Jacqueline
Gareau 1980
 On
the morning of April 21, 1980, Jacqueline Gareau sprawled on
the playing field behind the high school at Hopkinton and
stretched her muscles beneath a blue Massachusetts sky.
Calves, quadriceps, hamstrings, she went through the whole
range of exercises, as much this day to calm her nerves as to
prepare her ninety-eight-pound body for the long journey back
to Boston. This was to be her first Boston Marathon and she
thought her chances of winning were reasonable despite the
fact that little notice had been taken of her entry.
Gareau's training had gone well
and she felt ready, but for the moment there was only the long
wait for the noon start. Dressed in worn blue sweat shirt and
baggy warm-up pants, she faded into anonymity among the
thousands who had converged this morning on Hopington. (a)
The warmups concealed yellow racing shorts, matching singlet
and the official race number she had been issued by the Boston
Athletic Association — W22. The number indicated she had run
the twenty-second fastest qualifying time among women entrants
but it was wrong. In fact, she was among the top ten women in
the field.
Gareau's feet were also a sign of nerves. For the first time
prior to a race she smeared Vaseline on them to ward off
blisters. Her toes wiggled about oddly inside her blue and
white running shoes. Blisters had not been a problem for
Gareau in previous marathons but putting on Vaseline, like the
knotting and reknotting of laces, and the checking and
rechecking of digital stop watches, was one of those
reassuring rituals to be conducted before the starting gun.
With Gareau were Gilles
Lapierre, a Montreal banker who was also her confidant and
manager, and Alan Wright, the editor of Runner Canada (b)
magazine. Accomplished runners themselves, having met the
qualifying standard for men under forty by completing a
marathon in less than two hours and fifty minutes within the
previous year, they were also preparing to race. The group was
completed by Lucie La Ferriere, a lithe blond woman with a
camera hung from her neck. They were part of the sea of
runners that filled the playing field and spilled over into
virtually all corners of Hopkinton, more than doubling the
prim New England town's usual population of seven thousand,
and filling the air with an expectant buzz.
Caffeine
From an equipment bag Gareau
pulled out a jug of cold coffee and swallowed several ounces,
the bitter taste trailing down her throat to an empty stomach.
She shared it with the others and someone produced a bottle of
mineral water to flush away the aftertaste. The ceremony
occurred exactly on time, an hour before the race. Coffee was
the latest marathon elixir in the spring of 1980, its magic
property being caffeine. Ingested ahead of time, physiologists
claimed, it helped hold exhaustion at bay in the final miles.
Caffeine somehow tricked the body into burning fat for fuel
faster than it otherwise would, thus sparing stores of muscle
glycogen, the most readily available and easily depleted
source of physical energy.
Glycogen was another sacrosanct
matter. Gareau had maximized her supply of this precious
substance by following a careful dietary regimen over the past
week, another of the physiologists' discoveries. For the first
three days she avoided carbohydrates, the main sources of
glycogen, by not eating potatoes, bread, pasta or other
starchy foods. She also continued to run each day, a
combination of activities that quickly emptied her muscles of
glycogen and left her tired and irritable. Then for three days
she returned to carbohydrate foods, eating them almost
exclusively. The procedure was dietary sleight of hand. Her
muscles, starved for glycogen, overcompensated, taking on
stores well in excess of normal. Gareau's good nature came
back and she could almost feel the extended energies that
experts assured such "carbohydrate loading" would guarantee
athletes engaged in strenuous endurance sports.
Gareau was not alone in
suspecting she had a chance to win the women's race. Lapierre
thought so too, as did Wright. Joan Benoit of Portland, Maine,
the defending women's champion, with a marathon best of
2:31:23, was absent from the field, recovering from an
appendectomy.
So, mercifully, was Grete Waitz
of Norway, that untouchable streak of Northern Lightning, as
running magazines liked to describe her, the woman who so
dominated marathon running. Among women marathoners in the
spring of 1980 there was Grete, alone at the top, and then the
others. The previous fall at New York City Waitz had set a new
world record of 2:27:33 and done so with breathless ease. That
same race had been Jacqueline Gareau's best marathon. She ran
third in 2:39:04, (c) a fast time by the standards of most
women marathoners if not in Waitz's class. (Gayle Olinekova,
with a marathon best of 2:36:12, was the only Canadian woman
who was faster than Gareau at the time.)
Gareau thought her training
leading up to Boston would enable her to improve her time to
about two hours and thirty-four minutes. If she was right it
would put her in the thick of things with the fastest women
entered, recognized elite runners like Gillian Adams of Great
Britain and Patti Lyons of Boston.
" It's an open race,'' said
Wright.
Gareau was wistful, almost
dreamy.
"I suppose the laurel wreath
would look good on me,'' she said.
(106)
The coffee was mobilizing more
than the fat stores of the runners: it was also mobilizing
their bladders. They headed for what privacy was offered by a
wood adjacent the playing field, which wasn't much. The place
was crawling with hundreds of runners, male and female.
