The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (39 page)

Litton told Khan, “I'm starting to know every crack and pothole on that route from Hopkinton to Boston. Once you go to Boston, there's something special about it. Having all 26 miles with people lined up on both sides of the road, screaming their lungs out for six hours, is such an unusual experience and super cool.”

 

Wayne Kursh's “I smell a rat” blog post drew the attention of Michael McGrath, a former assistant track and cross-country coach at Haverford College. McGrath had competed at Boston nine times—including the year Rosie Ruiz cheated—and his best finish was 2:49:19. Although Kursh hadn't mentioned Litton by name, McGrath soon identified him, by comparing the lists of finishers at Missoula and Delaware. Like Strode, he found Litton a more compelling impostor than Ruiz, in no small part because his methodology was so tantalizingly elusive. Somehow, he had exploited the running community's faith in the very systems—transponders, chip times—that had been adopted to prevent cheating.

“I am like a dog who cannot let go of a bone,” McGrath wrote to Kursh. He spent days anatomizing Litton's races, dissecting first his 2010 showing at Boston. Litton had hit all the splits, at five-kilometer intervals. This suggested that running a sub-three-hour marathon was theoretically within his capacity. Unless, McGrath argued, the microscope was brought into tighter focus.

The Boston course has a reputation for toughness: the Newton hills, which runners encounter between miles 16 and 21, owe their notoriety to the fact that they must be climbed when the energy reserves of runners are greatly depleted. How was it, McGrath asked, that on the most leisurely stretch—just before the halfway mark, near Wellesley College—Litton's pace was a full minute slower than it was in the hills? Litton's Boston race in 2009 had the same incongruities.

McGrath learned that, in February 2009, Litton had run a 15-kilometer race in Florida. According to the split times, his pace during the second half—five minutes and 24 seconds per mile—was almost two minutes faster than during the first half. Such a divergence is called a “negative split,” and a variance of that magnitude is as common as snow in Miami. Nor did Litton's past performances indicate an ability to run a five-and-a-half-minute pace. The official timer of the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon, reflecting upon Litton's purported acceleration, told me, “I don't know any
Kenyans
who could do that.”

Not long after McGrath began his research, he decided to go public, sort of. His medium was LetsRun, a website devoted to news about elite track and distance running. One of LetsRun's salient features is its “World Famous Message Boards,” where most participants use pseudonyms, and the content quality runs the expected gamut (factual, analytical, sophomoric, inanely combative). McGrath, using the handle Anonymous.4, posted an item under the heading “Kip Litton,” referred to Litton's disqualification at Missoula, and solicited feedback from anyone who might have more information.

One responder was Scott Hubbard, a former collegiate runner and high school coach who was a familiar figure on the central Michigan running scene. Hubbard measured and certified courses, often worked as a race announcer, and wrote for running publications. His awareness of Litton dated to October 2009, when Litton's five-member relay team was disqualified from winning the Detroit Free Press Marathon Relay. Litton had recruited four topnotch masters runners, only two of whom he'd known previously, paid everyone's entry fee, and assigned himself the second leg of the relay. The members of the second-place team were stunned by the race result—especially their second-leg runner, who had received his baton in first place, knew that no one had passed him, yet learned after handing off to his third-leg teammate that they no longer held the lead. With encouragement from Litton's mortified teammates, who felt potentially implicated, the second-place team protested, leading to the disqualification. Afterward, Hubbard told me, he initiated a correspondence with Litton, trying to “pin him down on how he cut the course.”

Litton was initially evasive. But after about a week of questioning he offered an explanation: “Finally, he came down to ‘Yeah, I must have cut it short somewhere to come in with that time.' I asked him where that might have happened. I knew the course, because I'd measured it. He named the place and said, ‘I must have followed someone.' And I said, ‘No, you didn't follow anyone. You cheated.'”

A few weeks later, Hubbard came across the following item in the online newsletter of
Michigan Runner
, a bimonthly publication:

 

Reader Brian Smith passes along several great performances by Kip Litton:

“I wanted to relay some info about a couple of recent performances that I would consider great. I see a dentist in Davison who's name is Dr. Kip Litton. We often talk running when I am there. Recently he had told me about a couple of marathons he was planning to run. When I asked about them afterwards, he just said things like, ‘I was just glad to finish' and ‘Well, I didn't injure myself!' I know that he is a good runner, so I looked up the race results. Now I also know how humble he is.

