Did Rosie Ruiz take the T during Her Infamous Marathon "Victory"

In 1980, the Boston Marathon had what is undoubtedly its weirdest outcome in the history of the storied event. That year, Rosie Ruiz was the first women to cross the finish line with a recorded time of 2:31:56. The problem was, Ruiz didn't run the entire race. Harvard students John Faulkner and Sola Mahoney saw Ruiz emerge from the crowd of spectators on Commonwealth Avenue just half of a mile from the finish. An investigation ensued and later than week Ruiz was stripped of her victory and it was awarded to rightful winner Jacqueline Gareua of Canada.

Our question is: did Rosie Ruiz take the T during this infamous race?

Before we answer this, let's deal with the question you're all asking in your heads. How could Ruiz's hoax last for days? Wouldn't the officials immediately know she hadn't run the entire course? These are logical questions. What readers must remember is that the marathon was not the international spectacle in 1980 that is in 2017. Media outlets didn't cover every inch of the course like they do today. Spectators weren't armed with smart phones uploading videos to Facebook and Instagram. Other runners didn't remember seeing Ruiz during the race, but with the number of runners being much lower then than it is now and the packs of runners much smaller, the other racers just assumed she separated herself from the pack.

So if Ruiz wasn't on the course, was she perhaps, riding the T for at least part of the race? The Green Line provides many opportunities to reduce the 26.2 mile burden of the route. The D line in particular would allow a runner to skip most of Heartbreak Hell. Details about what Ruiz did leading up to emerging from the crowd close to the finish line are still a mystery. As recent as 2000, Ruiz still insisted she ran the entire race.

If Rosie's history is any evidence, there may be good reason to believe she took the T on race day. Just six months earlier, Ruiz took the subway during the New York City Marathon. New York City photographer Susan Morrow saw Ruiz and struck up a conversation with her. Ruiz told Morrow she was an injured runner who dropped out of the race but what she did in actuality was take the subway to close to the finish line and cross with a time that qualified her for Boston the next year. After Morrow saw Ruiz during coverage of her Boston "win," Morrow contacted the media and Ruiz was eventually disqualified from her appearance in the New York City Marathon. Note: even if Faulkner and Mahoney had not seen her, the disqualification from New York might still have rendered Ruiz's Boston win moot since her New York time is what qualified her to enter Boston.

Credit: http://rosieruizfanclub.blogspot.com/

What Ruiz did prior to running that final half of a mile to a dubious victory may always be a mystery. Did she ever set foot in Hopkinton, Ashland, or Natick on race day? Did she hop on the Green Line at some point and ride unbeknownst to everyone else. A T shirt produced by the Rosie Ruiz Fan Club suggests that perhaps she did. Unless the notoriously shady Ruiz ever comes clean, we might never know. But in support of weirdness on the T, I like to imagine an untrained Ruiz gussied up in her best running gear but devoid of all signs of effort (she wasn't sweaty at the finish line) sitting on the Green Line stealthily hiding behind a copy of the Globe's Sports section (the Sox led the AL East by 0.5 games that Marathon Monday) sketchily making her way towards the finish line.