Cameras
unwelcome
La Ferriere, deciding she could
use a trip herself, trooped along, the camera swinging about
her neck. As she entered the wood, it came alive with the
screams of crouching inhabitants. Was nothing in this age of
Boston mania sacred from the media's probing gaze?
The starting line at Boston was
a fresh strip of paint across the east end of Main Street,
overlooking a downhill stretch of highway lined by leafless
April trees. To the right stood a war memorial, a big pine
tree and the town green, to the left a cemetery and the First
Congregational Church. Hopkinton residents once thought their
town crowded if Patriot's Day brought an influx of a couple of
hundred runners. On this day there were five thousand official
runners and half as many more unauthorized participants.
Humanity massed back the length
of Main Street, past the trim white church and the John Warren
Lodge, AF & AM, past the Bank for Savings and the Brown and
Smith luncheonette, spilling down the hill on the other side.
The flow backed up side streets and into driveways, up
walkways in some cases and onto doorsteps. Traffic stood
halted in all directions and overhead in snarling helicopters
television cameras looked down on a small New England town
brought to kaleidoscopic standstill by one of the world's
unique sports spectacles.
Marathon officials herded
runners into position, elite athletes shoulder to shoulder at
the front across the bright white line, slower runners
following in order of qualifying times. Gareau should have
been close to the front. As her manager, Lapierre had planned,
if necessary, to muscle Gareau's slight five-foot-two frame to
the front of the pack to protect against lost time in the
chaos of the sta,-t.
Instead, a mix-up resulted when
Gareau made a last-minute dash to the wood to allay
competitive jitters. When she returned Lapierre was nowhere in
sight, lost in the sea of slender bodies. Asking a race
official for guidance she found herself thrust into the mob
among runners expecting to complete the race in two hours and
fifty minutes, well back from the starting line.
"They don't have my time here,"
she protested. "They're slower."
Annoyed, the official
threatened to bar her from the race if she tried to move
forward.
"Okay," she conceded, "okay."
The noon gun blast that sent
Bill Rodgers and a clutch of other cardiovascular marvels
spilling down Route 135 toward Boston left Jacqueline Gareau
standing motionless in the crowd, unable to run, her watch
flipping costly seconds away. When at last the assemblage
moved she set off in hot pursuit, dodging and weaving past
slower runners to make up time.
I was really far behind. I had
to do five miles very fast. My competition? I had no women
around me. You want to be with them."
Catching up
A fast start is gamble enough
in any marathon, risking burnout in the final miles, but on
this day the hazard was greater with the sun pouring down from
a cloudless sky and the temperature at road level hovering
near eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Two miles out Gareau overtook
Lapierre who should have been behind her from the beginning.
Alarmed, he urged her on and she left him behind. A few miles
later she caught the women she was looking for and, despite
the frantic chase to do so, she felt good, her legs strong,
the miles flowing easily. Near Framingham, at about six miles,
she passed Patti Lyons and a little later overtook Ellison
Goodall, another American runner.
Kathrine Switzer, the first
woman to run Boston with an of ficial race number, was
watching Gareau from a press bus just ahead. Switzer caught
her eye and held up an index finger, flashing a grin as she
did so.
"You're number one, " she
shouted.
The course was lined with
spectators virtually the whole twenty-six miles from Hopkinton
to the foot of the Prudential Centre where the race would
finish back in Boston. As the leading woman Gareau was carried
along on an unbroken wave of applause, the cheers nowhere
louder than when she sped through the screaming gauntlet of
women at Wellesley College. Their welcome seemed as though it
might sweep her from her feet. Rosie Ruiz Headquarters for the
1980 Boston Marathon was the Sheraton Boston Hotel. The
Sheraton was attached by a walkway to the Prudential Centre
and from many of its rooms it was possible to look down on the
decorated marathon finish line. Among those registered at the
Sheraton this day was a woman from New York, twenty-six years
old, of Cuban origin, an executive assistant employed with a
New York company called Metal Traders, Inc.
Although born in Havana, she
had grown up in Florida and gone to university in Nebraska
before making New York her home. At five-foot-eight and one
hundred and thirty pounds she was taller and heavier than most
women runners but she too was entered this day in the Boston
Marathon. She had with her a certificate showing she had
qualified for Boston by running the New York City Marathon in
2:56:29 the previous fall. An excellent time, if not fast
enough to attract media attention, it was the fiftieth fastest
among women runners at Boston and she had been duly issued the
corresponding race number, W50.
She dressed for the race in
white shorts with blue trim and a bulky yellow T-shirt with
the letters M.T.I. stenciled across the front. The initials,
for Metal Traders, Inc., were a gesture of thanks to her boss,
John Emptage, who had paid her way to Boston after learning
how fast she had run in New York. A runner himself he was
pleased to have such a competent athlete on his staff and was
happy to lend his support.