“It turns out that he finished 3 marathons in less than 2 months, all under 3 hours. He placed 2nd overall & 1st master in The New Mexico Marathon Sept 6 in 2:57:54, 5th overall & 1st master in The City of Trees Marathon Oct 4 in 2:55:45 and 14th overall and 1st in the division in The Manchester City Marathon Nov 1 in 2:54:06.

“I think that could be considered worthy of a mention. I didn't see them listed in your newsletter so I thought I would pass them along.”

 

Hubbard sent another email to Litton, on the pretext that he wanted to get in touch with Brian Smith. When Litton responded that he couldn't recall all his patients, Hubbard pressed harder. “The question was posed to him pointedly: ‘Who's Brian Smith?'” Hubbard later wrote on LetsRun. “He didn't say he was a patient of his. He didn't put up much of a fight when told it was felt he wrote the note.”

 

During the fall of 2010, Litton entered marathons in Rochester, New York; Portland, Maine; Huntington, West Virginia; and Charlotte, North Carolina. In Rochester, he posted a chip time under two hours and 58 minutes, winning the masters division. Photographs at Rochester showed him wearing a gray-green sweatshirt, a cap with a bright-yellow logo, and no visible racing bib. At the finish, he wore a different shirt and hat. This proved too much for Hubbard, who issued an ultimatum to Litton: take down the Worldrecordrun site or risk an exposé in
Michigan Runner
, for which Hubbard wrote a column.

Worldrecordrun was gone within days. (According to Litton, the site had become more trouble than it was worth, and Hubbard's threat wasn't a factor.) Cathy Zell, who at the time was the executive director of the local chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, told me that she didn't know of any donations that had been obtained through the link on Litton's web page. “We started getting phone calls saying, ‘I don't know if he's legit,'” she said. “I never had proof one way or the other.” Litton, she added, “basically is the one who said, ‘This isn't giving you guys a good name.'” Laurie Fink, a spokesperson for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, says that since 2004 the Litton household has contributed $20 to the organization.

Even after Litton dismantled the site, he continued to enter races. On December 11, 2010, at the Thunder Road Marathon, in Charlotte, his split times suggested to the race director that he had cut the course and not been overly clever about it; within 48 hours, he'd been provisionally disqualified. Just as swiftly, Litton responded with a pious defense, portraying himself as the victim of “a witch hunt” and “a smear campaign . . . ridiculous things which are ALL completely un-true.” He confessed only to a failure to be remarkable: “I have legally practiced dentistry for over 20 years and have 3 kids. I have never been arrested. I have never even been sued. I have never cheated in a race. I am not perfect, but probably the worst thing I have ever done is get a parking ticket. I know, boring.”

Meanwhile, the mockery on LetsRun's message boards, as Litton pointed out, was “taking on a life of its own.” In late December, he wrote to Weldon Johnson, one of the founders of LetsRun, complaining about his treatment. He acknowledged his disqualifications at Detroit, Missoula, and Delaware, and floated fuzzy explanations for each. (“I inadvertently turned too soon & cut part of the course . . . I was dq'd as I should have been, but only accidentally.”) He added, “I have served on my Dental Ethics Board”—in fact, he had not—“so I realize that people should take cheating seriously.” But the situation had got out of control. “If these accusations held any water, it would have certainly forced me to stop racing. As you know, I have not. I have nothing to hide.”

The connoisseurs of Litton's audacity were galvanized. They stared at course maps:
He could have cut it there—or there
. Rich Heller, a former collegiate runner, collated findings on an ancillary site, Study of Kip Litton Running, including links to videos, such as one of Litton walking across the finish line at the P. F. Chang's Rock 'n' Roll Arizona Marathon, in January 2010. (Chip time: 2:51:21.) “For some races the evidence is circumstantial,” Heller wrote. “For others it's [a] SLAM DUNK.” For the conspiracy-minded, it was a juicy peach, and LetsRun contributors adopted handles like Lone Gunman and Zapruder. The paramount question was “How?” Did he have an accomplice? Did he drive from point to point? Ride a bicycle? Devise digital subversions?

