Did Mexico politician stray the course during marathon?

MEXICO CITY — Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo disappeared midway through the Berlin Marathon on Sunday before reappearing nine miles later, winning first in his age group and shaving an hour off his personal record.

Race organizers brag the course is fast; a world record was set Sunday.

But rather than applaud Madrazo's victory in the men's 55-and-over category with a time of 2 hours, 40 minutes, 57 seconds, the Reforma newspaper is dredging up suspicions that have dogged Madrazo his entire career: Could he have cheated?

Madrazo finished third in the 2006 election, largely because voters questioned how he acquired mansions, Florida real estate and luxury cars during a lifetime of filling elected offices with the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

Many Mexicans are questioning how Madrazo, a veteran marathoner, could have cut his best time on the 26.2-mile race by about an hour without cheating.

Runners carried a computer microchip that recorded their times at race stations located every five kilometers along the course.

Madrazo ran his first 20 kilometers, taking him to the marathon's halfway mark, in a respectable 1:42:42. He was on track to beat his best times this year — 3 hours, 39 minutes at the London marathon, and 3:44 in San Diego. Not bad for a guy who turned 55 in July.

But he must have slipped into a Berlin Triangle somewhere along Potsdamer Strasse. There's no record, according to German race officials, of him passing the 25- or 30-kilometer stations, leaving 15 kilometers of the race with no record of his passing.

"The System Fell, Madrazo Wins," blared Thursday's front-page headline in Reforma, echoing a rallying cry from the 1988 presidential election that the PRI is believed to have won by fraud. In that election, opposition politician Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was leading Carlos Salinas, the candidate from Madrazo's then-ruling party, when government officials declared the national computerized vote counting system was malfunctioning. They closed off access to the vote counting to opposition party representatives. A week later, Salinas was declared the winner.

The arithmetic in Madrazo's case is much simpler than tallying a national election. He ran each five-kilometer segment on record in an average of about 25 minutes, according to computerized timers, compared with about 14 minutes run by race winner Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia.

But between kilometers 20 and 35, those missing from the race's computer record, Madrazo appeared to run every five kilometers in 11 minutes, faster than the 34-year-old Ethiopian winner who set a world record for a marathon of 2:04:26.

When Madrazo was recorded passing kilometer 35, he was close to the front of the pack. A video at the finish line shows Madrazo with arms held out wide as he glides to victory in his age group. He was 146th out of more 40,000 runners.

A Madrazo spokeswoman denied any irregularities in the race. "It's absurd to think you can manipulate a marathon race as important as the Berlin Marathon," Addy Garcia said.