The woman's name was Rosie
Ruiz.
Then she left the Sheraton that
day, stepping out into the balmy Boston air, she rehearsed in
her mind the strategy she had planned for the race, a strategy
that the entire country would know by sundown.
'I saw
something'
John Faulkner, a Harvard senior
who ran track as a freshman was standing with a classmate,
Sola Mahoney, near the Charlesgate intersection on
Commonwealth Avenue about twenty minutes past two on Patriot s
Day. Mahoney was a triple jumper on the Harvard track team.
From where they stood it was less than a mile to the marathon
finish line a good vantage point and a good day to watch the
runners go past. Bill Rodgers, the hometown hero, had just
sailed by en route to his fourth Boston victory and Faulkner
and Mahoney were waiting for a glimpse of the Canadian runner
that radio announcers kept saying had taken a commanding lead
in the women's division. Then a moment of commotion occurred
that both would recall later. (107)
"I saw something right across
the street that was sort of strange," Faulkner said. "I saw a
woman stumble out of the crowd. She looked like she wasn't a
runner. Her arms were flying around. She was wearing a number.
I didn't rake her very seriously. I watched her stumble along
the right side of the street. When the Canadian girl came by
everybody thought she was the winner."
Mahoney remembered the woman
too.
''She was running in a very
awkward manner, almost out of control. My feeling was that
nobody was taking any notice. Nobody was applauding. She did,
in fact, have a number. I said to my friend, 'Is this for
real?' ''
Gareau appeared minutes later
and sped through, hair tied back in a bundle of unruly brown
curls, taut body the picture of struggle and athletic
excellence. Packed throngs sent her on to the finish with an
ovation. For nearly fifteen miles Gareau was certain she had
led all other women. It was evident from the tumult provoked
by her every step as she advanced along the course, and now as
she pressed in Commonwealth Avenue toward the finish she
allowed herself to believe that she was about to win. Yet
quite suddenly the applause dwindled, and in the most
inexplicable of places, the final mile. Voices stopped
shouting that she was leading the women.
''You're second,'' a man
called.
''Second?" she thought. "He's
crazy. I'm not second. I'm the first.''
But something was amiss. The
fans of Boston did not hold back at the sight of a winner,
even if it meant, as it did on this marathon day, that a
hometown favorite, Patti Lyons, was about to be beaten. Gareau
was puzzled but her brain was too glazed by the effort of the
race to figure it out. Swinging off Commonwealth onto Hereford
Street she climbed the slight rise to Boylston Street, then
swung sharp left into the long barricaded finishing chute,
still hearing that curious lukewarm applause.
"The people were not really
acting like I was the first," she recalls. ' 'I was a bit
surprised when I arrived and I was not received.''
2:34:28
Gareau crossed the broad yellow
finish line exactly according to plan, the overhead clock
reading 2:34:28, her best marathon by four and a half minutes
and also a course record, breaking the mark of 2:35:15 set by
Joan Benoit the previous year.
Gareau glanced up at the
victory podium to the left and was surprised at what
confronted her. Another woman runner stood on the platform in
her place, a woman she had never seen before, clad in white
shorts with blue trim and a bulky yellow T-shirt. The green
laurel wreath crowned her head and the diamond-studded medal
of victory hung on a gold chain around her neck. The woman
stood with upraised arms, acknowledging the cameras,
acknowledging the crowds.
''She's first,'' Gareau
realized. "I'm not first."
The finish line clock read
2:31:56, a course record by nearly four minutes, when Rosie
Ruiz half-ran, half-stumbled across the yellow strip of paint
on the asphalt in front of the Prudential Centre, arms
flailing, legs buckling, face contorted in pain. She was
steadied by two Boston policemen and led to the victory stand
where Edward King, governor of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, was waiting to honor her.
The wreath was placed on her
head, she was given the glittering gold medal of victory and
Bill Rodgers, the men's champion, leaned forward to
congratulate her. So also did Gerard Cote of Ste. Rosalie,
Quebec, there to be honored himself on the fortieth
anniversary of the first of his own four Boston victories, and
Kevin White, the mayor of Boston. Will Cloney, since 1946 the
director of the Boston Marathon, reached out and steadied Ruiz
when for a moment it appeared she might lose her balance and
fall. Moments later Ruiz found herself ringed by reporters,
all stunned that an unknown runner could win so exacting a
footrace. It was common in the old days before many women ran
marathons, before records had plunged and the limits of female
anatomy had been much explored, but now? Who was she? How did
she do it? The questions came thick and fast.
How many miles had Ruiz
trained?
''About sixty-five miles a
week."
What about interval training?
''What's an interval?''
Her ten-mile split?
''What's a split?''
Charlie Rodgers, the brother of
the champion, watched the scene with fascination.
