Rossi Ruiz

December 18, 2015 1:36 PM

There is no purse for the Lehigh Valley Health Network Via Marathon. But 2014’s 114th-place finisher will bank $100,000 if he can recreate his result.

47-year-old Mike Rossi finished with an official time of 3:11:45, more than enough to qualify him to run the Boston Marathon the following April, which he finished in 4:01:42 (Boston is a much tougher course). He took his kids out of school to travel to the race, and his rejoinder to their principal’s notice that the absence was not excused went viral. The story also caught the notice of the owners and commenters at LetsRun.com.

What happened next is a cautionary tale about unintended consequences in an era of data and crowdsourcing. Convinced that Rossi had cheated his way into Boston, LetsRun.com participants pored through Lehigh Valley race photos, researched Rossi’s previous race results, and studied his social media posts. The Lehigh Valley time was a dramatic improvement over his other races. And while the 50 people who finished before Rossi and the 50 people who finished after him were each photographed at least twice along the course (and again at the finish), the official race photographers only caught Rossi at the finish. In addition to the $100,000 incentive if Rossi recreates his 3:11 marathon time, LetsRun has offered him $10,000 to run a roughly equivalent 5K or 10K, $500 for his phone’s location history during the Lehigh Valley marathon, and $500 for photos proving Rossi was among the runners along the course.

Rossi denies the allegations, and the Lehigh Valley race organizers said that in the absence of conclusive evidence, they will not disqualify the runner. However, the organizers added additional timing mats and video surveillance beginning in the 2015 race to deter course-cutting. Recently, suspecting Rossi of cutting a Turkey Trot 10K course, LetsRun.com amended its offer to require advance notice of his next race attempt.

posted by mama casserole (30 comments total)

Interesting story on fraudulent race results.
posted by grobstein at 1:41 PM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's pretty obvious (to me) that Rossi cheated and continues to cheat. Perhaps he should just be banned from racing all together.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:41 PM on December 18, 2015

So, to clarify. . . we are mad at him because he may have cheated with an okay time to compete in a larger race where he earned an okay time? And this is because we caught wind of it due to a viral complaint? Why are we mad at this guy?
posted by Think_Long at 1:45 PM on December 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

What is it that makes the letsrun.com folks so crazy about this particular guy? I know they are just going off of information that he makes public (like posting his training routes/times to twitter) but why spend so much time sleuthing this?
posted by sparklemotion at 1:47 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Why are we mad at this guy?

Thousands of people spend all year trying to qualify for Boston, but they don't make the cut so they can't run the race. Another large group actually makes the time cutoff, but because of space they don't get to run.

So, there is a person out there who had a dream to run Boston, and this dude cheated them out of it. Even worse, he continues to lie about it.
posted by sideshow at 1:53 PM on December 18, 2015 [29 favorites]

Yeah, it's about the BQ. He took someone's spot, which is shitty.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:57 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

remember that time when reddit paid undue attention to homeless radio voice actor/depressed Indian kid they confused for the Boston Marathon bomber/bunch of other people throughout history because it was fun witch hunt that embodied certain sentiments popular with their 18-24 white male demographic?

things that seem evident given this group's undue attention:

1) these people take their hobby super seriously and have really stringent and exclusive requirements for participation in larger group events

2) boy do marathon runners have a lot of extra cash lying around because 100k for a niche venue of people is not a small amount of ducats
posted by runt at 1:57 PM on December 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

Getting in to Boston is a huge accomplishment--if you can do it. It places you among the upper tier of runners. So to cheat your way in essentially invalidates everyone else's struggles. It's a way of claiming credit that isn't due to you. As a runner--a marathoner with a 3:35 PR, who isn't sure if I'll ever qualify for Boston, I can say that hearing about people like this makes me unreasonably mad. I worked for months to get the time that I got. Every minute of that time was something I literally sweated over.

So that's why it's a big deal. It's also akin to joke-stealing in comedy. The guy isn't going to be arrested or anything, but he might be publicly shamed into coming clean.
posted by heyitsgogi at 1:57 PM on December 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

For what it's worth reddit is not the same community as letsrun.

But anyway, what makes the situation worse, and what makes this guy worse, is that nobody would have paid any attention to him at all if he hadn't written that note to the school principal about taking his kids out of school to go see him run Boston. He created the publicity himself.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:59 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

ha! my wife ran the half marathon portion of this same race, i was there! and judging by what i saw, it would be incredibly easy to cheat this course. i dropped her off for the start, drove to meet her half way (her mile 7, marathon mile 20), and then drove again with plenty of time to meet her at the finish. its a level, straight-line course, mostly through unoccupied woods on a trail.
posted by Mach5 at 2:07 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Whether or not he cheated is a matter for the race organizers, not random strangers on the internet who feel outraged. Everyone participating in this campaign should be ashamed of themselves. You are making the world a worse place by contributing to a harassment campaign against an individual.
posted by humanfont at 2:07 PM on December 18, 2015 [12 favorites]

Whether or not he cheated originally, he should train hard for a twenty‐minute 5 k.

Ten thousand bucks is a pretty good motivator.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 2:10 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

humanfont: “You are making the world a worse place by contributing to a harassment campaign against an individual.”

Uh – do you have any evidence of a harassment campaign? As far as I can tell, no harassment campaign has been mentioned in any of the links in the post.

Or are you saying that it's harassment to write articles suggesting that someone who competed in a public event (and who moreover saw fit to very publicly chastise his children's school principal for not excusing their absence to attend said event) has actually cheated in that public event? Or to offer a reward to that competitor if they can prove publicly that they didn't cheat?

I'm not sure that counts as harassment. Are they calling his home? Trying to get him swatted? Sending violent, offensive, or otherwise abusive messages to him, or even posting said messages online for all to see? Yeah, that would be harassment. This? I'm not sure it is.
posted by koeselitz at 2:43 PM on December 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

(But it might count as harassment – that's a weird thing about harassment; it can be a lot of different things. In this case, though, it seems like Mr Rossi is not being threatened or personally attacked in any way. I know there are a lot of ways for microaggressions to rise to the level of harassment, but saying "I think you cheated on that race" isn't really one of them, unless it happens in a peculiarly intense and frequent way, I think.)
posted by koeselitz at 2:47 PM on December 18, 2015

'Random guy must feel the full weight of the internet' may not be technically harassment, and probably isn't quite as bad as 'Gawker outs a random guy as homosexual for no reason', but it's in the same vein. He's not a public figure for any reason other than the whims of the viral internet, and even if he cheated, I doubt he considered the consequences as would be an entire online community of strangers dedicated to smearing his name in perpetuity. Internet justice is rarely just, and never follows any notion of due process.
posted by T.D. Strange at 2:50 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Before anyone can join an internet campaign against someone, they should have to read "So You've Been Publicly Shamed". This guy could be cheating. Seems like something for the race organizers to examine. If their course isn't developed enough to enable easy cutting and cheating, they should have their BQ status pulled. Rummaging through the scraps of his digital life to catch him dirty doesn't seem like a productive use of anyone's time, and putting up a ransom for him to run again under different conditions and training times is a great waste of peoples' money.
posted by msbutah at 2:59 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I know there are a lot of ways for microaggressions to rise to the level of harassment, but saying "I think you cheated on that race" isn't really one of them, unless it happens in a peculiarly intense and frequent way, I think.

There are 17,000 comments* on the letsrun thread about this. Their payout promises have attracted media attention. I can't even see the point of making such insane wagers on this if not to draw attention to it. I can see how that would feel peculiarly intense and frequent, if I were the target of it.

*at least one of which called for getting his kids taken away -- I'm going to go with my assumption that that was a joke, but that's only the stuff that was happening on page 1, I can't imagine how things got by the time the comment count went over 9000 or so.
posted by sparklemotion at 3:01 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

msbutah: “Before anyone can join an internet campaign against someone, they should have to read ‘So You've Been Publicly Shamed’.”

Or maybe skip it, as it ranges from deeply problematic to awful. It has no context whatsoever on shaming, seems content to label anything and everything negative as "shaming," and doesn't take into account power balances at all. One woman loses her job and has her life destroyed, and one man finds he gets publicly called out for doing something probably inadvisable, and Jon Ronson concludes something to the tune of 'well, as you can see, it's all pretty much the same for everybody – shaming is bad.' And he steamrolls over the abject consequences for any woman labeled a "shamer."

This doesn't make anything done to Rossi okay, but I will say: it was highly unethical – highly unethical – for him to publicize an exchange between himself and the principal of his children's school in the way that he did.

I do agree that Rossi hasn't deserved what he's gotten, though. The fact that it isn't 4chan-level shit doesn't mean it's not bad. I think I let the awfulness of certain corners blind me to the fact that it's still bad even when it's not nuclear-level harassment.
posted by koeselitz at 3:12 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

("This Public Shaming is Not Like The Other," by Jacqui Shine, was a very good response to Ronson's book on shaming, I think.)
posted by koeselitz at 3:15 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

(Phew, looking through it, it seems like Rossi has suffered plenty for making that letter from the principal public, too.)
posted by koeselitz at 3:17 PM on December 18, 2015

Instead of putting up frankly ridiculous amounts of money to settle some kind of internet pissing match, why not invest that in creating an entire new racing series: Competitive Not-Being-Seen. See who can most creatively cut a course without getting caught by a brigade of internet sleuths who troll through your social media history. Hell, if you add in some doping control point "obstacles", I bet you could pull in a bunch of former pro cyclists, too.
posted by indubitable at 3:45 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

