He Has Become Phantom of Marathons : Running: There is no evidence that Van Nuys’ Roodberg covered entire distances while recording startling times in Boston and Los Angeles.

Richard Roodberg, 62, makes certain friends and acquaintances know about his seemingly ageless athletic ability.

At his Van Nuys home, he displays a photo enlargement that shows him crossing the Los Angeles Marathon finish line in record time for a man his age. At his club, he hands out photocopies of a newspaper article that chronicles his running achievements.

With a lean body and thick gray hair to go with his reputation as a marathon runner, Roodberg presents himself as a role model for aging athletes and boasts about book and endorsement deals. His running success, he tells everyone, is a result of a diet of fruit and grains and an unorthodox training routine: Instead of wrecking his knees by running miles over hard surfaces, he only runs in place on a soft rubber mat.

To some, however, it all sounded too good to be true. Despite Roodberg’s apparent documentation, there were skeptics at Santa Monica’s Sand and Sea Club, to which Roodberg belongs. “There was no way he could train like that and then go out and set marathon records,” a club official said. “We were very dubious.”

And for good reason.

According to official reports from both the L.A. and Boston marathons, Roodberg crosses the finish line all right, but allegedly he doesn’t run the entire race.

Roodberg has already been disqualified from this year’s L.A. Marathon, which took place March 4, and his disqualification from the April 16 Boston Marathon appears to be imminent. In the L.A. race, his bib number was not recorded at any of the eight checkpoints along the 26.2-mile course; and while L.A. used only trained observers to identify runners, Boston had video cameras every 10 kilometers.

“He didn’t show up on any of the videos out on the course,” a Boston Marathon spokesman said recently after a review of the tapes.

What does Roodberg say about the case against him? “I ran the whole course,” he said when contacted at his home. “No question about it.”

Roodberg, a general contractor who usually races only once a year said he is being persecuted by a “jealous” running community “not willing to admit

that my training method works.”

Roodberg said there’s a reason why his numbers weren’t seen at the checkpoints. “I get cold during a race,” he said, “so I put on a blue T-shirt, which covers my numbers.” Roodberg was informed that his entire body was missing on the Boston videos. “Must be bad camera angles or something,” he said.

That comment drew a laugh from Bill Burke, president of the L.A. Marathon. “You can’t put a T-shirt over your face,” he said.

However, L.A. Marathon officials did little to bring Roodberg’s alleged charade to light. Burke and his organization have been aware of him since the 1988 marathon. He got their attention then by crossing the finish line in an astounding time of 2:34:35, which would have been a world record for his age, but he was later disqualified for failing to make an appearance at any checkpoint. Again, Roodberg claimed that he was wearing the blue T-shirt.

This year, when Roodberg crossed the finish line in 2:47:28, winning the 60-64 age group and apparently setting a world record for his age, marathon officials didn’t blink. Despite his past, they released his result to the media with no hint of suspicion attached. Even weeks after the race--long after they had verified records--officials were silent.

Burke said he was too overwhelmed by sheer numbers--14,249 runners crossed the finish line this year--to pay immediate attention to a man who had once been disqualified, but who had just turned in another phenomenal time. With dozens of age-group categories, Burke said, it was merely another statistic.

“Personally, I don’t know when I became aware of Roodberg,” Burke said.

The marathon had no mechanism in place, no asterisk by Roodberg’s name, to put the media on alert. A week after the marathon, a Times reporter, assigned to write a feature on Roodberg, called a marathon representative to confirm Roodberg’s time and was given 2:47:28, the same time that had appeared in the newspaper a day after the race in the unofficial results. Neither the specter of possible cheating nor Roodberg’s ’88 disqualification were even hinted at.

The feature on Roodberg was published April 6 and made no mention of suspicions about him. Roodberg made quick use of the publicity. He told people that an official of the Boston Marathon had seen the article, invited him to the race and had even offered to pay his hotel and air fare.

But Roodberg’s version of how he got into the world’s most prestigious marathon also was challenged.

According to Jack Fultz, who was in charge of the Boston entries, Roodberg initiated contact, faxing The Times article to Fultz. The latter denied paying any of Roodberg’s expenses and said: “(I’m) surprised I let him in. He had no qualifications other than what he did in L.A.”

When Burke heard that Roodberg was running in Boston, he knew exactly what he would do if he were in charge of that race. “I would watch him and catch him,” Burke told a reporter three days before the race. Burke, in Boston as a representative of the L.A. Marathon, saw his visit as an opportunity to inform Boston Marathon officials about Roodberg. He reportedly suggested having Roodberg followed by another runner, but race director Guy Morse “didn’t want anything to do with that,” a source said.