''The first thing I did was
look at her legs, and I said to myself, 'Uh, oh, we have a
problem here.' I mean it was cellulite city."
(108)
Suspicion
Suspicions mounted rapidly. The
heavy T-shirt was out of whack with the weather, far heavier
than the light racing singlets worn by other women runners to
vent as much body heat as possible. Moreover, it was wet at
the front but not under the arms, a physical impossibility for
anyone running all the way from Hopkinton in such a garment.
Ruiz's face, too, seemed curious, betraying none of the
exertion evident in the features of other finishers.
''Anyone who has run a marathon
is aware that over the course of twenty-six miles the body
undergoes immense changes,'' Ed Ayres wrote later in Running
Times.
"Runners are intimately
familiar with these changes and recognize them in others. They
may not be able to say what those changes are (any more than
one can accurately describe the face of a friend), but the
signs are unmistakable nevertheless: a characteristic pattern
of sweat on the clothing; a residue of salt left by the
continual evaporation of sweat on the face; traces of foam or
encrustation around the mouth resulting from dehydration of
saliva; sunburn patterns which include whitish 'squint' marks
from running into the sun, and from the characteristic facial
tension (which reporters so often confuse with pain) of a
marathoner; tautness of the leg muscles resulting from hours
of repeated contraction without full extension; and the
peculiar finishing chute walk of a person whose legs are
usually strong but temporarily depleted of glycogen—the walk
of an exhausted athlete, which is quite different from the
walk of someone whose fatigue is due to lack of conditioning.
These and many subtler signs make up the 'gestalt' of the
runner who has just finished two hours of physiological
struggle. There is no way this gestalt can be faked. ''
(109)
Runners were funnelled from the
finishing chute in 1980, as they had been every year since the
finish line was moved from Exeter Street to the Prudential
Centre in 1965, into the dank underground confines of the
Prudential parking garage. As medical personnel tended to a
stream of runners arriving with blisters, blackened toenails,
chafed thighs and assorted other marathon miseries, Jacqueline
Gareau stood by a concrete pillar watching Bill Rodgers and
Rosie Ruiz answer questions in a glaze of television lights.
''I really didn't expect to
win," Ruiz said. ''I came across in 2:31, that's all I have to
say. I know I ran the course. I did the best I can. What else
can I say? How would you feel? I just wanted to finish. I
didn't know I was the first woman until I crossed the finish
line. To be sincere, this is a dream.'"
(110)
Runner's World
As doubts about Ruiz's
credibility escalated, Bob Anderson, publisher of Runner's
World, the largest and oldest of American running magazines,
walked over to Gareau and told her she would be recognized by
his magazine as the women's champion.
''If they don't disqualify her.
you're still the winner with us,'' Anderson said.
Derek Clayton, holder of the
men's marathon record with a durable eleven-year-old best of
2:08:34, alleged openly that the race was a fix and Jock
Semple, the BAA's tart-tongued Scottish alter ego to Will
Cloney, was even more explicit. Spluttering with rage, Semple
paced about the tenth floor press room in the Prudential
Centre, talking to anyone who would listen.
''That Rosie Ruiz is a fraud,"
he said. ''Poor Jacqueline Gareau. I really feel sorry for
her. She's been robbed of her moment of glory up there on the
victory stand, receiving the wreath and the medal."
(111)
The remainder of the day, the
day that might have been the happiest of her life, was a
nightmare for Jacqueline Gareau. The pressure brought to bear
upon her by the media was exceeded only by that brought to
bear on Ruiz. As the scent of scandal rose from the circle of
media lights, filling the gloom of the garage, reporters
became increasingly frustrated trying to pin down the true
story of the race. First in a trickle, then a flood, they
broke away from the impenetrable veneer of Ruiz and ringed the
wronged Canadian. If the culprit would not confess, then the
victim would do it for her. Gareau was caught in a crossfire
of cameras and questions barked one over the other in a
staccato English she could scarcely comprehend, the reporters
almost demanding that she denounce Ruiz as the impostor they
were so certain she was.
What followed was a remarkable
display of grace under pressure by Gareau. Because Boston was
new and bewildering, because French was the language she
understood, not English, and because she had just run
twenty-six miles, the fastest, hardest twenty-six miles of her
life, and was physically spent from doing so, Gareau was among
the last to grasp the dimensions of what was happening. Her
responses to the shouted questions were small and halting but
her instincts led her away from each trap laid in quest of the
bitter quote.
"I supposed I was first," she
said simply. "Then I arrived at the line."
Gareau was scheduled to fly
home to Montreal that night, and with things as they were she
was almost glad to be going back to her job as a respiratory
therapist at Hotel Dieu Hospital, where she was due the next
morning. In other circumstances she would like to have stayed
in Boston but now she wanted nothing so much as to escape it.
Serge Arsenault, the director of the Montreal International
Marathon, a fluently bilingual reporter with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, came to her aid, disentangling her
from the media, reuniting her with friends, getting her off to
Logan Airport and the peace of a flight home.
