On the day of the 1966 Boston Marathon, Bobbi Gibb hid in the bushes close to the starting line and waited for the gun. She wore her brother's Bermuda shorts and a blue hooded sweatshirt over her ponytail. She had applied to run and been turned down by letter. As Gibb has recounted it to Competitor, the letter said "This is an AAU Men's Division race only" and that women "are not physiologically able." Her reaction was "All the more reason to run it!" Once the field was moving she jumped in, and she finished in about 3 hours 21 minutes.
In the United States, women were first allowed to run marathons officially in 1972, when the AAU changed its rule. That year Boston took women as legal entrants for the first time. New York's women were official entrants too. The Olympics came last. The first Olympic women's marathon was run in Los Angeles in 1984. Before 1972, women in the United States, Britain and New Zealand ran the distance anyway.
Why were women kept out?
The idea that women were too fragile for long races has a documented starting point. At the 1928 Olympics, women ran the 800m. Newspapers reported athletes finishing in distress. According to World Athletics, only one runner collapsed afterwards. The public uproar was still enough to remove the women's 800m from the Olympic programme. It did not return until Rome in 1960.
In the United States the Amateur Athletic Union wrote the same caution into its rules. The Boston Globe reports that the AAU barred women from races longer than two miles. The cap moved over the years. Running USA records a later AAU committee raising the maximum distance for women from five miles to 10, with a separate start still required. A woman who wanted to race 26.2 miles had no sanctioned way to do it.
Gibb had trained for the distance. "I could run 30 miles at a stretch!" she said later. Every woman who finished a marathon disproved the fragility claim.
The first women to finish, in the early 1960s
Gibb was not the first woman to complete a marathon. The running history site RunYoung50 records Merry Lepper finishing a road marathon at Culver City, California, in December 1963 in 3:37:07. It calls her "the first woman in the USA to complete an organised road marathon."
The same source has two more from the following year. Dale Greig ran 3:27:25 on the Isle of Wight on 23 May 1964. Her time is often misrecorded as 3:27:45. In New Zealand, Millie Sampson ran 3:19:33 later that year.
Britain's Violet Piercy is often credited with a marathon in London in 1926. The historian Peter Lovesey doubts the date, the distance and the route. The date usually given, 3 October 1926, was a Sunday. In Lovesey's words, that was a day "when athletics simply didn't take place in the 1920s." Some reports put her run at about 20 miles.
Gibb and Switzer at Boston in 1966 and 1967
Gibb's 1966 run put her about 125th overall. Massachusetts Governor John A. Volpe met her at the finish. She ran in new youth size-6 shoes, because nobody yet made running shoes for women. Of that day she later said, "I saw that this moment was bigger than me."
In 1967 Kathrine Switzer tried the other route. She entered properly. She signed the form as "K.V. Switzer," the way she always signed her name, and paid the $3 fee. She was given bib number 261.
During the race, the race manager Jock Semple came after her. By Switzer's account he shouted, "Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!" Her coach, Arnie Briggs, told him, "Leave her alone, Jock. I've trained her, she's okay, leave her alone!" Her boyfriend, Tom Miller, was a former All-American football player and hammer thrower. He knocked Semple out of the way, and Switzer kept running. A reporter later told her she had finished in about four hours and 20 minutes.
The same afternoon, Gibb ran Boston again without a number. She finished in 3:27:17, roughly an hour ahead of Switzer. The registered woman was attacked on the course. The faster woman was not on the entry list at all. Gibb ran Boston a third time in 1968.
Boston's first official women's race, 1972
The 1972 race was the 76th Boston Marathon. It was the first in which women were legal entrants. Eight or nine women started, depending on which Globe account is counted.
Nina Kuscsik won in 3:10:26. She called the time "pretty lousy," because she was "used to doing the Marathon in 2:56." Officials reckoned her time would have placed her about 410th among the 1,081 men. Switzer came third in 3:29:51.
Six women sat down at the New York start
The 1972 rule came with a condition. The AAU declared that a "separate" race for women meant a start ten minutes before or after the men. At New York the women's gun was set for ten minutes before the men's. Ms. magazine called it a "separate but equal" solution.
