Rosie Ruiz, 66, who ‘won’ 1980 Boston Marathon but skipped most of the race
The first woman to cross the finish line of the 1980 Boston Marathon seemed to have run 800 meters, not 26.2 miles. Scarcely out of breath, hair still in place, she had finished her first marathon in New York months earlier in just under three hours, then set a course record in Boston with a stunning time of 2 hours, 31 minutes and 56 seconds, the third-fastest in women’s history.
But competitors said they never saw Rosie Ruiz and her bright yellow shirt fly down the course. On video tapes of the marathon, the 26-year-old Cuban American was nowhere to be found. No one had jotted down her number, W50, at checkpoints during the event.
Four days after the race, officials in New York concluded that she had skipped much of that city’s marathon, apparently taking a 16-mile subway ride to the finish after turning an ankle. And in what is sometimes described as one of the worst moments in marathon history, Ruiz was soon stripped of her Boston Marathon title as well, as race officials determined she had jumped in with roughly half a mile to go, cheating Canadian runner Jacqueline Gareau at the finish line.
Ruiz, who later went by Rosie M. Vivas, was 66 when she died July 8, according to an obituary her family placed with a funeral home in West Palm Beach, Fla. The obituary said she had been diagnosed with cancer more than 10 years ago but did not specify where she died.
In rare interviews after the Boston race, Ruiz always insisted that she had completed the marathon. As she saw it, her boyish short hair had led the crowd to mistake her for a men’s runner; officials were embarrassed that she, an amateur, had defeated the professionals; and her victory marked a “triumph” for women’s sports.
“I do not believe that there is enough coverage for women in any of the races,” Ruiz said in a tearful news conference days after the marathon. “I believe that maybe after this, whether you prove me guilty or not — which I am not — there will be more coverage of women crossing the finish line during 26 miles.”
“I had one minute to feel that I had won the race,” she added, “and every moment after that has been a nightmare.”
To many runners and race historians, Ruiz was less a feminist trailblazer than a brazen course-cutter and an unrepentant cheat. Some wrote her off as a mischievous prankster; others suggested she was deluded, struggling with mental illness. According to one theory, she had only wanted to cross the finish lane with the rest of the women, and her real mistake was winning.
“It was the last time we could have been fooled,” said marathon runner and race commentator Kathrine Switzer, who interviewed Ruiz on television after the race. “Women’s running was growing so fast and so excitingly, that there was still a chance that some unknown could emerge and win a race.”
“People called me and said, ‘This is such a setback for women,’” Switzer recalled by phone. “I said, ‘People haven’t even been paying attention to women. The reason she was allowed to cheat is nobody was paying attention to anyone except for the first 10 men at the Boston Marathon. At least now people are paying attention to what we do.’”
Ruiz was far from the first person to cheat at a marathon. Fred Lorz finished first at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, only to acknowledge that he was helped by hitchhiking roughly 10 miles after suffering from cramps. (It was all a “joke,” he said.) More recent contestants have been caught doping and biking across racecourses. Last month, the marathon world was rocked when Frank Meza, a 70-year-old runner, died by suicide, after his record time at the Los Angeles Marathon was disqualified amid accusations of cheating.
Ruiz’s victory was suspect from the beginning. In a postrace interview with Switzer, Ruiz said she had run in high school, quit because of a knee operation and only recently taken it back up, running 65 to 70 miles each week.
“Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals?” asked Switzer, using a common term for a speed-training technique. “Someone else asked me that,” Ruiz replied, crowned with the winner’s wreath. “I’m not sure what intervals are. What are they?”
In a separate interview, she explained, “I just got up this morning with a lot of energy.”
Two Harvard students ultimately helped uncover the ruse, reporting that they saw Ruiz emerge from the crowd near Commonwealth Avenue, not far from the finish. Soon after, the phrase “pulling a Rosie” became “a euphemism for finagling with infamy or finding a shortcut to success,” the Boston Globe reported, and Ruiz became one of the world’s bestknown marathon runners.
“Great for our sport, isn’t it? Think of the two most famous marathoners — Pheidippides and Rosie Ruiz,” said Boston Marathon champion Bill Rodgers in an interview with the Globe. “One dropped dead and the other was crazy.”