Will Cloney
Will Cloney reeled in the
disaster that the eighty-fourth Boston Marathon had become. In
the half century he had been part of the marathon, dating back
to the Depression and his days as a journalist with the Boston
Post, years that included Les Pawson and Tarzan Brown, and
John A. Kelley before he became ''John the Elder" with the
emergence of John J. Kelley, ''John the Younger,'' years of
foreign domination when even a starving Greek runner,
Stylianos Kyriakides, outran the best America could muster,
and the years of the modern boom which had swamped the
marathon with unmanageable numbers and given rise to a carping
new class of elite runners critical of the old way of doing
things, through all this and more Cloney had encountered
nothing to prepare him for the havoc wreaked by Rosie Ruiz.
Cloney did not discover the
Ruiz controversy until forty-five minutes after she left the
victory stand and he had extracted himself from marathon
guests on the platform at the finish line. Until he walked
into the Prudential garage and encountered it at full boil he
never suspected a thing, not when Ruiz came through the
finishing chute nor when he clipped the BAA medal around her
neck. His response when he realized fraud might have occurred
was as calm and controlled as Jock Semple's was angry and
accusatory. Assembling what facts he could in the confusion of
the moment Cloney issued a statement to the press.
''There is an obvious problem
with the determination of the women's winner,'' he said ''At
this moment we have no proof one way or the other that would
cause us to reverse the decision immediately. But we will try
to do everything possible within the next week to check
whether there was a discrepancy. If this proves to be the case
we will invalidate the final results and adjust the places
accordingly. If the medal had not already been awarded it
would have been held up. I have not talked to the young lady
in question. I have no reason to accuse her of anything. We do
have grave doubts." (112)
Fred Lebow, the director of the
New York City Marathon, then the largest in the world, shared
Cloney's doubts. As head of the New York Road Runners Club,
Lebow was to New York what Cloney was to Boston, only more so.
Few people anywhere knew marathoners better than Lebow.
Standing at the finish line when Ruiz crossed, he could only
shake his head. "No salt stains? Her hair in place? Her sides
dry?" When he learned the rest, that Ruiz had qualified with a
2:56:29 marathon in New York, that his marathon had been
Ruiz's first, and that no one among all the New Yorkers he
could contact had heard of her, he was certain of fraud. While
Cloney began an exhaustive review of photographs and
television footage, and the interviewing of witnesses who had
seen the Boston race, Lebow launched an investigation of his
own.
The camera at the Central Park
finish line in New York had recorded the arrival in 1979 of
close to nine thousand runners who had made the
twenty-six-mile trek through the five boroughs of America's
largest metropolis. Lebow dug out videotapes and discovered
that Ruiz was nowhere in sight. No woman could be spotted
crossing the finish line at 2:56:29. Runners who did appear in
the tapes were located and interviewed. None had seen Ruiz at
any point in the race. Lebow got out Ruiz's marathon
application form and found more incriminating evidence. In the
space where runners were asked to forecast their finishing
times Ruiz had written 4:10:00. The case seemed complete when
Susan Morrow, a New York Times photographer, came forward and
told of riding the subway with Ruiz to the finish line.
The subway
Morrow recognized Ruiz from
Boston photographs. Dressed as a runner and wearing a marathon
number, Ruiz had boarded the subway with Morrow at West 4th
Street, saying she had turned an ankle and dropped out of the
race at ten miles. Morrow said they rode to Columbus Circle,
exchanging telephone numbers and agreeing to meet sometime for
lunch, then walked the half-mile to Central Park where they
wandered into the area of the finishing chutes. Ruiz told race
workers she needed medical treatment, then disappeared. If
normal procedure had been followed the computer bar code would
have been removed from Ruiz's race number and recorded in
sequence with runners then crossing the finish line. In due
course a marathon certificate bearing the recorded time would
also have been issued by the New York Road Runners Club and
mailed to Rosie Ruiz.
To Lebow the evidence was
beyond question. He called a news conference to announce that
Ruiz was being disqualified as a finisher in the New York City
Marathon.
The news from New York might
have resolved Will Cloney's dilemma. If Ruiz had not qualified
legitimately for Boston she could not, technically at least,
have been a legitimate winner. But Cloney shunned the
suggestion. From his law studies long ago at Harvard Cloney
knew that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be
done. So he pressed on with the painstaking BAA inquiry, the
endless questioning, the endless probing of people and photos
and footage by the harried officials of the BAA. Through it
all, as media outrage swirled about him and pressure for the
obvious conclusion increased, Cloney refused to be rushed. The
day Rosie Ruiz was disqualified in New York he issued a
progress report on Boston.
"We're about eighty-five per
cent there. We're looking for a couple more details. I'd
rather not say what they are but we're very close. If our
investigation alters the finish we absolutely want to be sure.
