by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
Boston is getting ready for its 123rd Marathon race. Gumshoe’s Mary is not a sports writer, so if this article is about running there is likely to be some hint of conspiracy in it. And sure enough there is.
But first let’s sketch some of the great Marathon races.
A Selective History
The first Marathon occurred in 490BC, run by a fellow named Phidippedes who was a professional runner. Not professional as in the sport of running but the business. You know they didn’t have Fed-ex in those day, and if you had to get a parcel from A to B, it was by horse or by man.
The Persians had invaded Greece, but were successfully resisted in a battle at Marathon. Phidippides was asked to run the news of the Greek victory down to Athens. He is said to have died soon after arriving.
All very romantic, perhaps a myth. He had said the god Pan met him along the way. The account by Herodotus (born in 484BC) shows that Phidippides:
“reached Sparta the day after he left Athens and delivered his message to the Spartan government. “Men of Sparta, the Athenians ask you to help them, and not to stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and subdued by a foreign invader; for even now Eritrea has been enslaved.”
And so forth. I don’t think the term “Marathon race” came up again until 1896 when Athens held the first modern Olympics. The race there was won by a local in 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds. Many years later the Olympics, now “multi-locational,” added a Women’s Marathon. The girl who won it, Joan Benoit, came in in 2 hours and 24 minutes. Remember that figure for a discussion below – two, twenty-four.
Our Hero Cliff Young
But wait, that was 1984. A year earlier, the magnificent potato farmer, Cliff Young, had thrilled Australia with his run from Sydney to Melbourne. Do you remember it? Everyone lined the streets during his last 8 hours or so, thanks to radio coverage. The shocking part was that he had no previous racing experience. He won.
He covered about 600 miles in 5 days, by not sleeping. At age 61 he was still living with his mother. Cliff Young was born in Victoria, one of seven kids. A year after the big win he married fellow runner, mary, age 22, who said she would not start the babies too soon as she had to perfect her running.
(Hello?)
Here is a film that gives me goose bumps. You’ll see Cliff with his cows at 5.16 minutes.
But Age 61 Was Nothing
Canadian runner Ed Whitlock broke records for Marathon, graded for age, when he was in his 70s and 80s. In this video he mentions that in one of his earlier races he was running with Alan Turing of enigma-code fame.
He has run 40 Marathons in a lifetime. I might remind you of the mini-Marathon that I did not run in Boston last year, at age 71, due to fear of heat stroke. That was a memorial run for one of the victims of the marathon bombing in 2013, Lingzi Lu.
Here is our 85-year-old Ed Whitlock:
How about nonagenarians — can they run? Yes. Ask Hariette Thompson of San Diego. She is a star at 92. Definitely worth watching this video which includes her playing a Rachmaninoff ditty, which she says is what is in her mind when she is running.
By God, it takes all kinds to make this beautiful world.
For Boston, for Boston
Let us now prepare for Monday, April 15, 2019, which I hate to say is “Patriot’s Day” in Beantown.
The Boston Marathon is in its 123rd year and is run by the Boston Athletic Association. For its first 75 years it was men only. You have to qualify to enter the race by showing that you have successfully done another 26 mile Marathon somewhere.
Australia has won it once in the Men’s Open, compared to 24 wins for Kenya. But Australia won four times in the Women’s wheelchair division.
This year we are expecting cold weather. However, last year, March, 2018, Boston had super-bad weather. (I was in Adelaide). They say the wind was quite something at it was “raining diagonally.”
This caused 60% of the Elite men runners to drop out. I am assuming they did that, so as not to spoil their lifetime average or whatever.
The race begins west of Boston in Hopkinton and starts to get exciting around Wellesley, a wealthy suburb, which is when the Wellesley College girls come out on the street to root for the female runners. (“Root” being the word in Seppoese that means to cheer someone on.)
And Then There Was Rosie Ruiz
The 1980 race is the second-most famous of all Boston Marathons. (I don’t need to tell you which is the most famous, or why.) A Cuban American girl named Rosie Ruiz, age 27, won it in 2 hours 31 minutes.
You may recall that Joan Benoit did a 2-hour-twenty-four minute run, in the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. That’s better than Rosie’s, but the Boston track is slower. You start by going downhill for 10 miles and then uphill, so world records are unlikely to be broken at the Finish Line in Copley Square.
