The Mexico City Marathon and 6 more tales of cheating throughout running history

During the 2017 Mexico City Marathon, more than 5,800 runners (and counting!) were disqualified out of 28,206 participants. That’s more than 20 percent of the field at one of the world’s biggest races, thrown out for a silly array of infractions ranging from course-cutting to hiring professional runners to compete as other people.

This may be one of the bigger (biggest?) example of cheating in the history of marathons, but it is faaaaaar from the first, or the most egregious. Turns out, the sport is rife with scofflaws going back centuries.

Why people go to such extreme lengths to cheat marathons, I have no idea. Unless you’re an elite runner, you have to pay to enter, and you know how long the course is. No one’s pulling the wool over your eyes. Not running is much, MUCH easier than signing up, cheating, then getting caught. It’s not like cheating in cycling — at least those people have staked their livelihoods on winning.

While we may never understand them, thank goodness these people exist, because their failures are hilarious.

There’s corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell happened in Mexico City. Among the near-6,000 people who were thrown out of the race, 1,296 posted times that would have qualified them for the ultra-prestigious Boston Marathon, according to Runner’s World.

Derek Murphy at the website Marathon Investigation (who SB Nation profiled in March) has been all over the case and discovered that thousands likely jumped onto the 26.2-mile course late in the race, or worse. One facebook page has been collecting evidence, including photos of people wearing marathon bibs riding the subway. One man appeared to wear two bibs during the marathon, one of which belonged to a woman named “Maria,” who posted a Boston-qualifying time.

I encourage you to read all of Murphy’s work on the Mexico City because hoo boy it’s a doozy. It’s hard to tell exactly how many of the gross discrepancies are actually examples of cheating. Murphy seems to be so flabbergasted by the extent of the disqualifications that he’s almost hoping there was some kind of technical error.

“I’m not going to say all 5,800 runners—or anyone that missed a mat—cheated,” Murphy told Runner’s World. “It’s a bigger number than I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of baffling to find this much error.”

Ultramarathons are one of the most maniacal endurance on Earth. The Comrades Marathon in South Africa is one of the oldest and most famous. It also comes with relatively lucrative cash prizes, incentivizing tomfoolery like Sergio Motsoeneng’s gambit to earn in a top-10 finish.

During the race, in the time that elapsed between the first and second photos being taken, Sergio had apparently switched his watch from his left wrist to his right wrist and inexplicably grown a scar on his left shin. When the photos came to light, Bester, the scorned 15th place finisher, knew that something was up.

As it turns out, the competitor Sergio Motsoeneng was not one, but two people. Forty-five minutes into the race, Sergio ducked into a porta-potty. Inside, his identical brother, Fika, was waiting.

I’m surprised that we don’t hear about more runners doing The Prestige routine. Perhaps it occurs more often than we think and everyone else is smart enough to make sure their watches are on the same wrist.

You see it all the time in heist movies: The accomplished thieves make a tidy living pulling off small-scale jobs, then get into trouble when they bite off more than they can chew. That was Rosie Ruiz’s problem.

If Ruiz hadn’t shot for the stars — say, only tried to come in top-20 instead of win the whole darn thing — perhaps no one would have noticed that she had taken a subway until roughly the half-mile-to-go mark. She collapsed into the arms of police officers at the line to sell her the fake, but was stripped of her title eight days later after spectators found it suspicious that she wasn’t sweating much at the line. And that she couldn’t remember what happened during the race. And that the second- and third-place finishers couldn’t recall ever seeing her pass. And also she somehow didn’t appear in any photos and video footage of the race. And people spotted her bursting out of the crowd at Commonwealth Avenue.

Ruiz did a really bad job of cheating, is what I’m saying.

Seriously, if you’re going to cheat anyway, why run at all? At the Xiamen International Marathon in 2010, at least 30 runners were disqualified, many of them for paying faster impostors to take their place. There was good reason in many cases, however:

If they run a marathon in good time, students can earn extra points for the “‘gaokao”, the entrance examination for China’s highly competitive universities that some children and their parents will go to huge lengths to shine in. ...

Scoring well on the university entrance exam has spawned all sorts of high-tech cheating methods, which saw 40 people detained last year.

In one case in the northern province of Shanxi, six people - including one teacher - were detained for allegedly selling receivers to students so they could be fed the correct answers during the tests.

The long version:

The short version:

The “winner” of the race, Fred Lorz, actually dropped out of the race nine miles in, was picked up in a car by his manager, then ran the final seven miles of the race after the car broke down. He had his picture taken with Teddy Roosevelt and was about to be awarded the gold medal when the then-second place finisher, eventual winner Thomas Hicks, ran into the stadium, near-dead from the stychnine he had been fed during the race as a stimulant.

The whole race was about as weird as any international competition can be. It also featured feral dogs, two other near-death experiences, and raw eggs. I can’t recommend the video up above enough.

Sometimes multiple parties are invested in your finishing in a certain time frame. That was the case of Dane Patterson, who set a weight-loss record on The Biggest Loser. He got a three-mile ride in an NBC van so that the crew could take a photo of him finishing an Arizona marathon before the six-hour cutoff time.

“When I got to the marathon, I understood that after six hours, the marathon was going to be close,” he told Roker. “At mile 17, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to make it in that time. The producer wanted that shot of me going through the finish line, so that decision was made.”

Patterson insisted he never intended to cheat or deceive anyone. “I went back after the filming was done and ran those three miles, because I was planning on running the entire marathon and that’s what I did,” he told Roker.

The Greek hero on which the Marathon is based actually ran roughly a mile less than the 26.2 miles for an official marathon established by the International Amateur Athletic Federation in the early 20th century.

Pheidippides is a fraud and literal human garbage.