We've been able to collect information from some very
creditable sources. I'm looking for provable facts."
(113)
Steve Marek
When the storm broke over Rosie
Ruiz on Patriot's Day, a lone defender came to her rescue. A
flamboyant
Westchester, New York, promoter
named Steve Marek, he was a big, beefy man who weighed more
than two hundred pounds and stood six feet, three inches tall.
Marek bore little resemblance to most marathoners but he was
president of a running club, a group called the Suburban Road
Runners, and he did run marathons himself, however slowly.
Marek was also known to Fred Lebow for showing up at NYRRC
races as Superman, dressed in flowing red cape and shorts, and
for entering the New York City Marathon under a false name and
forecasting a finishing time of 2:58:10 when he usually took
more than five hours to finish a marathon. His explanation
when discovered: "I meant to put 5:58. They wouldn't let me
run under my real name. ...I made a mistake."
(114)
Marek, again dressed as
Superman, was among the swarm of "bandits" who participated
without sanction in the 1980 Boston Marathon. Sometime after
Ruiz crossed the finish line, Marek appeared at her side,
telling reporters he had met her in an elevator the night
before and had spotted her in the crowd that morning at
Hopkinton.
Marek cast himself as the good
Samaritan, interested only in seeing that Ruiz had a chance to
explain herself, but to those familiar with the man, an
independent insurance adjustor when not engaged in promotional
activities his sudden entry into the affair smacked of
opportunism, a chance to inject his name into the headlines
and gain publicity for his various personal and business
activities. Whatever his motivations, Marek and Ruiz spent a
frantic week together, shuttling between Boston and New York,
buffeted by unfolding events, their every move and
pronouncement followed by the media. When not seeking
reporters out for their own purposes, it seemed, they were
hiding from them in hotel rooms.
Ruiz responded to the
unrelenting pressure of the media with tears when she ran out
of words, an unrelenting stream of them. The more the evidence
mounted against her, the louder she sobbed when the cameras
were fumed upon her. Marek quickly betrayed the discomfort of
a man who had signed on with a sinking ship, his stout words
of defence on Monday dissolving by the end of the week to a
weary uncertain litany.
''I don't know what the story
is any more,'' he admitted. "I don't know whether she ran the
race. I know she believes in her own mind she ran the race.
That's all I know.''
It remained only for Will
Cloney to bring down the verdict.
Rural roots
Nothing in Jacqueline Gareau's
background prepared her for such a preposterous controversy.
Bom March IO, 1953, in L'Annonciation, Quebec, a
French-speaking community one hundred miles northwest of
Montreal, Gareau's roots were not unlike those of Gerard Cote.
Her father was a farmer, she fell in the middle of a large
family, in her case two brothers and four sisters, and her
upbringing was thoroughly rural. She went to school, she went
to church, she played the games that country children play,
swimming and riding a bicycle in the summer. skating outdoors
and coasting down snowy hills in winter. Organized sports,
especially for girls, were not much a part of the Quebec
school system of the 1960s, not even in Montreal where the
Gareau family moved when Jacqueline was twelve. Organized
activity during her school years was confined to the odd game
of volleyball.
Her father died of cancer in
1975, forcing her mother to take a full-time job, and with the
oldest of the Gareau family off to college, Jacqueline became
the housekeeper for a period, sweeping floors, making beds,
cooking meals. When it came her turn to leave she entered
Rosemont College for three years of study as a respiratory
technician. By the time she graduated and was working
full-time at Hotel Dieu Hospital she had fallen into the
comfortable lifestyle of her peers, irregular hours,
late-night parties, smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.
In retrospect, it may have been
smoking that made her a marathoner. The longer she continued,
knowing her father had been a cancer victim and seeing
patients stricken with lung ailments every day at the
hospital, the more the habit began to bother her. Finally, she
quit and began substituting long walks about the streets of
Montreal just as once she had taken long rambling walks in the
countryside around L'Annonciation.
That led to running, short jogs
at first for health, then extra miles because she enjoyed it,
her experience a mirror of what was happening to millions in
the worldwide running boom that sprang out of the 1970s. Later
she would look back with pride on her origin as a runner,
differing as it did from most elite runners who started on the
track. ''I come from the mass," she would say.
Ile d'Orleans
In 1977, Gareau ran her first
marathon almost on a whim, at Ile d'Orleans, an island in the
St. Lawrence River east of Quebec City. She was on holidays at
the time and she finished in 3:44:04, placing second to
Eleanor Thomas of Ottawa. The following spring she ran the
National Capital Marathon in Ottawa thirty-seen minutes
faster. again placing second. and the obvious began to dawn on
her.
"I think it's about that time I
really noticed I have some talent,'' she remembers.
One reason for her improvement
was the advice she was getting from Medhi Jaouhar, a
Morrocan-bom athlete who managed a Montreal running store.
