Did Mike Rossi (viral marathon dad) cheat his way into Boston?

So we've got circumstantial evidence:

1. There are few known photographs of him (except at the end) on the Lehigh course.

2. There is limited evidence he is fast enough to run 3:11.

Based on this, there has been no DQ and there probably will be no DQ.

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

dsb wrote:

The question of whether or not he cheated is mostly irrelevant to me; what I enjoy most about this whole situation is how karma came back to him in a major way for him publicly calling out a school official for simply doing her job.

A disqualification would be symbolic at best. He's unlikely to qualify for Boston ever again (assuming he ever did in the first place) and we can not turn back time and take the experience of running Boston away from him. Twenty years from now he'll still be able to show off his finisher's medal and; quite possibly, a framed picture of himself from Runner's World magazine with the caption blacked out via a Sharpie marker.

You forgot that he will still be rocking one of his 37 pieces of Boston flair.

alanson wrote:

So we've got circumstantial evidence:

1. There are few known photographs of him (except at the end) on the Lehigh course.

2. There is limited evidence he is fast enough to run 3:11.

Based on this, there has been no DQ and there probably will be no DQ.

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

Both of those points are incorrect. There are no known photographs of him on the course (except at the end), and there is no evidence he is fast enough to run 3:11.

Let me fix that for you:

So we've got circumstantial evidence:

1. There are NO known photographs of him (except at the end) on the Lehigh course.

2. There is NO evidence he is fast enough to run 3:11.

Based on this, there has been no DQ and there probably will be a DQ.

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

Not the case!!! wrote:

If there were one race photographer at one place I would agee, but every one??? He will be DQ'd... And yes, they can look at past performances, I work for a timing company and when results are questioned that is one of the things we go to...

"Not the case!!!" has a point and an insider's perspective (as do I since I work in the race biz.) This is what I predict will happen:

- Chances are LVM does not have a policy in place for how to handle accusations of cheating (yet) since they believe their point-to-point course would be hard to cheat on. Pus it may have never come up before.

- But MR is not running's first cheater so some reputable, established, USATF certified course races do have a policy or at least some history. If I were LVM team, I would see what other races do under similar circumstances (no mat or missed a mat, no photos, inconsistent performances, etc.) so that they can, if they DQ him, state that "this is what Twin Cities...or Boston or Chicago or ??? also does when a runner is suspected of not running the entire course."

Amen.

cheater xtra wrote:Kip Litton got by your controls.

Most likely he did. I've said that numerous times before. I've also explained the research we did to try to prove one way or the other. It's still out there on SOKLR and on this message board for you to read. I've also posted about the steps we took after the Kipster was here in 2010 to try to give us even more evidence should something of this nature happen in the future.

Despite every effort our races does, or any races does, unless it's a track meet or you're in a position to have video footage of a runner for an entire race, there are always going to be ways for runners to cut a course. It's when a runner calls attention to themselves that threads like this blow up and they get outed. Rossi could have slid under the radar had he not responded to his kid's principal. There would be no investigation into his result from Lehigh Valley and nobody would be any wiser regarding his most likely ill-gained participation in Boston. With Kip, the fact that he had a website to raise money and was doing so potentially not 100% above board got the ball rolling. Plus he had called me to ask about his award (3rd chip time in his age group...he didn't understand that our awards were by gun time) which put him on my radar.

Now that the ball is rolling and you have guys like Switek who routinely review race results for anomalies we'll probably see more questionable results brought to light. Kind of a hobby, isn't it? I've brought numerous questionable results that I've seen in the last 15 years to RD's attention, "you might want to check this one out", that sort of thing. For an anonymous midpack runner, what an RD does with it after that is up to them. Most races have been good about dealing with the obvious cases, the only one that comes to mind that hasn't is the Philly Marathon, and from what I can see they've gotten a lot better the last ~3 years.

Hal Higdon faster than brojos wrote:

Looks like Hal Higdon is faster than the brojos these days! Come on, where is that promised article?

Proofreading and editing anything brojos put out would take 2-3 weeks minimum.

alanson wrote:

So we've got circumstantial evidence:

1. There are few known photographs of him (except at the end) on the Lehigh course.

2. There is limited evidence he is fast enough to run 3:11.

Based on this, there has been no DQ and there probably will be no DQ.

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

Hi Mike!

alanson wrote:

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

There have been plenty of posts about the redundancy in this thread, so what's the point of this post?

Haven't seen this addressed... do we think MR chose the LVM because it didn't have timing mats, or was he just lucky in that regard? i.e., did he even know that it didn't have intermediate mats, did he even care?

My guess is he figured nobody would check his results and didn't care about the presence/absence of timing mats. He'd posted months in advance that he wanted to use the LVM as his BQ race. If this was planned the whole time, that would indicate that he'd researched well in advance about local races that would be good options for cheating. Honestly, I have difficulty giving him that much credit. I think it's more likely that as the race came nearer, he just realized his BQ wasn't going to happen the honest way. But I'm curious what others think.

Post fixer wrote:

What's the point of the 2743 posts?

Entertainment. Isn't that the point of every message board?

This is by no means a defense of this guy - and I have tried to read through a good amount of this thread - but seeing these threads pop up always makes me nervous. Although you do seem to get it right in the end pretty much every time...

But I think about this and see myself as someone who might pop up on your radar eventually.

I ran in college and have pretty decent PRs, but I am now in my mid-thirties and very rarely race. I have absolutely no consistency to my times b/c I will sometimes train for something and other times just jump in with old running buddies and run slow times because we all meet somewhere and run together for a 5k or 10k.

Two years ago, for instance, I ran a marathon in the Fall and another in the following Spring, dropping my time by 38 minutes between the two races. Not because of some kind of crazy training, but because the first was something I did on a whim with friends while the other was something I actually "raced." That has to ring some alarm bells, right? Before all of that, I had not "raced" for almost three years. I ran a few 5ks and 10ks hungover in the middle of vacations or just for fun, but I literally ran them for exercise. I have not "raced" since the last full.

So there was a string of five years with about 6-8 mediocre races and one pretty fast time. Granted, I guess I have people who would vouch for me - and I am not the type to go spouting off about my race to the Today show - but you get the point.

I am currently trying to get under a specific time for a local Half. If I hit my goal it will likely win the Half (presuming somebody decent doesn't show up) and add another suspiciously "fast" time to my racing history. Training seems like it is going alright, so we'll see. Anyway, I sometimes wonder if the targets of these campaigns might just be guys who don't "race" much.

There have to be more people out there like me. I don't do it on purpose. I just have a lot going on and don't race very often, despite keeping a pretty tight training regimen out of habit/health. When I do decide to race, I try pretty hard to run a fast time, but those races are increasingly fewer and far between. I am more likely to meet a bunch of guys for an alumni weekend where we all run the pace of the slowest guy after a night of beer drinking and s--t talking at some chosen location. And based on the fitness levels of some of my former teammates, those times aren't going to be improving.

Keith Stone wrote:

gatorade&vodka wrote:

This, but also for RDs to make their races less laughably easy to cheat - both by adding mats and/or video and by looking through the results after the fact. It's Rossi's fault he cheated, but there's room to blame Lehigh too. If they had done their jobs and disqualified Rossi quietly they could have spared him the embarrassment, spared Internet posters from doing their work for them, and spared us all from having to hear about this whole "news" saga.

That's a great idea, let demand all races have mats every mile! That'll eliminate cheaters because it'll cost $1000 to enter just to pay for it all.

You old mervert, think about it. At a smaller or mid-sized marathon add at least 1 timing mat and set up a couple of video cameras along the course and you'll be able to catch. A larger race would require one or two more timing mats, and one of those should be sort of random.

The big issue is that out of Mike Rossi's entire body of work, he has no single race that is even close to indicative of a 3:11 marathon.

Also, when you race do you tend to get photographed? Out of every competitor at Lehigh, Mike was the only runner to have ZERO photographs running the race. Only at the start and finish line.

helper of yelpers wrote:

The big issue is that out of Mike Rossi's entire body of work, he has no single race that is even close to indicative of a 3:11 marathon.

Also, when you race do you tend to get photographed? Out of every competitor at Lehigh, Mike was the only runner to have ZERO photographs running the race. Only at the start and finish line.

I guess you make a good point, especially about the whole "body of work" thing. I have no doubt that you're right 99.9% of the time.

My worry is that this seems to be more common these days, and the thrill of the hunt is going to eventually nab some innocent folks. Although maybe cheating is just more common these days.

I have no concept of cheating in a race. It just makes zero sense to me. I understand the temptation of using EPO and s--t to win medals and make money (especially if you live in a 3rd World country), but cheating to run 3:11 in a local marathon just doesn't make sense. Isn't the whole point of running Boston supposed to be the satisfaction of qualifying? I guess that is for another thread...

Curious About It wrote:

I ran in college and have pretty decent PRs

and that's the reason why there will never be a 2,000+ post thread about you cheating, unless you do something super egregious. This guy is in a completely different stratosphere. We're talking about going off the couch to a 3:11 in a couple of years with zero correlating performances. As a 47-year old.

Here's something I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread: Bob Kennedy returned to running as a 44-year old in order to runt the NYC marathon. He wasn't training like a professional, but he was training; he can see details here:

He did a 20-miler at ~7:40 pace; his weekly mileage was consistently in the low 30s but that must have peaked higher than that when he was doing his long runs.

In short, Kennedy was doing way more than Rossi in terms of training. He also happens to be Bob freaking Kennedy. He ran 3:26 at NYC and was pretty damn happy to do it:

Curious About It,

I'm sure that most of us didn't start digging through the photos feeling it was a guarantee that we would catch a cheat. Based on his times the question was posed and we sought to find the truth.

If he had been in photos as he should be, running alongside people who had similar times, I think we all would say "Wow! Great job by this guy!" We might like the letter that he wrote to the principal, or we might not. That is neither here nor there. But we would respect the achievement and assume he really cranked up the training, got over some injuries, whatever.

If you have a great time and deserve credit, I think this is a sport in which you will get it. There are plenty of runners who will pat another runner on the back and say, "Good for you!"

Nobody should be afraid to improve because of this case. They should be very afraid to cheat.

I loved that BK article and even shared it with my wife. Y'all are right. I guess I am a worrier by nature, so I think about this kind of crap when I see it.

I had NO idea the level this had reached, by the way. Just saw the meme page and have read more pages on this thread. Crazy stuff.