Jennifer Straughan, the Missoula race director, was as mystified as anyone. “It's expensive,” she told me. “He flies all over the country, rents cars, plans in advance, has to figure out how many chip mats there are, how you deal with those. Think about how hard you have to work to
not
run a race.”

 

The debunkers zeroed in on the West Wyoming Marathon, the one race that Litton had supposedly won outright. One of them came across a web cache of the race's defunct home page, which included this caveat: “With a low entry fee, there will be no goodie bags, no shirts, no photographer and no finishers medals.”

On January 11, 2011, a poster called Liptodakip wrote, “Still curious about the west Wyoming marathon. 29 runners total. And he won it. Anyone know anything about it? Is it a real race? The main page is down and now the results are gone. (was up last week). did he make up an entire race? That would be bold!”

Yes, it would. And, yes, he did. LetsRun exploded: West Wyoming was Litton's pièce de résistance, and even his most indignant accusers had to concede their perverse admiration. In this race, the key to winning was ingeniously uncomplicated:
Make the whole thing up!
For his fabricated marathon, Litton had assembled not only a website but also a list of finishers and their times (plus name, age, gender, and hometown), and created a phantom race director, who responded to email queries. It occurred to Kyle Strode that six months earlier, when he had raised questions about Litton to “Richard Rodriguez,” the reply (“Wow, that's quite a scenario!”) had omitted a crucial detail. When Richard Rodriguez looked in the mirror, Litton looked back.

In concocting the fantasy, someone had gone so far as to create a post-race testimonial for the website Marathon Guide. “Small race, with only a couple dozen runners,” a post there said. “Bring your own gels; only water is available on course. Out-and-back route. No spectators to speak of. Sounds like a downer, but the view and the town are so worth it! Cross Wyoming off of your list and visit one of the most beautiful towns in the US at the same time.”

This was attributed to “G.S. from Nebraska,” which matched one listed entrant, Greg Sanchez, of Lincoln, age 54. “Cross Wyoming off of your list” referred to running marathons in all 50 states. More people summit Mount Everest each year than celebrate running a marathon in a 50th state. LetsRun's forensic beavers established that it made no sense for Sanchez to refer to crossing states off a list, because, according to a database at Marathon Guide, this was his one and only marathon. The same was true of the other finishers besides Litton: 28 men and women, from 12 states, with tellingly unimaginative names (Joseph Smith, Kevin Scott, Sue Johnson, Karen Nelson). This lapse notwithstanding, someone had invested considerable time and effort to create Athlinks profiles for several of the fictional runners.

The next day, two more imaginary races, in Orlando and Atlanta, were identified among Litton's Athlinks performances. Inspection of the race websites revealed that they were hosted by the same Internet server as the sites for the West Wyoming race, for Worldrecordrun, and for Litton's dental practice.

Along with outrage and stupefaction, the LetsRun community expressed gratitude: “This is the craziest thing I have ever read in my life. Ever . . . WOW . . . Better than porn . . . Is it possible that Kip Litton doesn't actually exist, and it is all an incredible ruse?”

 

Litton certainly existed, but his bizarre story posed a conundrum: was he just a guy with Olympic-caliber chutzpah, or did he suffer the certitude of self-delusion? After his provisional disqualification at the Charlotte marathon, in December 2010, his appeal to the race director, Tim Rhodes, brimmed with wounded resentment. He invoked the tragedy of his son's illness. (“I have a 9-year old son with terminal Cystic Fibrosis. I run to raise funds to help cure this vicious disease.”) As Rhodes explained to Scott Hubbard, without definitive proof of a deception “our hands are tied.” In the absence of witnesses who had seen Litton leave and reenter the course, Rhodes reversed the disqualification.

Once Litton had insinuated a few dubious times into the top running databases, he must have convinced himself that he could celebrate his sham successes on his website without attracting hostile scrutiny. But the close call at Charlotte seemed to change his game. For the time being, it would be Litton's final race appearance. Pressed via email by Hubbard and others, he denied that he had cheated or had intended to deceive—and offered justifications that left one in awe of his gift for just making shit up. He provided this account of what happened at West Wyoming: