Guest Post: Mike Rossi’s 45 Minutes of Fame

Another guest post, this time by a loyal reader named Hering, which none of you seem like loyal readers right now. None of the views expressed here are mine.

The most interesting person from this past week was not Floyd Mayweather, or Manny Pacquiao, or Stephen Curry, or Chris Paul, or Victor Espinoza, or even the baby Princess Charlotte. For me, by a wide margin, the most interesting person from last week was 47 year-old Michael “Mike” Rossi from Rydal, Pennsylvania. Let me explain why.

Mike Rossi has experienced 15 minutes of fame on three separate occasions during his adult life, which adds up to 45 minutes in total. The first of these 15 minutes occurred way back in the 1980’s, when Mike was one of the hosts of Dancin’ On Air, a TV show that looks a little like a distant forerunner of Dancing with the Stars. The show is perhaps most remembered for featuring a very young Kelly Ripa, sporting a very different, authentic 1980’s hairstyle.

Three decades later, Mike Rossi experienced a second 15 minutes of fame as a result of his participation in the 2015 Boston Marathon. Rossi, now a wedding and local radio DJ, decided to take his whole family on the trip to soak-up the excitement of Marathon Monday in Boston (see family photo below, taken from media reports). The problem is that his two children had to miss a few days of school for the trip, and as a result the school principal sent a warning note explaining that the trip counts as an unexcused absence. The principal goes on to say that after accumulating a certain number of such absences, the attendance officer will get involved and the parents will be issued a notice informing them of their violation of Pennsylvania’s compulsory school attendance law.

Rossi responded in a way that has provoked very different reactions from people. He wrote a stern, open letter  in response to the principal, arguing that five days in Boston was possibly more educational than an entire year of formal schooling. He broadcasts the letter over social media, and pretty soon it goes viral, getting picked up by major media outlets, including mentions on The Today Show and Fox News. Hilton Hotels even offers him two free nights in solidarity with his cause of extra-curricular enrichment for his children. Some call him Dad of the Year. Others think he is a self-righteous publicity hound. One thing that is not in dispute, however, is that the uproar has made life very difficult for the principal who wrote the initial letter.

You might be wondering, after all this, how Mike Rossi can possibly have another 15 minutes of fame left waiting for him. Well, the story gets even more entertaining from here on out. The publicity generated by the Rossi story drew the attention of curious fellow runners. They started looking into his running exploits, and just as the initial excitement over his letter to the principal began to fade, questions started emerging on the Runner’s World discussions forums about whether Rossi legitimately qualified for the Boston Marathon that he took his children out of school to go and watch. This soon spawned an epic thread on LetsRun.com, home to the most rabid running enthusiasts anywhere on the web. The 84 pages and counting of posts includes everything, from a crowd-sourced campaign to comb through thousands of race photos for evidence, to Rossi defenders with different usernames who all turn out to share the same IP address.

What are the allegations? In short, for a 47 year-old male like Mike Rossi, in order to qualify to run in the Boston Marathon, he must first run another sanctioned marathon race in faster than 3 hours and 25 minutes. The strictness of these qualifying standards is part of the reason why participating in the Boston Marathon is considered the holy grail of amateur distance running. Some non-qualifier spots are allotted to charity teams, but these are available only to runners who raise thousands of dollars for their corresponding charities.

Rossi qualified for the Boston Marathon by running the 2014 Lehigh Valley Health Network Via Marathon in 3 hours, 11 minutes, and 45 seconds. However, what initially aroused the suspicion of fellow runners is the fact that, in extensive online records of Rossi’s race history, he has never run more than 5 km, or less than 1/8 of the marathon distance, at the pace he would need to maintain for his finishing time at Lehigh. Moreover, among the thousands of official race photos taken on the course, Rossi only shows up at the finish line. The LetsRun.com crowd-sourcing campaign found that, for the ten runners finishing before and after Rossi, they each show up in photos from at least two other locations on the marathon course. This evidence is damning because race photographers are paid to take as many photos as possible of a given event, so runners will have ample images of themselves to choose from. At any given location on the race course, one can cycle through a sequence of thousands of photos taken in quick succession, to form an almost continuous animation of events. The density of runners is small enough around Rossi’s supposed pace that he should definitely show up in these photo reels. However, he is nowhere to be found, leading to the strong suspicion that he started the race, then hopped in a car and drove to the finish line to record his Boston qualifying time. Needless to say, it is not too hard to drive 26.2 miles in a little over 3 hours.

This twist in the whole saga is giving Mike Rossi a whole new 15 minutes of fame, with outlets such as the Sun Times, Philadelphia Magazine, Yahoo Sports,The Morning Call, and Runner’s World all picking it up. The Runner’s World write-up, in particular, is probably the most informative version.

All this makes it especially ironic that at home on his wall, Rossi has a custom hanger for his many race medals that says, “Always Earned, Never Given.” If you look closely, at the one with the bright green strap right in the middle, you can spot the medal he got from the 2014 Lehigh Valley Health Network Via Marathon.