CaptainandtheToenail wrote:
You might want to also consider that the runner dropped out and walked near the finish area. It could be as simple as that. Possibly the timer never got the dnf info on her and the result in and of itself isn't completely out of line.
Very different than Mike here.
Remember, Mike didn't get caught at the race. He got caught because of ego. When he went off on the Principal, and someone saw it was Boston related, that's when the search took off. Otherwise, he's living the life of luxury and the world sees him as a Boston finisher.
Prize money or ego are really the only two reasons to cheat in running. Because there is no competition the only possible loser is the runner himself. But if there is prize money involved, or a person somehow feels competitive and wants to make himself feel superior to other people, or he's just an attention whore, then those are all very compelling reasons.
And Mike milked the attention for all it was worth when the letter to the principal went viral. He answered the phone to any reporter who would listen and call him "dad of the year". He is probably telling the people around him that other runners were simply jealous of him and all he achieved in such a short period of time, while they sat home wishing they had been in Boston. But real runners accept the limitations of their abilities and do it for the fun and to better their health.
Nobody looked into his past races because they were jealous. People looked into it because somebody who flaunts their Boston run the way he did are clearly narcissists and are the primary candidates to be cheaters. He had made running Boston to be his biggest life accomplishment even before he qualified. And then was horrified when he started to realize that he simply wasn't good enough to ever run Boston. And thus a cheater was born.
And with a little out-of-the-way race in Allentown that nobody cared about it became possible to fulfill his goal and only hurt one nameless, faceless person along the way. The one person who would have been next in line for Boston.
We'll never know who that person would have been. But we all know the name Mike Rossi now. And we've all seen his face. And I'll bet he could never run a race for a BQ time without a small mob of people following him the whole race to make sure he knows that we know what he has done.