Have a closer look at the above picture of Rosie after she won the Boston Marathon of 1980. She does not look as half-dead as most of the winners do. They say she was not even sweating. And that her legs are not as muscular as they should be for a Marathoner.
So what’s up? Nowadays all the runners wear a bib with a gps tracker. But at that time the only monitoring of the competitors was by media cameras that were set up along the way. A subsequent review of their films showed no Rosie anywhere from Hopkinton to Boston.
It seems she had hopped a subway ride to a place rather near to Copley Square and jumped into the race from the sidelines. The Canadian girl, Jaqueline Gareau, who was expected to win, came in second after Rosie, at 2.34.
In the previous year, Rosie had run her only other Marathon, in New York, and achieved a reasonable speed but did not win. In Boston she broke a record with her 2.31 win.
All comes out in the wash here:
https://video.wgbh.org/video/wgbh-2016-boston-marathon-mile-12-story-rosie-ruiz/
Hidden Agenda
So what about a conspiracy angle to my sports article?
You have to watch that video to learn that after Rosie’s prize got rescinded, Ms Gareau became the winner, naturally. At the end of the video it says that they even allowed Ms Gareau to come back to Boston and do a mock-up of breaking through the ribbon.
And they hired thousands of people to line Boyslton Street to watch her get the laurel wreath.
I ain’t sayin’ nuttin’ else.
I ain’t sayin’ a word.
Olympics are for amateurs like Cliffy who ran in gumboots. I did not look up Phidippedes, my school recollections have him a professional in the sense his abilities to run were used just like the baptism of fire for the new Australian Army(p off sheepie anzac never was- sarcastic)with runners aka movie Gallipoli .I think he was even meant to have died from his 26 mile run after delivering the message(don’t shot the messager). Lance Armstrong was known for a liberal view of the rules but luckily only almost died.
Sport is the preferred circus of the masses. The will of individuals is strong enough to cause cheating but this needs enabling from the bookmakers who have the franchise to run the circus.
Phidippedes information was of a generic view of loss and not highly detailed battle analysis. Why not use smoke signals, mirrors and maybe pigeon or horse(turn a hire horse for home after a ride then you will know what I mean, does not necessarily require a rider).
Rothschild exploited this too, to buy up perpetual English bonds because “miscommunication” over their campion, Napoleon.
Horse racing is in a league of its own here. Not rife in all sport, it seems to be required. Keep ’em on the edge of their seats, then fleece ’em like a kiwi(jokes bro) being the Maxim or MO.
It is sickening to say the least…:-(
Mary, may I say it for you ? “And they hired thousands of people to line Boyslton Street to watch her get the laurel wreath.”
“And they hired people to make out that they were injured or killed in the Boston Marathon of 2013.” Very similar, you now have the conspiracy.
They also had a judge who threw all law out the window. How’s that for a conspiracy?
Research surprises. I can’t find my copy of The Ballad of Cliff Young, so I googled for it. That brought me to Trove (National Library of Australia’s fun collection). They offered three libraries where it can be gotten. There was a download button. I pressed it and then when offered various formats I pressed “music.”
OK, guys, so what did that yield? This:
1972-2019, English, Printed music edition: International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology [electronic resource].
I think somebody is algorithiming me.
Me Too i.e.” I think somebody is algorithiming me.”
https://jackewilson.com/2014/04/24/automatic-for-the-not-people/
http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/79843441901/the-automatic-corporation
I am quoting from Diane’s second link:
“High-frequency trading firms are already pure software, mostly beyond human control or comprehension. The flash crash of 2010 demonstrated this. Companies that are centered around logistics, like FedEx or Walmart, can be already thought of as complex software entities where human worker bees carry out the machine’s instructions.
“This happens naturally, because over time more and more of the business logic of a company becomes encoded in software. Humans still have some control (or so they think) but mostly what they’re doing is supplying parameters to the computation. A modern corporation is so complex that it does not fit in the brain of a single person (or a small number of persons). Software carries the slack”
All right, you twisted my arm, I’ll say what I think the Ruiz cheating was all about. This is based on about 30 minutes research and mucho speculation, OK?
