Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
and her brother’s shorts, but it wasn’t long before other runners realized she was a woman. She says they were supportive and friendly. And after she took off her sweatshirt, so were the crowds.
By the time she reached Wellesley College, the women’s university at roughly the halfway point of the course, the word had gotten out that a woman was running the Boston Marathon. Spectators were screaming and crying. “I felt as though I was setting them free,” she wrote.
When she finished the race, the governor of Massachusetts shook her hand. The story was reported internationally. “It changed the way men thought about women, and it changed the way women thought about themselves,” Gibb wrote. “It replaced an old false belief with a new reality.”
Gibb ran again in 1967. This time, there was a woman registered for the race. But it wasn’t her.
Like Bobbi Gibb, Kathrine Switzer had been told by someone that a woman couldn’t complete a marathon. In 1967, when she was a journalism student at Syracuse University, she registered for Boston using her initials, K.V. Switzer, and received bib number 261.
On race day, Switzer says, she didn’t try to disguise her appearance. Because of the weather, she was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants. But her hair wasn’t hidden and she says she was wearing makeup. What followed has been documented many times. A couple of miles into the marathon, a race official named Jock Semple discovered Switzer and tried to physically remove her from the course. Switzer says he screamed, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.”
Jock Semple was born in the slums of Glasgow in 1903. According to the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, he lived “in a crumbling, cold one-bedroom apartment” with his parents and two brothers and learned from a young age to “punch first and talk later.” Semple moved to the U.S. in 1921 and worked as a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia. After running the Boston Marathon, he moved to Massachusetts and began working in sports, as a trainer for Olympic athletes and a physical therapist for the Bruins and Celtics.
Eventually, he became the co-director of the Boston Marathon, a role he carried out very earnestly. An article in Sports Illustrated describes how Semple would physically and verbally attack anyone who didn’t seem to be taking the race seriously. He called them weirdos and screwballs. One year he tackled a runner wearing swimming fins and a snorkeling mask.
To Semple, Kathrine Switzer was not welcome in the Boston Marathon because she was breaking the rules. Women were not just discouraged from running Boston, they were banned from the marathon and other long-distance races by the Amateur Athletics Union.
Switzer was running alongside her boyfriend, an athlete named Tom Miller. After Semple grabbed Switzer’s sweatshirt, Miller knocked him out of the way. The incident was captured in photographs that were soon shared around the world and, eventually, in a Time-Life book called 100 Photos that Changed the World.
Switzer finished the race, crossing about an hour after Gibb, who had once again participated as a non-registered runner. But she wasn’t welcomed or congratulated at the finish line. She was disqualified from the event and expelled from the Amateur Athletics Union.
Switzer became an advocate for women’s running, won the New York City Marathon in 1974, launched a global running series for women, and wrote a book.
Semple is known for his attempt to physically remove Switzer from the course. But he was also a pioneer who was instrumental in changing the rules he once enforced. In 1972, he and other race officials opened the race to women. At the start line of the 1973 Boston Marathon, Semple and Switzer reconciled. A photo of them embracing appeared in the New York Times the following day. The two were friends for the next fifteen years until Semple died in 1988.
Bobbi Gibb was honored as the grand marshal of the 2016 Boston Marathon, fifty years after she was the first woman to cross the finish line.
In 1972, eight women registered and ran the Boston Marathon. None of them collapsed at the finish line.
CHAPTER 8
When you first glance at a picture of Bill Rodgers from the 1975 Boston Marathon, you might think he was an eccentric local runner hoping simply to finish, not an elite athlete competing for the podium. He’s wearing a t-shirt – legend says he pulled it out of a trash can – on which he has written with a felt-tip pen “Boston GBTC.” His bib number 14 is attached at a bit of an angle. He has on painter’s gloves that his brother bought for him from a hardware store in Hopkinton because his hands were cold. He’s sporting a headband that makes him look a bit like Wimbledon champion Bjorn Borg. He’s running in brand-new shoes – a cardinal sin among modern marathon runners – that were sent to him by Steve Prefontaine, samples from a relatively unknown shoe company called Nike. He’s not even wearing a watch.
Rodgers was a graduate student at Boston College and ran with the Greater Boston Track Club – that’s what the GBTC on his shirt represented. He failed to finish the 1973 Boston Marathon, dropping out on Heartbreak Hill. In frustration, he quit running for three months. In 1974, he ran Boston again and placed a respectable fourteenth in just over two hours and nineteen minutes. He won that fall’s Philadelphia Marathon, but in an even slower time.
No one thought of him as a future Boston champion. But a few weeks before the 1975 race, he captured a bronze medal at the world cross-country championships in Morocco. Rodgers later told Runner’s World that he felt “I can run with anyone now.”
Rodgers was also driven by a sense of local pride, saying he wanted the race to belong to a Bostonian. Eight miles into the marathon, he was racing side-by-side with Canadian Jerome Drayton.
“I remember someone yelling, ‘Go Canada!’” Rodgers told Runner’s World forty years later. “It really got me fired up, and I surged and I made my move. I think Jerome didn’t know who the heck I was, and he let me go.”
He ran the rest of the course alone. At the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, he stopped to tie his shoe. In the final few miles, he stopped four more times to drink water. Rodgers says he simply found it easier to gulp down fluids while he was standing still.
As he approached the finish, Rodgers was told by race official Jock Semple that he was going to break the course record. Rodgers says he was shocked. He finished in just under two hours and ten minutes, knocking almost ten minutes off his previous best time.
The 1975 race was historic for another reason. Bob Hall completed the course in a wheelchair, finishing in just under three hours. The milestone led to the creation of a wheelchair division.
Rodgers’ victory launched him into the upper echelon of distance runners. Over the next six years, he won sixteen of the twenty-five marathons he entered. He won New York four times in a row, from 1976 to 1979. He won Boston three more times, from 1978 to 1980. In 1978, he won twenty-seven of thirty races he entered.
Boston Billy became an endearing icon of endurance sports, an Olympian and record-breaker who had more in common with the everyday runner than the typical elite athlete. He talked often of his love of cheeseburgers. One of his victories in New York was run in a pair of newly acquired soccer shorts, because he forgot to pack his shorts for the race. He made marathon running seem more accessible and he inspired a generation of amateur runners, launching the first running boom.
Rodgers continued to run long after his competitive days were over. In 1996, he ran a sub-three-hour Boston at the age of 48. In 1999, he fell victim to dehydration and had to pull out. He was determined that would not be his last marathon. He joked to the Wall Street Journal in 2002, “I can’t have my last marathon in Boston be a DNF (did not finish). This is unacceptable.”
In 2009, sixty-one years old and having survived prostate cancer, Bill Rodgers ran Boston again and finished in just over four hours.
When Rodgers won his fourth Boston Marathon in 1980, he raised four fingers as he crossed the finish line. The historic win put him in exclusive company. Other than Clarence DeMar, only Gerard Côté of Canada had won four times (Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot of Kenya later joined