There are many differences between Sunday’s London marathon and the one run in Boston, Massachusetts last Monday, not least the weather. While Boston’s runners struggled in wintry conditions, London’s race is predicted to be the hottest since the event began in 1981. Hopes that the Kenyan favourite, Eliud Kipchoge […]
But perhaps the most symbolic difference between the two races is also the most subtle. There was no runner wearing No 261 at Boston on Monday. The reason? Ask the person wearing that number at London.
Kathrine Switzer, 71, may not be a name familiar to the wider UK public, but among the running community she is considered marathon royalty.
For it was Switzer who in 1967 became the first woman to run Boston as a registered entrant. It seems extraordinary today, but 50 years ago women were not allowed to compete in the world’s oldest annual marathon.
True, some had run the race unofficially before, but Switzer’s participation was to change everything, even if she did not realise its significance when, wearing an official bib, No 261, she lined up surrounded by hundreds of men for the start of the race.
“I had no intention of making history that day,” she said. “I was a kid who wanted to run. I signed up to the race. I signed my name K Switzer – I’d done it since I was 12 – and they thought I was a guy. I wasn’t trying to defraud them but my coach insisted that I officially sign up. He said: ‘You don’t mess around with Boston, you don’t just jump in the race.’ Other women had run marathons, and even one at Boston the year before, but not officially. We checked the rule book. Nothing in the rule book about it being for men only. It was only a tradition. They just assumed a woman couldn’t or wouldn’t want to run. Even on the entry form there was nothing about gender.”
What happened next has entered the annals of marathon history. Four miles into the race, an official, Jock Semple, attempted to grab Switzer, yelling, “get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers”.
Switzer remembers the moment graphically. “My coach was screaming at him, saying ‘She’s OK, leave her alone, I’ve trained her’, but he [Semple] was tired, and he was a man of his time. He didn’t think women should be there.”
Switzer’s boyfriend Tom Miller, a 17-stone ex-All American football player, who was also running the race, bodychecked Semple, knocking him into the air, a moment caught in photographs that went around the world. Switzer went on to finish in 4 hours 20 minutes, almost an hour after the first unregistered woman to finish, Bobbi Gibb.