The affair was likely scripted from the get-go. Probably for practice (including checking how savvy the citizens were) and for entertainment. A few clues as to “outside involvement” are:
Rosie had to be ready to jump into the race at a precise moment, in order to only slightly beat the next best, Gareau.
It’s odd that she ran only one previous Marathon and did quite an excellent job (New York, 1979) for somebody who just doesn’t have the leg muscles.
She wasn’t arrested or interrogated, in fact she has never returned the trophy, claiming innocence.
Sorry, but this is one of my strong hands, the evolving of computers and trading. I will try to explain the phenomena of “hands off you are not an appointed expert” as applied in court or “career management” in the corporate world. Not my strong hand but I would say that corporate lawyers are the apex of the savvy lawyer in this post modern worlds culture that I call the cookie cutter.
Because the Corporations are connected and directed they can lay waste to a viable business at will. You have Walmart(Waltons) but I will compare with Aus supermarkets that connected and replicated through the commonwealth setup but the DNA is a match.
One dollar milk, everyone has to compete because its business. Trouble is that a viable quality farm cannot. Your all savvy here and know the “ecomonic hitman”, so I can more through how these things are setup.
Dollar a litre milk what!! it should be lower looking other soft drinks thinks the customer believing a level playing field exists in the “economies of scale” in farming and chemical mimic foods. The carbonated sugar products must be fraudulently brought to market, if I can use supermarket water as a litmus test. Maybe a vast scale but growing all that sugar with chemicals, processing it with lots of power and on the shelf cheaper than water. Not to mention the honey type activities Shane proved in that place.
Happy with your required daily corporate dealings, bet your hanging on the phone a bit. Only to be duded in some way. Better healthier faster stronger we are constantly told.
The high frequency trading requires huge amounts of power and hardware as well as the software. Therefore it must be also be located physically. All these things must be brought together as an insider. Viable outsiders will believe for a time that if only they were physically located right next to the exchange they could have the lowest latency(quickest transaction speed). Gumshoe the exchanges, lots of the known “havens”, the channel islands like Jersey are popular to EU insiders.
But what are they trading that no one can understand. Shaving a fraction off a cent allegedly between buyers and sellers that we all easily understand. The connected insiders need to create a narrative to explain their good luck. The narrative would fall apart if it could be understood so we get endless experts making no sense. No sense, not because no one person can understand, but because we all understand fraud.
The experts get their credibility though access to endless wealth that we see in Forbes and such. This also gets their hands on the levers of the peace makers who happen to have large guns, for any pesky issues of unhappy unsecured creditor backlash.
The endless wealth where does it come from. Don’t ask me, you have Central Bank Governor, think he would say its open market operation that you would not understand. Can’t argue with an experts expert.
I have no idea of the cargo but, the Berlin Airlift of 1945abouts, would have been above the “metrics” of FedEx. The known combined computer power at time, maybe a $40 dollar phone.
Like this sector in the agenda,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-16/coles-partners-with-struggling-spc-to-stock-australian-grown/11020636
Caveat, I would take the “clean” as chemical but at least not solient-green.
Shep has a “history” of being mighty unclean. Top people come outa that .. place too.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-16/jcu-scientist-peter-ridd-sacking-unlawful-federal-court-judgment/11021554
lol, questioning scientific consensus and only wanting the standard of science that makes the discipline of value. ie – replication. He’s talking about cross checks showing disparity. What I find interesting is the reference to “weather” and I suggest the facts point to “seeding” ferris style as a natural inference flow.
He breached confidentiality and denigrated others ???
What confidential information PPCockin, , Harvard IP. O, operational.
You say enterprise agreement, I say, secret society.lol, never mind me, thanks for forgetting your seed providers(the ones who paid, the sack class, o the tradesman.
Nice to hear Dr Ridd was never gagged, been a whole rash of that since the weather changed in circa Gitmo.Not sure what the silenced means in the statement, must be a patent like the microbiologists have chased. Wish you guys would just concentrate on the measles cure, lot of rash there too.
Sorry, I did vent,I’ll take a small leave of absence from commenting. It is a good space here as we all know, you can imagine my daily “tribulations” out there.