The course of forgiveness
Jacqueline Gareau says she’s sending the late Rosie Ruiz ‘high vibes’
Jacqueline Gareau read Rosie Ruiz’s obituary and learned some things.
Ruiz liked music, had a life partner and, Gareau surmised, was probably a loving person because she helped to raise children.
But the 66-year-old Canadian didn’t dwell on the paragraphs detailing Ruiz’s enduring infamy — as the Boston Marathon’s most brazen cheat.
Gareau, the true winner in 1980, needed no reminders of the facts.
And she was not angry at Ruiz. She said she never was.
Instead, Gareau felt sorrow for the dead woman. Same age as her. Cancer given as cause of death. Such suffering after becoming pop culture’s punchline for anyone who faked an achievement.
“I said ‘What a sad story, not for me, but for her,’ ” Gareau, a massage therapist based in SteAdèle, Que., said after hearing the American had died.
“I don’t think I would have liked to live that way with a lie, unless she just believed so much” that she actually won the Boston Marathon.
Gareau was crowned champion in Boston eight days later, while Ruiz was disqualified in disgrace. Their lives, while entwined by the race, continued to diverge after the scandal.
Ruiz built a criminal record. She was convicted and jailed in the early 1980s on charges of grand larceny and forgery and for an attempt to sell cocaine, according to media reports.
Gareau, a respiratory technician in a hospital, quit her job to train and compete as a worldclass marathoner over the next decade.
She was fifth in the 1983 world championships, made the 1984 Canadian Olympic team (but dropped out of the race due to injury) and has nine career marathon wins. Gareau married, had a son and lived in the United States for several years before returning to Quebec, where she wanted to help people physically and spiritually. She became a registered massage therapist specializing in “energy work” with Swedish, reflexology and shiatsu treatments — “If you don’t feel good inside, your heart is not happy,” she said.
“For me, it’s important to grow in life spiritually and that’s what I’m trying to do,” Gareau said, speaking effusively on her Bluetooth while driving to Quebec’s Mont Tremblant area for a business meeting.
“I am not going to say (spiritual growth) can’t be done, because there is always something that can be done by being more vigilant to our heart — the soul is there,” she continued.
“We have a soul and we don’t want a chain over the soul. We want to listen to it.”
Within her sense of spirituality, Gareau has been thinking of Ruiz since her death, reported in early July.
“I’m talking to her once in a while,” Gareau said. Through prayer? A pause. “I’m sending her a message, I’m sending her high vibes and I’m thinking about her because she is somewhere in an another dimension,” she said.
“You don’t have to believe that — everyone has their beliefs.”
Gareau’s compassion for Ruiz is rooted in the “empathy” she, personally, has received from athletes and the public, ever since marathon officials completed their investigation of Ruiz’s course-cutting scam in Boston.
Ruiz drew skepticism as soon as she crossed the finish line — she didn’t look like a fit longdistance runner and didn’t understand training questions when interviewed.
It was later determined Ruiz emerged from the crowd of spectators, about a kilometre and a half from the finish line, and several minutes ahead of Gareau, who had led the women’s field almost the entire race.
After the Ruiz disqualification, Gareau was crowned with the winner’s laurel wreath and was given a new medal in a special ceremony in Boston.
Ruiz refused to return the medal she accepted on race day.
Did Ruiz steal her moment of glory, Gareau was asked.
“There’s some advantage (to being caught up in the scandal) as everyone knows I won in Boston,” Gareau said, laughing.
“There are past Boston (winners) that are not remembered and I am, so there’s always a positive thing in a negative.
“I made many friends, just talking about that race.”
Gareau, who also conducts running clinics and is a motivational speaker, is asked if she might have been able to help Ruiz spiritually if Ruiz had asked for help: “Yes, I think so.
“For me, it’s part of my mission in life to grow myself spiritually, help people, and why not? We are all interconnected,” said Gareau, who posted a tribute to Ruiz in French and English on her Facebook page.
“If she would have come to me and said, ‘Poor Jacqueline, I am so sorry for you; do you forgive me?’ I would have been happy for her and me. But that didn’t happen. But I forgive her.”
Gareau said it’s also time to put Ruiz’s decades-old cheating into perspective and accept that “maybe she was good in other aspects of her life.”
Gareau added, gently: “Let her go in peace.”