The Inspiring History Of Women In The Boston Marathon

Step back in time with me, Luke Alfred, as we trace the footsteps of relentless women who dared to disrupt the Boston Marathon's status quo. 

Discover how Bobbi Gibb and Kathrine Switzer's audacious strides ignited a revolution in women's sports, transforming a mere footrace into a symbol of gender equality. Gibb’s surreptitious dash from the bushes in '66, clad in men's clothing, and Switzer's groundbreaking, yet contentious, run a year later, marked by an infamous altercation with race official Jock Semple, were not mere acts of defiance but pivotal events that reshaped the sporting world. 

Witness the emancipation narrative that ensues, echoing the indomitable spirit of Patriots' Day and connecting the marathon's revolutionary past with its egalitarian present.

Beyond the struggles and triumphs of these legendary women, we cast a spotlight on the mysterious JJ McDermott, the marathon's first victor whose life story is as elusive as it is fascinating. Plagued by rumors of racing with tuberculosis, McDermott's legacy is a blend of athletic prowess and enigma, with his death and final resting place remaining topics of speculation. 

Join me in celebrating these captivating tales from the Boston Marathon that not only exemplify the unyielding pursuit of equality but also serve as a testament to the human spirit's capacity for endurance and resilience. This is more than just a race; it's a narrative of heroes and history-makers that continue to inspire every runner that takes to the starting line.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

When she applied to run in the 1966 Boston Marathon, female athlete Bobbie Gibb had her application rejected by the race director because quote women are physiologically incapable of running marathons. This is the story of how a woman snuck into the Boston Marathon and proved all the men wrong. Welcome to the Luke Alfred Show. I have 30 years of experience on the front lines of sports journalism. Have 30 years of experience on the front lines of sports journalism, covering some of the biggest games in cricket, rugby, the FIFA World Cup and even the Olympic Games. Come and join me as we learn about some of the greatest sports stories you've never heard. I'm Luke Alfred, and welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:43

The Boston Marathon was first raced in 1897, a year after the first Olympic marathon in Athens, which makes it the oldest official marathon in the world. The US Olympic team at Athens in 1896 was managed by a Boston resident one, john Graham. Impressed by what he saw in Athens, graham was determined to start a marathon in his hometown. He did so with the help of a Boston businessman, herbert Houlton. The first winner of the inaugural Boston Marathon, held on April 19, 1897, was a runner from New York called John J McDermott, a lithographer by trade, mcdermott, or JJ as he was fondly known, was a pale, slightly built Irish-American who photographs show sometimes ran with a of 14 other male athletes, without an East African runner or oversized running shoe, sole or performance-enhancing drug in sight. From such humble 15-man beginnings, the Boston Marathon has grown and grown. It is now universally regarded as the eldest statesman of the world's six great marathons the others are London, new York, berlin, tokyo and Chicago and is the most well-known event of its kind in the world. From 1897 until 1968, the Boston Marathon was run on the 19th of April, which fell on Patriot's Day, a public holiday in the states of Massachusetts and Maine. From 1969 onwards, patriots Day was moved to the third Monday of the month of April and the day upon which the marathon was raced moved with it. It is now synonymous with the third Monday in April, and the third Monday in April has become synonymous with it.

Speaker 1: 2:47

Patriots Day commemorates the opening skirmishes of the American Revolution. The first of the standoffs took place on Lexington Green in 1775. Here, 70 armed settlers otherwise known as Minutemen so known because they were expected to be ready at a minute's notice engaged ten times that many British troops loyal to the then governor of Massachusetts. The governor was the recently appointed General Thomas Gage, and Gage's troops were on their way to Concord with the aim of destroying the settlers' armory, where they were engaged by the Minutemen. A battle at Concord followed the original skirmish on Lexington Green. So began the American Revolution. It lasted for seven years, from 1775 until 1782, and culminated in independence for the 13 colonies that had rebelled from Britain.