Kuscsik and the race's founder, Fred Lebow, planned a way to embarrass the AAU. When the gun fired for the women's start, six women sat down on the road. They were Lynn Blackstone, Jane Muhrcke, Liz Franceschini, Pat Barrett, Cathy Miller and Kuscsik. Kuscsik held up a handwritten sign that read "The AAU is unfair." Once the press had its story, the six got up and started with the men ten minutes later.
The New York Times covered the protest. Shortly afterwards Kuscsik went to the AAU's convention with a lawsuit ready, and the separate-start rule was dropped. She described her method plainly. "I attended all the meetings of the AAU in person, and I learned how to file appropriate legislation." The Globe notes that she won the New York City Marathon that year too.
A women's marathon in West Germany
In Europe the push came from Ernst van Aaken in West Germany. Runner's World Germany calls him a visionary of women's equality in sport. The American runner Jacqueline Hansen ran his races at Waldniel. She writes that "he had been arguing the case for women since the fifties."
Van Aaken staged a women's marathon at Waldniel in 1973. Hansen describes it as West Germany's first. In 1974 he held the first international women's marathon there. From 1979 Hansen was among the runners lobbying for a women's marathon at the Olympics.
How women's races reached the IOC
Avon staged a women's marathon in Atlanta on Palm Sunday, 19 March 1978. Martha Cooksey won it. She was 23 and running her eighth marathon. Avon had hired Switzer to build its women's running program and oversee it.
The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1987 that Avon's circuit of women's races reached 30 countries within eight years. Switzer put the results in a report and took it to the International Olympic Committee.
In 1979 Tokyo held a women's marathon. "They closed the streets for 54 women!" the British runner Joyce Smith recalled. She ran 2:30:27 in Tokyo the following year.
On 23 February 1981 the IOC voted to include a women's marathon at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Five weeks later London held its first marathon, on 29 March 1981, with women in the field from the first edition. Smith won the women's race in a British record of 2:29:57.
The first Olympic women's marathon, Los Angeles 1984
On 5 August 1984, 50 women from 28 countries started on the track at Santa Monica College. Joan Benoit won in 2:24:52. She was a college coach from Maine. "This win is a triumph for women's athletics," she said afterwards.
Further back in the field, Gabriela Andersen-Schiess staggered round the stadium track dehydrated. She was 39. She finished 37th in 2:48:42. Joyce Smith was 11th in 2:32:48. "I ran in the Olympics when I was only two months short of being 47," she said.
Decades after Gibb came out of the bushes, the B.A.A. recognised her runs in 1966, 1967 and 1968 as official victories.
Further reading
- Roberta Gibb's profile at AIMS: her 1966 and 1967 runs and the B.A.A.'s later recognition.
- Bobbi Gibb's story, from Competitor via ESPN: the rejection letter, her outfit and her own words.
- Kathrine Switzer's account of the 1967 Boston Marathon: the entry, the bib and Semple's attack, told by Switzer.
- The Boston Globe on the women who opened the race: the AAU's two-mile limit and the 1972 field.
- The 1972 Boston Marathon in the Globe's archive: Kuscsik's win and the first legal women entrants.
- US Sport History on the AAU's 1972 rule: how women were let into marathons on a separate start.
- Ms. magazine on Nina Kuscsik: the New York sit-down and the lawsuit that ended the separate start.
- Running USA on Kuscsik and the Six Who Sat: the six names and the AAU's distance caps.
- World Athletics on Lina Radke and the 1928 800m: the race behind the fragility claim.
- Jacqueline Hansen on Waldniel and van Aaken: the German races and the Olympic campaign, from a runner who was there.
- Runner's World Germany on the Waldniel marathon: van Aaken and the 1973 race, in German.
- David Martin on the Avon project at AIMS: Atlanta 1978 and the IOC vote of 1981.
- The Christian Science Monitor on Switzer, 1987: how the Avon circuit grew and reached the IOC.
- Highgate Harriers on Joyce Smith: Tokyo, London and Los Angeles, from her club's archive.
- Athletics Weekly on the first London Marathon: the 1981 race and Smith's win.
- World Athletics on Joan Benoit in 1984: the first Olympic women's marathon.
- AIMS on the 1984 Olympic marathon field: the 50 starters and Andersen-Schiess's finish.
- Peter Lovesey on Violet Piercy: why her 1926 run is disputed.
- RunYoung50 on the early women marathoners: Lepper, Greig and Sampson.
