[On April 19th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]
On three layers
to the infamous Boston
Marathon scandal beyond the headlines.
1)
New York and Boston: I’ve been reading recently
about the
Mandela Effect, the way in which large groups of people can remember
something differently than how it actually took place. I don’t know if this
quite qualifies, but it seems to me that Rosie Ruiz is consistently remembered
for having cheated her way to the 1980 Boston Marathon women’s title by taking
the subway instead of running the full course. Yet that’s in fact a combination
of two different sides to Ruiz’s story: she was discovered to have cheated to the Boston title
(by jumping out of the crowd on Commonwealth Avenue near the finish line) and
stripped of that crown; and subsequently, stories came out about her being
spotted on the subway during the 1979
New York City marathon, which had provided her qualifying time for Boston
and which was then also stripped from her record. Obviously these are parallel
and interconnected stories, but the combination of them into one event reveals
at the very least the need to reexamine our collective memories of any figure
and history.
2)
Subsequent crimes: As far as I can tell, Ruiz
largely disappeared from the public record after those 1980 revelations, with
two specific, also parallel exceptions: her April 1982
arrest in New York (on the same day as the Boston Marathon) for embezzling
from a real estate company; and her November 1983
arrest as part of a South Florida drug bust. These arrests would seem to
indicate that both Ruiz’s propensity for cheating and her troubled life went
far beyond the 1979 and 1980 sports scandals, but it’s also possible to see
them another way: that after those scandals (before which the 26-year-old Ruiz
had never been arrested) her life went off the rails, spiraling into additional
criminal behavior. Obviously that’s a chicken-and-egg type question, and the
answer wouldn’t change the facts of these different unethical and illegal actions
in any case. But it’s always worth thinking about narratives of contingency and
inevitability when it comes to the arc of any individual life, just as with all
of history.
3)
A Cuban American childhood: Ruiz was born in
Havana, and immigrated to (or rather fled to, given the realities
of movement under Castro’s regime) the United States with her family
in 1962, when she was 8. She was apparently then separated from her mother
and lived with extended family in South Florida. I don’t want to overstate the
relevance of these complex childhood details, as of course the vast majority of
either Cuban Americans or immigrant children separated from their parents do
not go on to a life of cheating and criminality. Yet if we simply examine
Ruiz’s own life, it’s fair to say that these early experiences would have been
influential, and perhaps more specifically that they left her with feelings of
instability or uncertainty about such foundational elements as home and family.
All part of understanding the story of Rosie Ruiz beyond the headlines, anyway.
Next Marathon
split tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?
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