Speaker 1: 3:54

History has cast these adventures in a radiant light. We can also understand them, at least in the beginning, as the story of a group of uppity men drunk on ideas of liberation encountering a soldier keen to prove to the world that his generalship wasn't a mistake. So winds the story we like to call history. The Patriots' Day backdrop to the Boston Marathon means that the event has always been symbolically tied in one way or another to the idea of emancipation and therefore to freedom. This might be the narrative of emancipation from a colonial power, britain. It also relates and this is more of a contemporary idea to the emancipation of woman and the growing idea over the last 50 years of woman's equality with men in sport and other areas of life.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Take the story of Roberta or Bobby Gibb, when she was denied official entry to the race, with a scalding riposte to her entry form, questioning her capabilities on physiological grounds, she thought to hell with it. She was young and full of the idealism that allows the young to do brave and foolish things, and she raced in the 1966 Boston Marathon anyway. On the morning before the firing of the noon gun, gibb cajoled her mother into driving her as close to the start of the course as her mother dared, fearing that she would be nabbed by organisers or course officials. Gibb hid under a bush or in a thicket of bushes until it was time to start. When Gibb joined the race, she did so wearing her brother's Bermuda shorts. She wore running shoes that were too big for her because they were men's. We will return to Gibb's story shortly.

Speaker 1: 5:45

But a year later, one KV Switzer real name Kathy or Catherine Switzer a student at Syracuse University, entered the race. She filled out the entry forms with only her initials before her surname because she feared being turned away if she used her first name. Kathy KV was issued with an official number, 261, collected by her coach, who had dared her to run in the Boston Marathon in the first place. She ran in the race with her boyfriend, an All-American football player called Tom Miller. This was until the course director Jock Semple took it upon himself to try to forcibly remove her from the course because he believed it was no place for women. Many years later, in interview, switzer herself put women running in long-distance events at the time in some kind of historical perspective.

Speaker 2: 6:44

Quote Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers. And then he started clawing at me, starting to try to rip my numbers off and I was so surprised and he had the fiercest face of any guy I'd ever seen and out of control really.

Speaker 1: 6:58

Semple tried to rip Switzer's number off her sweatshirt and a scuffle ensued. Her boyfriend Miller, a beefy guy, pushed Semple out of the way. Other athletes also tried to protect her. Semple retired to lick his wounds on a nearby verge. While the group, including Switzer and her boyfriend, ran on in falling snow, a hush descended. According to Switzer, the press photographers now taunted her, after originally asking her to slow down so they could make sure their photographs were a sufficient quality to be used by their desks at the newspaper. They asked if she was a suffragette, as she tells it. She now realized that it was imperative she complete the race. Only on their way back home to Syracuse University later that night did the full import of what had happened during the afternoon sink in for her and her boyfriend. Stopping for ice cream and coffee at a diner, switzer and her boyfriend noticed the early editions of the following day's newspapers. They were in them, sometimes as front-page news, sometimes as back, with photographs and accompanying stories.

Speaker 1: 8:15

Switzer, the woman who had used only her initials to sneak into a male-dominated event via the back door, suddenly realized that her life had changed. She was now a national figure, while Semple, with his ruddy features and two large jacket lapels was the very caricature of an establishment figure. He was more he was a national villain. Running the previous year, gibb was photographed, but not nearly to the same extent. She wasn't attacked or in fact hindered in any way during her race. Men noticing a woman in their midst were supportive, if sometimes a little paternalistic. As she crested through the finished tape in the spring sunshine it looked as if she was hardly breaking sweat. The male-dominated Boston Athletic Association the organizers of the event noted in 1966 and in 1967 that the winds of change were blowing, but they weren't going to bow down before those winds before digging in.

Speaker 1: 9:23

It took until 1972 before women were officially allowed into the Boston Marathon, 75 years after the event started with 15 male athletes that April day, way back in 1897. The women's race in the 1972 Boston Marathon was won that year by Nina Cusick, a sporting polymath who also enjoyed speed skating and competitive cycling, in a time of three hours and ten minutes. The American journalist Janice Kaplan, writing more than a decade later, summed up the mixed feelings of Cusick's 1972 win as follows Quote those of us who knew about Cusick's win felt a surge of pride mixed with a tinge of embarrassment. Pride because Cusick's story proved that woman could run 26 miles after all Embarrassment, because her time of 3 hours and 10 minutes was more than 50 minutes slower than the best men's times. 50 minutes, that's an eternity in racing lingo. The obvious explanation was that woman had rarely run marathons before and lacked training and experience. An obvious explanation, but who really believed it? Change has been long and incremental. To recap, gibb ran in 1966, switzer the year after that. Women were only officially allowed to compete in the event in 1972 and they were only officially allowed to compete in the Olympic marathon in 1984. That's 18 years from Gibb running in a hooded top to disguise her femininity to Joan Benoit's Olympic gold in the women's marathon in Los Angeles in 1984.