Instead, the Boston Marathon was going to do things its way. Fultz was directed to “red-flag” Roodberg’s number so that Roodberg would be detained when he picked up his credentials. Fultz wasn’t going to kick Roodberg out of the marathon--he merely wanted to tell him that Boston knew about L.A. and that “he’d be better off not running.”

But by the time Fultz got around to red-flagging Roodberg’s number--about four hours after the office opened--Roodberg had picked up his credentials.

Attempting to contact Roodberg at his hotel, Fultz said he left several telephone messages that were not returned. Roodberg said he did call back but never talked to Fultz. Regardless, Roodberg never received a warning, not that it would have mattered. “I would have run anyway,” he said.

According to runners, if a person wants to cheat in a marathon, it is fairly easy. Simply stand among the spectators--a million line the route in Boston--bend down to tie your shoelaces and get up running when a pack of runners goes by. Rosie Ruiz, marathon running’s most notorious cheater, was said to have jumped into the 1980 Boston Marathon a mile before the finish line. Some cheaters like to start the race and then take ground transportation to their jumping-in point. The only time that Roodberg is said to appear on the Boston video is at the finish line. His time was recorded as 2:56:42, second in his age group, 809th among the 7,966 finishers. Boston officials suspected that Roodberg’s results might be phony but didn’t note his apparent absence from most of the race until they reviewed the videotapes 3 1/2 months later.

Disqualification is a dirty job--possible lawsuits, bad publicity--but the L.A. Marathon has disqualified dozens of runners in its five-year history. However, L.A. marathon officials decided to hand the Roodberg case to the local chapter of The Athletics Congress, the governing body of track and field.

Why the change in procedure?

Bob Hickey, executive vice president of Southern California Assn. of The Athletics Congress, said: “Because of all the notoriety Roodberg received from The Times’ article, Nick (Curl, executive director of the marathon) felt they needed something more substantial.”

Roodberg was officially disqualified when he received a letter dated May 20 from Brian Pritchard, chairman of SCA-TAC’s long-distance running committee. Admittedly uncomfortable disqualifying a runner, Pritchard deliberated for weeks before sending the letter. He wanted to get the wording right to avoid a possible lawsuit--he said he eventually copied a letter of disqualification previously used by the Long Beach Marathon.

In building his case, Roodberg noted that his 1989 L.A. Marathon performance--a time of 3:13:31, third in his age group--was included in the official results, proving that he is a capable runner. Burke confirmed that Roodberg made the official results, which are published four months after the race by Running Times magazine, but his inclusion might have been a blunder by the marathon.

Sources said that L.A. Marathon officials only look for cheating when prize money is involved or when a runner wins his division or sets a record. In ‘89, despite Roodberg’s disqualification the year before, the written reports weren’t examined to see if he had actually run the race.

“We didn’t look for him,” Hickey said.

Roodberg’s performance last year “is probably a phony, too,” said Al Hromjak, former editor of the Seniors Track Club Newsletter. “He didn’t get caught (in ‘89) because nobody cares about an old man who comes across the finish line an hour after the first finisher. This year, and in ‘88, out of his own ignorance, he ran too fast and got noticed.”

Hromjak, who has offered to pay Roodberg $500 if he can repeat his 1990 L.A. Marathon performance on any TAC-certified course, is by no means alone in criticizing Roodberg. An editorial in the August issue of Running Times called him “a known fraud” and said: “There’s no way a person with no running credentials can suddenly come from nowhere and win a major race in world-class time.”

But aside from saying he is considering a lawsuit against Running Times, Roodberg remains undaunted. “The whole thing is kind of funny,” he said, “but if the marathon people don’t want to count my results, I accept that. What matters is what I know I did. I’ll just have to run L.A. again next year to prove it to everyone.”

But is Burke going to let him enter in 1991? “This is America,” Burke said, adding that L.A.’s marathon, as opposed to Boston’s, is open to everyone.

And contrary to what he reportedly wanted Boston to do, Burke said he would not shadow Roodberg with another runner in ’91. “I’m not in the detective business, and the way our judicial system works, just because a guy is guilty once,” Burke said, “he’s not guilty for life.”

Roodberg is cheered by the opportunity to clear his name next March. He said he will eliminate any possible confusion by making color photocopies of his race numbers and affixing the extra set to his ubiquitous blue T-shirt.

“This time,” he said, “they’ll see my numbers.”