The principal is a public authority figure responsible for the oversight of many children in his community. I'm not sure why it was unethical for him to publicize a communication from the principal regarding an administrative decision he disagreed with.
posted by humanfont at 3:56 PM on December 18, 2015

Nobody is investing that amount of money in anything else because absolutely nobody involved in promising it ever expects to pay it out. It's like saying "ok, I'll give you my house if you can lift that mountain". The usual response is not "omg that's fiscally irresponsible, why don't you give your house to a decent person instead?!?!?" And that's because everyone involved understands that haha, lol no, that house isn't changing hands. That's how unlikely it is that Rossi will ever meet their $100,000 challenge. The 5k challenge looks more achievable but still very unlikely - a guy at his age who has just spent a couple years training seriously is pretty unlikely to be able to just get 'more serious' and cut a couple of minutes off his 5k time (and his previous best time is 21.52).
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:00 PM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I do think that the most productive outcome of this whole thing would be for some more stringent standards for races to get BQ status, though. The race where he cheated is already introducing more timing mats which would make it much harder, but I haven't seen much discussion of what reasonable minimum standards should be.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:02 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I know people have trouble with middle ground, but the point of the anti shaming stories is to not get carried away, not that alleged bad behavior should never be discussed. There are other options besides;
a. Passing judgement on people who may have done Something and telling them they are bad people, or
b. Passing judgement on people who discuss Something and telling them they are bad people.

Discussing it civilly, not rushing to judgement, don’t threaten people, those are just off the top of my head.
posted by bongo_x at 4:05 PM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Running *used* to be a niche sport. But marathon running is increasingly popular. I'm really glad about that-- I'm a running evangelist, and one of the great things about running a marathon is it is something that nearly everybody can aspire to do.

However, as running gets more popular, so does cheating. More people want the bragging rights of having finished a marathon, or they don't find finishing good enough-- they want to place. For folks whose motivation to run is external, it seems to be less difficult to consider cheating.

For the running community, the behaviour is outrageous enough by itself, but if it means that honest runners lose their place at Boston then it's incendiary. I'll never qualify for Boston. But I have run enough races to have a huge appreciation for people who genuinely do qualify, and the idea of someone who puts in the work *not* getting a place because of an asshole trying to impress his students is just awful.

This is not to the point on whether the Rossi case is vigilante justice or community self policing. I'm torn about that myself.
posted by frumiousb at 5:42 PM on December 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

I sort-of want to talk about the absurdity of elementary schools refusing to excuse family vacation absences (as long as they're rare) when the children are in no academic trouble. Spending three days in Chicago seeing the big museums and touring a great city? Yes, that probably IS more educational than drilling math facts up to 10. It's not like they can't take homework with them.

(Five years on the school board made me very eye-rolly about emphasis on school attendance as an end in and of itself as important, as it leads to both kids coming to school REALLY SICK and to elementary students missing out on great opportunities to broaden their horizons. Yeah, you don't want to encourage parents to do it all the time, but those parents are ALREADY doing it and just calling in fake strep.)

Also cheating bad and the lengths some people are willing to go to cheat at running is mind-boggling, especially given how individual a sport it is. If you're just a middle aged dude who likes to run, who CARES what your time is, other than you, and you have to know you cheated to get it!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:26 AM on December 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

He is an elite runner that has trained for years and can run a marathon in 3 hours easy. He ran slower on purpose to fake his other results and then wrote the letter for publicity. Now he is about to cash in on $100,000 - genius! I'm going to start working on a similar plan right now!
posted by solmyjuice at 10:34 AM on December 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I sort-of want to talk about the absurdity of elementary schools refusing to excuse family vacation absences (as long as they're rare) when the children are in no academic trouble.

I imagine the principal herself doesn't have a whole lot of leeway in deciding what is or is not excused, especially in places that tie school funding to attendance.

The letter from the principal may have been a little curt but I don't think she did anything wrong in telling this father that he could potentially face trouble down the road.
posted by madajb at 2:13 PM on December 19, 2015

It took me years or training, but I've run Boston. (3:06 marathon PR.) It really was an amazing experience. While getting in wasn't easy, I couldn't care less whether someone else cheated to get there. As far as I'm concerned, they're only cheating themselves. Anyone who feels like they were denied a spot due to this one guy taking it is completely full of shit -- there are always going to be a handful of cheaters around the margins. The aggrieved runners should have run faster, pure and simple.

You're right, of course, Eyebrows. No one cares about your marathon times. Most people don't have any kind of point of references as to whether 3:30 is "fast" or whatever, they're just impressed you finished and didn't die.

That's not to say that I'm a fan of cheating -- a public shaming is probably exactly the proper penalty for the "crime." That LetsRun thread is hilarious, though... the vitriol seems way out of line, given that we're talking about amateur athletics. Their dedication, though, is impressive -- he would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those pesky kids!
posted by ph00dz at 7:56 PM on December 19, 2015