Speaker 1: 11:20

Such liberation stories shouldn't blind us to official jiggery-pokery. The Wikipedia page on the Boston Marathon says that women were allowed to compete in the race in 1966. This of course refers to Gibb who, in an active disguise that sounds almost Old Testament-like, hid beneath a bush until she could sneak into the start without being noticed. As we now know, women weren't officially allowed into the race until six years later, so to claim that women first ran the race in 1966 looks more than just slightly disingenuous. Gibb ran unofficially in 1966, doing so without a race number and in outsized Bermuda shorts. Her father was so irritable with her that he refused to come and watch her. The Wikipedia entry, I'm sure you'll all agree, looks rather like the retroactive tweaking of history, and it looks pretty bad.

Speaker 1: 12:22

The Gibbs story began in 1964, two years before she actually ran the race, when she was taken to watch the marathon by her father, a chemistry professor. It made a profound impression upon her. She loved the sense of freedom the athletes experienced and she identified with the sense of purpose that running gave. She had found her calling. With the sense of purpose that running gave, she had found her calling. Quote I just fell in love with it. She said many years later. I found it very moving. All these people moved with such strength, courage, endurance and integrity. Something deep inside told me that I was going to run this race. This was what I was supposed to do. After leaving school, gibb became an art student in Boston. As a student, she wised up to the patriarchy. She chafed at the sanctioned hypocrisy which meant that her mother who she believed bought too squarely into the idea that a woman's place is in the home needed her father's approval to qualify for a credit card. Running suspended. All that it allowed Gibb to forget Quote.

Speaker 2: 13:34

It was completely outside the social norm for a woman to run, for a grown woman to run was unacceptable. It was completely outside the social norm. Women had a very restricted role in society. Women were not expected to have careers or to work outside the social norm. Women had a very restricted role in society. Women were not expected to have careers or to work outside the home.

Speaker 1: 13:50

A woman professional was looked at as kind of an oddity and I rebelled against that as a young athlete she had no role models, no models at all, no roadmap of the future. Yet she'd miraculously found her calling. She just knew that she wanted to run. In the months before she ran in the first of her three Boston marathons, she inherited her parents' VW camper van because they were on sabbatical in Britain. In it she fulfilled a long-standing dream and drove from east to west across America during summer vacation Quote. At night I would sleep out under the skies, and each day I would run in a different place, over the Berkshires, along the Mississippi River and across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide and down into California before jumping into the Pacific Ocean. All in one summer. That was my training for the 1966 Boston Marathon, she said.

Speaker 1: 15:17

With her training for the Boston Marathon of 1966, complete Gibb made an application to become one of the 540 athletes to officially enter the race. Her application was refused. Will Cloney, the race director who answered her application, told her that women were physiologically incapable of running a standard marathon. He added that under the rules of the American Athletics Union at the time, women were not allowed to run more than a mile and a half competitively. This seemed ridiculous to Gibb, as she'd been training significantly longer distances for months. Talking about Gibb and her application many years later, cloney made the following statement, quote Women can't run in the marathon because the rules forbid it. Unless we have rules, society will be in chaos. I don't make the rules, but I try to carry them out. We have no space in the marathon for any unauthorized person, even a man. If that girl were my daughter, I would spank her. If Cloney's refusal to allow Gibb to compete was meant to have a deterrent effect, it didn't work.

Speaker 1: 16:32

She returned from her cross-country vacation in her parents' camper van, determined to race in the Boston Marathon. After her mother had dropped her as close to the start as she dared, gibb waited until a significant group of runners had run off at the start before joining the race. Black and white photographs from the 1966 race show Gibb in baggy Bermudas and a dark swimming costume type top. As she approached the finishing line she had no race number. If we knew no better, we might think that she'd mistakenly wandered onto the course for half an hour's worth of innocent fun. The expressions on the faces of the onlookers and policemen are revealing. There's curiosity in people's eyes and a kind of vicarious pride in Gibb's moral courage. Judging from the spectator's expressions, very few people think that she shouldn't be where she so clearly is. If we listen carefully, we can almost hear them cheer Gibb on.