Jaoahar recognized Gareau s talent and functioned informally
as a coach through an important phase in her development as a
marathoner. But as her confidence and training increased her
family began to wonder.
"At first my mother thought it
was good, but then when I started doing ten miles a day she
would say, 'Don't do that, it's bad for you, you'll hurt
yourself.'" (115)
Gareau did not become a
snowshoe racer like Fabre, Young and Cole, the sport having
all but disappeared in Quebec since their time, but she did
become a cross-country skier, twice tackling the daunting
one-hundred-mile Canadian Ski Marathon through the wilderness
from Lachute, Quebec. to Ottawa, a two-day event. Gareau skied
ninety miles the first year, missing the final checkpoint
deadline by minutes because of improper wax. Of ficials forced
her to stop.
But she went the entire
distance the next time despite frightful conditions in which
the thermometer plunged to thirty-five below Fahrenheit and
the wind chill pushed the effective reading dangerously below
that. Gareau was the only woman to finish and it took all her
strength. Trouble occurred late in the race when the
phenomenon known as honking — fatigue, dizziness, the sense of
impending collapse — overcame her. Instinct told her to eat
and she dug a handful of nuts, dates and chocolate from her
pocket.
''My strength came back
instantly. I just couldn't believe the change. l thought to
myself, I just saved my own life."
(116)
Montreal
Home for Gareau became a
rambling third-floor apartment in the Plateau Mont Royal
district of Montreal, not far from Lafontaine Park and the
slopes of Mount Royal where she often trained, a small,
resolute figure running alone. One who noticed her, becoming
her friend and eventually her business manager,
(117) was Gilles Lapierre. Lapierre
was a good runner in his own right but as Gareau improved he
found he could not keep pace with her.
Gareau went back to Ile
d'Orleans in 1978, finishing first in 2:59:15. Then followed a
string of rapid improvements, 2:57:00 for first in the 1978
Skylon Marathon from Buffalo, New York, to Niagara Falls,
Ontario; 2:47:58 to win the National Capital Marathon in 1979;
2:40:56 to sweep to triumph in her hometown debut, the
Montreal Intemational Marathon of 1979, and then the New York
City Marathon of 1979, third place in the biggest race in the
world with yet another best time, 2:39:04.
As Gareau, exhausted and happy,
mingled in the warm October sunshine with Central Park crowds
that day she had no way of knowing a messenger was carrying
the bar code of an injured runner to recorders at the finish
line. Nor could she possibly have dreamed the significance the
incident would hold for her if she had known.
Three more trips to Boston
awaited Jacqueline Gareau before the affair occasioned by
Rosie Ruiz was put mercifully to rest. The first came within
days when WBZ, a Boston television station, talked her into
returning to the city by telling her that Will Cloney was
about to announce his decision. She arrived to find Cloney
ready to do no such thing. She was plopped instead before a
WBZ monitor displaying a tearful image of Ruiz so that WBZ
cameras could tape what Gareau had to say in reply. Gareau
said little, embarrassed that her presence in Boston might be
seen by Cloney as pressure to come to a conclusion.
"That was not a good day for
me. I was so tired, and I went to Boston for what? Only for
the television. "
A week to the day after the
marathon Cloney met in a Boston hotel suite with Rosie Ruiz
and Steve Marek. The tired race director was as quiet and
gentle with Ruiz as the media had been loud and belligerent.
Again there were tears but Rosie budged not an inch from her
story. She had run the race, she insisted, she had won it, and
while she would respect Cloney's decision, she would not
return the medal if the ruling went against her. Cloney
brought the meeting to a close, with Ruiz again breaking down
in tears, by putting his arms around her and inviting her back
to Boston the following year, whether she could meet the
qualifying standard or not. Rosie promised to come. (d)
''She sincerely believes in her
own mind that she won the race," Cloney said. "Ours was a very
friendly and helpful discussion." (118)
Disqualification
The remark alluded to what was
already being speculated openly as the underlying cause of the
whole bizarre episode, the possibility that Ruiz was suffering
from a mental disorder and could not distinguish between truth
and fantasy. Among the disclosures, as details of her
background were unearthed, was the information that Ruiz had
twice undergone brain surgery, once for the removal of a
benign tumor. No firm medical evidence was presented to
support the theory of mental incapacity but it seemed in the
minds of many the only plausible explanation.
The following day, in an
anti-climatic press conference high in the Prudential Centre
overlooking the marathon finish line, Cloney announced the
invalidation of Ruiz's Boston victory.
"Is Rosie Ruiz a liar, a fraud,
a cheat?'' he was asked.
"I would never use those words
for another human being," Cloney said. "People want me to say
that she came up with the intention of doing this. I don't
believe that. If she did do anything it was on the spur of the
moment. I'm not a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist. I
wouldn't presume to figure it out. I am convinced that Rosie
thinks she won the race. She is equally convinced, and this is
a little bit strange, that our information is overwhelming.
