Us old geezers never forgot old Alexi. In a time before the internet had taken off, he was talked about from coast to coast by college runners and (as I was at the time) recent alums. As rojo noted, the strangest thing about that story - and that's saying something, truly - is what a good guy he seemed to be in his Alexi Santana persona and also how well he was doing academically. If you look at Hogue's life, you see he is a compulsive liar and thief, and had been even in high school. You see a guy who has also been in more trouble for burglaries and fake personas and so on even since the time of his Princeton scam and Harvard theft problems. He later built a cabin deep in the wilderness outside Telluride, Colorado where he kept all the stuff he would steal from rich people's ski lodges and so forth, where he was also known by a false persona. But at Princeton, it honestly felt like he was at least TRYING to become someone else, i.e. a good person -- like he was only using a fake identity to separate from his real past, and not simply as a front for his thieving, like he did at Harvard (as "Jim McAuthor") or as he later did in the ski-towns of Colorado. Trying to erase his old life and step into a new one without all the baggage of his thieving and swindling past. He apparently wasn't stealing stuff or doing anything else untoward beyond falsifying his identity. That's what made his story so complex for people, and why a lot of people were willing to forgive. It was such a random coincidence that someone from the California high school would be at the meet at Yale to recognize him, but of course the Ivy League brings in kids from all over. I always thought if he'd been willing to pull the scam at a prestigious but not quite Ivy school, like Emory or someplace, he might well be living as Alexi Santana to this day.
As to Mr. Hebert -- well. I think the truth lies somewhere between the ones yelling "SEND HIM TO PRISON" and the high schoolers saying "no big deal!" His answers to the MileSplit interviewer suggest to me he's lost some mental faculties. When the interviewer says college kids can't run in high school races, and his answer is basically, "I'm not in college though," focusing on exactly the wrong part of the question, one suspects he must be pretty well cracked upstairs. But I also don't think there is a whole lot of harm done here ultimately, though that would have been different had he "won" or if he'd impeded or hurt an athlete along the way. Get this kid before a psychiatrist, posthaste. I think Kevin Sanchez's answers about the incident were very mature and hit the scope of the banditry correctly -- he called Brendan an idiot but said it didn't take away from his experience or his team's placing. That's about where I'd stand on the issue as well.
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