Montco Man Who Allegedly Cheated His Way Into Boston Marathon Becoming Legend

The running community has not forgiven - nor forgotten - Mike Rossi, who continues to attempt to defend himself after he allegedly cheated in the Lehigh Valley Marathon en route to qualifying for the Boston Marathon earlier in 2015.

Rossi, 48, of Abington, initially rose to fame when he wrote a letter to the elementary school which his children attend, after administration was allegedly upset that he pulled them out of school to come to Boston to watch him run the marathon.

Patch reported on the story: Abington Man’s Marathon Story Explodes Across The Internet.

But that fame swiftly turned - as fame so often does, when its origins are examined - to infamy, when the online running community took a peek into Rossi’s story.

And seven months later, it’s becoming clear that one story is turning a man into a legend.

It’s not the first time the online running community has worked hard to debunk a liar or a cheater. LetsRun is a leader in the anti-doping campaign in the running world, and is routinely a place where athletes, coaches, and fans turn when they feel they have been treated unfairly and been witness to injustice. And during the 2012 presidential campaign, the LetsRun message boards made national headlines when Mitt Romney’s running mate, now Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, claimed that he ran a marathon under three hours.

In reality, Ryan’s time was about four hours. To non-runners, that might not seem that egregious. To anyone who has run even recreationally, however, the three hour marathon is a whole world away from the four marathon, just as much so as the five hour marathon is away from the four. A sub-three hour marathoner would be the overall winner in certain marathons, and even in the biggest races, could expect to finish in the top few hundred. A sub four marathoner is more likely to place in the top few thousand.

Rossi’s story was different. He came under scrutiny because the time he ran to qualify for Boston was such an outlier from all of his other performances.

His time of 3 hours, 11 minutes in the 2014 Lehigh Valley Health Marathon was deemed suspicious by LetsRun users, who carry sufficient enough mettle in the running world that the marathon began to inspect evidence from the race: photos along the course and interviews with other runners, among other things.

From the start, Rossi denied everything.

“The allegation against me that I did not achieve a qualifying time at Lehigh Valley is completely false,” he told NBC Philadelphia, citing a hip injury that slowed him in Boston and accounted for the time differential. “I focused my training to peak for the LV race in order to hopefully qualify for Boston.”

But Rossi, who had run several other races, had never approached anything comparing to his 3:11 time at Lehigh. His lifetime bests are 21:52 in the 5k, and 1:40:42 in the half marathon. His per mile pace in the 5k - 3.1 miles - is barely faster than the per mile pace of a 3:11 marathon - 26.2 miles.

Moreover, he was the only runner that investigators could not find a picture of during the actual race.

However, the Lehigh Valley Marathon said that although the evidence Rossi was compelling, it was not conclusive. They let the official results stand.

LetsRun and the running community were outraged. They were so outraged, in fact, that they offered a $10,000 cash prize to Rossi if he could run a 3:25 marathon within the next 12 months.

And because Rossi has persisted in what they are unanimously convinced is an elaborate lie of the worst kind, they have not forgotten.

As of Monday, a thread on Rossi entitled “Did Mike Rossi (viral marathon dad) cheat his way into Boston?” had over 18,000 comments. It’s been a continuing conversation, updated daily, sometimes hourly, between hundreds of different posters since May 3.

Many allege that has cheated in other road races, offering up all kinds of evidence that is much harder to verify or follow-up on, given that low key races do not have the same kind of media coverage and surveillance as major marathons.

Rossi insists, through it all, that he can run 3:11 and will do so again. Yet the evidence against him is so widely compelling - and his rebuttals so public, so unconvincing, and sometimes violently suggestive - that he has cemented his place in running lore as something tantamount to a megalomaniacal criminal. In 2016 and in twenty years, when runners line up for April’s Boston Marathon, the name Mike Rossi will, for better or worse, still be whispered.