She is as baffled as we are." (119)
The women's marathon had been
reconstructed from the halfway point, the order of the first
seventeen runners being charted from Wellesley forward to
Kenmore Square and a bit beyond. Nowhere in all that distance
had anyone-seen Rosie Ruiz, not the official race checkers,
not the media cameras, not witnesses who stood on the
sidelines. Nor did she appear, and this was what Cloney had
waited so long to determine, in any of the more than ten
thousand frames taken a mile from the finish by the official
race photographers. Every negative had been checked.
Cloney introduced the real
women's champion of the 1980 Boston Marathon — Jacqueline
Gareau. With the moment illuminated by television lights, the
green laurel wreath, a new one, not the one another woman had
worn on marathon day, was placed on Gareau's head. She had
been right that morning on the playing field at Hopkinton: it
did look good on her. Her right arm shot into the air in
salute and she broke into a mile-wide grin.
The Eliot
Lounge
It remained only for Tommy
Leonard to make the day complete with a final flourish. At the
Eliot Lounge, that storied Boston watering hole where Leonard
reigned so cheerfully as bartender, the lounge made famous as
a runners' shrine by the sheer force of Leonard's personality
and love of runners, the place that hung with the framed
photographs of great moments and great marathons, a warm old
haunt that echoed with lies and laughter, in the confines of
that wonderful place, a party was held for Jacqueline Gareau.
She arrived to find the
Canadian flag hanging from the ceiling. Patrons rose as one to
give her an ovation and Tommy Leonard, good stout-hearted
Tommy, the patron saint of runners, opened a bottle of Dom
Perignon.
The last detail was the
marathon medal. Rosie was as good as her word. She did not
give it back. A second medal was struck, not a small one like
the medal taken away by Ruiz, but one identical in size to
that given Bill Rodgers as champion of the men's division. It
was presented in another ceremony two weeks later, the BAA
wiping away the last of its distinctions between men and women
in bestowing it upon her.
For that final trip to Boston
Gareau was met at Logan Airport by a limousine and whisked in
stately splendor to the foot of the tall Prudential Centre on
Boylston Street. The end of the marathon was re-enacted at the
finish line in the presence of Boston's running elite and a
large appreciative crowd. This time the cameras caught what
they had missed before: The Winner — Jacqueline Gareau.
Postscript
Sheraton Boston Hotel
Boston Marathon Eve
April 19, 1981
The Turning Point Bar to one side of the Sheraton Boston
lobby is filled with noisy chatter, the air alive with
anticipation of the 1981 Boston Marathon, a mere fifteen
hours away. Around two adjoining tables, their merry chatter
alternating between French and English, sits a group of
Montreal runners and Canadian journalists. In their lively
midst, sipping a glass of tomato juice, is a small woman
with eyes so bright they leap halfway across the room.
A big raw-boned man arrives
and sits down on the edge of the gathering, the seat sagging
with his weight. His ears pick up the sound of French and
his eyes settle for a fleeting moment on the woman with the
tomato juice, then flick uncomfortably away. The man is
wearing running shorts, knee socks and a long red cape.
Twenty, perhaps thirty, minutes pass and the woman rises to
leave. The big man has not acknowledged her so she turns to
acknowledge him, eyes crinkling in a smile.
"Salut,'' she says.
From somewhere within himself
the man summons the absolutely correct response.
"Bonne chance,'' he replies.
Jacqueline
Gareau's Marathon Record
(* winner) (CR Canadian record)
1977
Ile d'Orleans Marathon (August 27) 3:44:04
1978
National Capital Marathon (May 14) 3:07:19
He d'Orleans Marathon (August 26) 2:59: 15*
Skylon Marathon, Buffalo, New York (October 21) 2:57:00*
1979
National Capital Marathon (May 13) 2:47:58*
Montreal Intemational Marathon (August 26) 2:40:56*
New York City Marathon (October 21) 2:39:04
1980
Boston Marathon (April 21) 2:34:28*
Montreal Intemational Marathon (September 7) 2:31:26
Tokyo Women's Marathon (November 16) 2:30:58
1981
Boston Marathon (April 20) 2:31:28
1982
Boston Marathon (April 19) 2:36:09
Montreal Intemational Marathon (May 30) 2:41:19
1983
Boston Marathon (April 18) 2:29:27x
World Marathon Championship, Helsinki (Aug. 7) 2:32:35
America's Marathon, Chicago (October 16) 2:31:56
1984
Los Angeles Marathon (February 19) 2:31:57*
Footnotes:
(a) Portions of this chapter are based on an interview with Jacqueline Gareau
at her home in Montreal on January 19, 1982.
(b) No longer published.
(c) Gayle Olinekova, with a marathon best of 2:36:12, was the only Canadian
woman who was faster than Gareau at the time.
(d) Ruiz did not return to Boston or enter any other marathon the next year.
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