Mike Rossi (DJ)

Mike Rossi (born May 1967) is a disc jockey and former television host who gained national notoriety in 2015 after qualifying for the Boston Marathon with a time that later came under heavy scrutiny, resulting in widespread accusations that he had cheated in his qualifying race.

Rossi was one of the dancers on the 1980s television show Dancin' On Air. In 1986, one of the hosts quit, and 36 hours later, Rossi became one of the co-hosts of the show at the age of 18. The show was canceled in 1987.

In 2015, Rossi ran in the Boston Marathon, and brought his wife and 9-year-old twins on the trip from their hometown of Abington, Pennsylvania. He subsequently received a form letter from his children's principal informing him that a family vacation was not an excusable reason for absence, and that the school days his children missed would be marked as unexcused. Rossi then wrote a response to the principal, which he never mailed, but did post on Facebook; the post went viral, and was shared over 15,000 times within one weekend.

After appearances on the Today show and Fox & Friends, controversy erupted over how Rossi qualified for the Boston Marathon. Rossi had submitted a qualifying time of 3:11 that he had supposedly run in the Lehigh Valley Health Network Via Marathon. The organizers of that marathon asked USA Track & Field for help in investigating cheating allegations, raised mostly by other runners who, in exploring Rossi's race history, noticed that a 3:11 marathon was inconsistent with all of Rossi’s other publicly available race results. In addition, there were no photos of Rossi anywhere on the Lehigh marathon race course except for at the finish line, while most other runners were seen in 10 or more pictures taken along the way by a company hired to take photographs of the runners.

The editors of LetsRun.com, one of the top five running-centric websites in the world, called the evidence "overwhelming" that "Rossi did not run the entire 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon." The organizers of the Via Marathon sent LetsRun a statement explaining why they could not disqualify Rossi's time, stating it was "simply because they received no reports of wrongdoing as the race took place." They also stated that "there is data from Rossi’s participation in other racing events indicating that Rossi’s time may not be accurate."

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