Speaker 3: 17:37

Quote Well, I always loved to run. It was an expression of my love of life and nature. I love Boston. I saw the Boston Marathon in 1964 and decided I wanted to run it. When I wrote for my application blank and they told me women weren't allowed so I had to enter by jumping in from behind the bush, which I did and ran the whole way. It was a very exciting, wonderful time.

Speaker 1: 18:10

Gibb raced again the following year, in 1967, the same year as Switzer used her initials rather than her first name to gain entry to the race.

Speaker 1: 18:20

While Switzer and her boyfriend attracted the headlines, reading editions of the newspapers that night on their way back to Syracuse, gibb beat Switzer by a full hour when five women, of which Gibb was one, raced in 1968. Gibb won again. There's been friction between Gibb and Switzer over the years, although, as far as I can ascertain, this has been more from Gibb in Switzer's direction than the other way round. Gibb has gone so far as to say quote Switzer was neither first nor official. She was in fact the second-placed woman in the second year of what is now called the Women's Pioneer Division of the Boston Marathon. The record shows that Gibb has also generally been more sympathetic to race director Semple. Shows that Gibb has also generally been more sympathetic to race director Semple, perhaps because, given that when she started the race without a number of 1966, she wasn't prevented from doing so by him. The photographs taken from the back of the flatbed truck in 1967 as he attempted to manhandle Switzer did not depict him in a flattering light. True. Gibb points out, however, that there were fears from race organizers at the time that if women were allowed to race, the AAU would sanction the organizers of the Boston Marathon and the entire event would be disbanded.

Speaker 1: 19:46

The idea of a marathon, and the Boston Marathon and the Big Five along with it, is, and of itself, culturally and historically interesting. The very notion of women running so far, for so long seems to tap some dire fears deep in the male psyche. Other Olympic events have been far more accessible to women for far longer. Women ran in the 100 metres and the 800 metres as far back as the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. They ran in the 200 metres for the first time in London in 1948 and the 400 metres for the first time in Tokyo in 1964. True distance events for women have taken longer to be enshrined in the Olympics. Women only ran the 1500 metres in the 1972 Munich Olympics for the first time, for example, and it wasn't until 1996 that the 5000 metres was on the women's Olympic event schedule for the first time, event schedule for the first time.

Speaker 1: 20:54

So the idea of women running distance events seems to cause the patriarchy a very specific, very acute pain. Why? What exactly is at stake? Is it because the marathon is a test of stamina and strength traditionally seen as male preserves? Or could it be that men have such an investment in sexualising the female body that the idea of women sweating, chafing, blistering, puking and running to the alfresco toilet in the bushes besides the road is simply too much for them? Are we simply dealing with a threat to male power, plain and simple? As Gibb Switzer and others went about doing it for themselves, it was a power they have made good use of. Gibb has become an evangelist for women in sport.

Speaker 2: 21:42

Quote Part of what I wanted to do is show that men and women can do things together and share all of life together.

Speaker 1: 21:49

Having become a passing celebrity in 1967, switzer campaigned successfully in the 1970s for the Women's Marathon to become an Olympic event. I love all these stories and I love all of the social and cultural history, but I'm fascinated most of all with JJ McDermott, the pint-sized winner of the very first Boston Marathon in 1897. So let's end back where we started at the beginning, completing a full circle of the rhetorical track. Very little is known about McDermott other than he was the inaugural event's first winner. What is known can't always be agreed upon.

Speaker 1: 22:32

Some sports historians and genealogists believe, for example, that McDermott was a consumptive. Consumption is another word for tuberculosis. He might have raced the Boston Marathon, therefore, in 1897, as a tubercular. Nobody is completely sure. They are also unsure of where he was buried and at what age he died, although it is commonly agreed that he died round about 1906. So there we have it A noble race full of sporting, social and cultural. History has some fascinatingly ambiguous beginnings, questions to which we can only guess the answers. If you enjoyed this episode of the Luke Alfred Show, please give me a five-star rating. As an independent creator, this podcast is made possible through your support.