allowed to start at the front of the race with the elites because she was a relative nobody, but the 27-year-old hospital worker looked like a decisive victor by mile 18.

But Gareau did not win, and few people outside the running world know who she is today.

Someone even more unknown, Rosie Ruiz, “won” the Boston Marathon after cutting the course and only running the last half mile of the race. Ruiz ran a time that was the fastest ever for a female runner in the Boston Marathon, and also the third fastest for a woman ever — she apparently finished in 2 hours, 31 minutes, and 56 seconds.

Suspicions

When she finished, a commentator asked her how she improved her previous time by so much. She had apparently run a 2:56:33 at the New York City Marathon the year before and improved her marathon time by 25 minutes.

However, according to Richard Sandomir at the New York Times, she couldn’t answer the interviewers' questions about basic things runners do to train and improve, including interval training. No one saw her at various checkpoints of the race, and she was not sweating at all on an incredibly muggy day after apparently running 26.2 miles.

Ruiz was branded by commentator Kathrine Switzer as “the mystery woman winner.”

Bill Burt at the Eagle Tribune also notes Ruiz was also asked by men’s marathon winner, Bill Rodgers, what her splits were during the race. Splits are the times you ran for each mile (or kilometer) of the marathon, and while runners in 1980 may not have had watches or GPS watches to religiously take splits, there would have been clocks at various milestones of the race to tell you your splits and elite runners pay a lot of attention to make sure they’re on track.

Ruiz responded “what are splits?” to Rodgers’s question.

Unraveling and disqualifications

Rosie Ruiz’s scheme unraveled very quickly — but first about the New York City Marathon months prior. A freelance photographer told the New York Times she chatted with Ruiz on the subway in New York, and Ruiz told the photographer she dropped out due to an injured ankle. Morrow and Ruiz then walked to the finish and watched the winner finish the New York City Marathon, with Ruiz needing to lean on Morrow the whole time.

Ruiz needed medical attention in the medical area, which led to her recording a finishing time of two hours and 56 minutes, enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

Morrow later called a sportswriter at the New York Times after she saw Ruiz on the news as the winner of the Boston Marathon. The sportswriter took Morrow to a press conference held by Ruiz, where Morrow identified her as the injured runner she was on the subway with.

First, Rosie Ruiz was disqualified from the New York City Marathon on April 25.

Race organizers at Boston scanned pictures of various checkpoints and didn’t find a single one that Ruiz had crossed, although she was insistent she did finish the race and was “very convincing,” according to race director Will Cloney. When he presented evidence to Ruiz that she wasn’t at checkpoints, she said “I ran the race” and said she didn’t care. At another meeting, Ruiz cried a lot when he told her they would award Gareau the winner.

Boston Marathon race officials took longer to disqualify Ruiz than New York City Marathon officials — they wanted to be “absolutely certain,” according to Cloney. Since she qualified for the Boston Marathon based on her fake New York City Marathon time, her entry was effectively null, and Boston would be let off the hook.

Throughout the entire fiasco, Cloney was known for being very respectful of Ruiz and did not “lay into her” as others wanted to. He and Gareau did not condemn Ruiz at any point — they only felt sorry for her.

But more evidence compiled that Ruiz did not run the whole race. Harvard senior John Faulkner and his classmate reported seeing someone stumble from the crowd onto the street — a woman with a yellow T-shirt flailing her arms. They would later see her in the newspaper, and Faulkner reported what he saw to race officials.

Ruiz would be disqualified from the Boston Marathon later in the week.

When Ruiz was disqualified from the Boston Marathon, she called it the “second saddest day of my lie” behind leaving her father in Cuba. She never returned her first-place medal that Gareau earned.

A friend of Ruiz, Steve Marek, said Ruiz admitted to him she cheated in the marathon. He also said she mistimed when she was going to finish the race — Ruiz did not know no women had finished yet, and she was shocked she won. Rodgers also thinks Ruiz simply mistimed when she would finish.

“She had no idea she was going to win…Just looking at her and talking to her, she was overwhelmed. It wasn’t someone who planned to win,” Rodgers said.

Takeaways

The biggest question behind the Rosie Ruiz story is “why?” Why did Rosie Ruiz do it? What did Ruiz get out of it? It’s not like there was a ton of money involved, and as a runner, when I tell people I run and even when I won a local race, people say “that’s cool” before moving on with the rest of their lives. It feels bad to join in on the pile-on of Rosie Ruiz when she gained nothing from the scheme — she had a few days of fame, but ultimately ruined her reputation for life and became known as a cheater.

One theory is that Rosie Ruiz was trying to impress her boss and her co-workers at Metal Traders Incorporated, the company she worked for. Her boss, who was also a runner, was so impressed by her time in the New York City Marathon that he paid for her to travel and run the Boston Marathon. By that point, Ruiz was in too deep.

Ruiz would live a relatively quiet life and keep a low profile after the Boston Marathon fiasco. She would have legal problems after being charged with grand larceny and forgery after she was accused of stealing from her real estate firm in 1982. When she moved to Florida in 1983, Ruiz was arrested and charged for allegedly selling cocaine to undercover police officers.

For the rest of her life, Ruiz insisted she won the race. She died at 66 years of age on July 8, 2019, from cancer.

I also think Rosie Ruiz genuinely made the mistake of mistiming when she’d jump out and finish. And I also think there’s a certain irony and humor in the fact that runners (like myself) take themselves so seriously and take the sport so seriously, only for someone who cut the course and only ran the last half mile of the Boston Marathon to be the most famous “winner” in the history of the event.

It doesn’t seem like the win was super well-planned or coordinated, given she didn’t show up at various checkpoints. But I also think that she was too far in to turn back after she crossed the finish line in first place and took the medal. She would have been vilified the same, if not worse, in the media had she apologized and cowered in shame, so perhaps she saw doubling down on her lie as the better option.

Regardless, it’s very difficult to do what Rosie Ruiz did today. Runners have bibs and timing chips whenever we run major races. We’re tracked at various checkpoints. Someone is going to know you cut the course just by virtue of you not going through those checkpoints.

At some level, that was a failure by the Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon to allow Rosie Ruiz to finish in the times she purported to finish in. They failed to monitor who was actually running the race, even at its most elite levels.

I’m surprised a more cynical message about race organizing wasn’t sent at the time: if someone as normal as Rosie Ruiz could steal victory at a race as prominent as the Boston Marathon, anyone could.