Remembering when Rosie Ruiz stole the Boston Marathon from a Canadian

That is an excerpt from The Buzzer, which is CBC Sports activities’ each day electronic mail publication. Stay up to speed on what’s happening in sports by subscribing here.

Three days in the past, Malindi Elmore produced one of many extra outstanding performances ever by a Canadian distance runner. With the Boston Marathon celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its first official girls’s competitors, the 42-year-old mom of two (and nationwide record-holder) ran the game’s most prestigious and hardest race in 2:27:58. That is the quickest time ever by a Canadian girl on this revered course, and it positioned Elmore a particularly spectacular eleventh in her Boston debut.

Nonetheless, although, just one Canadian has ever gained the ladies’s division of the Boston Marathon. It occurred 42 years in the past right now, and below probably the most weird circumstances possible.

Jacqueline Gareau’s victory on April 21, 1980 would have been unimaginable simply by itself deserves. On the time, the 27-year-old Montrealer was in no way an expert athlete. She’d been an out-of-shape smoker till getting hooked on working six years earlier, and did not strive a marathon till 1977. Gareau’s expertise was simple from the beginning (she positioned second in her first marathon), however in early 1980 she was nonetheless simply coaching in her spare time whereas working at a hospital. When she made it to Boston for the primary time that April, Gareau was taken so frivolously that she wasn’t allowed to line up on the entrance with the elite runners, forcing her to zig-zag by means of the gang to catch up.

So think about everybody’s shock — and Gareau’s pleasure — when she not solely went toe-to-toe with the elites however pulled away from them and crossed the end line in a record-breaking 2:34:28. Cinderella story! However then think about her despair when she noticed somebody much more unknown than she was — some 27-year-old Cuban-American named Rosie Ruiz — being topped with the laurel wreath for successful the ladies’s division.

A number of of the highest athletes instantly grew to become suspicious once they went to speak to Ruiz and located that this one who had simply shattered the Boston Marathon girls’s report didn’t look like an precise runner. She did not have the physique of 1, did not costume like one, and did not even appear to know something concerning the sport. One other purple flag was that Ruiz did not seem all that drained for somebody who had supposedly simply run for 2 and half hours on an unseasonably heat day.

Ultimately, Ruiz’s total ruse was uncovered. As the opposite runners suspected, she was not one in all them. She’d cheated her technique to a Boston qualifying time by hopping on the subway in the course of the 1979 New York Metropolis Marathon, the place she “completed” eleventh. In Boston, she managed to sneak her means onto the final mile of the course unnoticed a couple of minutes earlier than Gareau obtained there. This was troublesome however not unattainable in an period when chip timing had but to be launched, the Boston Marathon attracted far smaller crowds, and fewer than 5,500 runners participated within the race (in comparison with 30,000 today).

Within the years after her marathon fraud was uncovered, Ruiz did jail time for stealing cash from the Manhattan actual property firm the place she labored, and for a foiled cocaine deal at a Miami airport resort. She died of most cancers in 2019 on the age of 66, destined to eternally be talked about in any dialogue of the largest cheaters in sports activities historical past.

It took a few week for Ruiz’s Boston Marathon title to be handed to its rightful winner. And 25 years for Gareau to obtain one thing else she deserved — the satisfaction of breaking the tape on the end line in downtown Boston. Gareau was named the grand marshal of the 2005 race, the place a tempo automotive carried the 52-year-old to the tip of the course and she or he ran the final 100m to lastly get the first-place end she’d earned 1 / 4 century earlier.

In between, Gareau normal a superb marathon profession — particularly contemplating her modest status earlier than her Boston win. She positioned second in Tokyo later that yr, then  completed fifth, second and second within the subsequent three Boston Marathons. Gareau was fifth on the 1983 world championships and certified for the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles, although she was unable to complete that race. She earned victories in Montreal and L.A., and positioned second in Chicago and Houston earlier than the tip of her prime within the mid-to-late ’80s.

If you would like to study extra about Gareau and the “Rosie Ruiz race,” read this 2015 Q&A by Scott Leitch for Canadian Working. I used among the particulars she shares there for this text.