30th anniversary of Ruiz's shortcut to infamy

Rosie Ruiz's 15 minutes of fame now have lasted 30 years. A mysterious figure when she crossed the Boston Marathon finish line first among 448 women on April 21, 1980, and a disgraced enigma in exile ever since, Ruiz nevertheless has hung around in sporting lore as possibly the most familiar name in the great race's 114-year history.

She never has admitted that she sneaked onto the 26-mile, 385-yard course with about a mile to go and wound up wearing a laurel wreath and champion's medal. The last record of her making any public comment was 10 years ago, when she declined to discuss the event.

Stripped of her title eight days after an investigation determined she had cheated, she didn't respond to race officials' invitation to run Boston the following year, and there is no record of her ever attempting another marathon.

Yet four-time Boston winner Bill Rodgers recently told The Boston Globe, "I always say that the most famous marathoner of all time is Rosie Ruiz. I guess infamous is more accurate."

She was big news, of the wacko variety, in the immediate wake of her Boston masquerade, and her name instantly became shorthand for audacious prevarication. In the face of overwhelming evidence against her, which began to collect within minutes of her "victory," she repeatedly insisted she had won, fair and square, and she stuck to her story days later during a sometimes teary Manhattan news conference in which members of the running community challenged everything from her veracity to her resting heart rate. (She said it was 76. Runners yelped that no woman in marathon condition would have a resting rate higher than the 50s.)

She then disappeared, but somehow didn't go away.

Consider that Monday, a 56-year-old massage therapist from rural Quebec named Jacqueline Gareau will seem - to the public at large - to be just another face in the crowd of 25,000 energetic souls running this year's Boston Marathon, even though Gareau is the woman who actually won the 1980 race.

Boston officials have issued her a "Gareau 1980" running bib; maybe that will shift some attention to Gareau in the midst of the odd Ruiz anniversary. Gareau's career has included nine marathon victories and a berth on the Canadian Olympic team in 1984, while Ruiz's single achievement in running was as an impostor.

Almost from the moment Ruiz crossed the Boston finish line in 1980, she was having trouble convincing anyone that she was the champion - or even a runner. A volunteer trying to help her to the interview area said "she seemed to want no part of it." Rodgers - who had just won the men's race and already was speaking to reporters when Ruiz was seated next to him at an interview table - blinked and asked, "Uh, who are you?"

She supposedly had run the race in 2 hours, 31 minutes and 56 seconds - a Boston record - though her entry form had claimed a previous-best marathon of 3:56, an "almost impossible" improvement in the minds of officials and runners. (That 3:56, it was determined within a week, had been claimed for the previous fall's New York City Marathon, when Ruiz had been spotted riding the subway to the finish area.)

Even as Ruiz spoke to reporters after the Boston race, surprisingly unable to recall any details along the course, New York's marathon impresario, Fred Lebow, was demanding: "Look at her. She didn't have any dried salt [from sweat] on her temples. Her hair wasn't matted. Her sides weren't even wet. Look at her thighs." They were too heavy for someone who supposedly did the sort of training - up to 100 miles a week - to have run such an elite time.

Race officials scrambled to review photos and checkpoint records along the course to find evidence of Ruiz's presence - there was no television coverage of the race - and found nothing. Within hours, a theory - later bolstered by eyewitnesses but never acknowledged by Ruiz - crystallized:

Ruiz, wearing a yellow T-shirt advertising her New York employer, who had paid for her trip to Boston and her hotel, had miscalculated. In the enormous, confusing crowd, she had jumped onto the course too near the male front-runners, around 150th place, ahead of the other women. And had come to the finish, about a mile later, less than a second off the American women's record.

When Gareau finished not quite three minutes later, in 2:34:28, and was escorted to the interview area, she was asked if she knew the woman wearing the winner's laurel wreath. "No," Gareau said. "Who is she?"

"She won."

"She did?"

"Yes."

"But the people [along the route]. They told me I was No. 1. First woman . . . "

Shortly after Boston stripped her of her title, Ruiz was fired. Two years later, after a 10-kilometer race in Miami, Gareau was startled to see Ruiz approach her and introduce herself. Gareau asked, "Why did you do that?" in Boston, and Ruiz responded that she had run the entire race and had won. Gareau walked away.

That same year, 1982, Ruiz was arrested on larceny and forgery charges in New York for allegedly stealing $60,000 from her new employer. A year and a half later, she was arrested for attempting to sell cocaine to an undercover agent in Miami. In both cases, she was jailed briefly.

There were reports that Ruiz married, then divorced, in the 1980s and that she has settled in South Florida. Gareau, up in Canada, still is asked about Ruiz.

"I just laugh," Gareau told a reporter in January. "I really don't think about her anymore."

Others still do. But not in a good way.