Sign up for notifications to the most recent Insight options through the BBC Sport app and discover the newest within the series.
“Women are usually not physiologically able to operating a marathon.”
Those 9 phrases leapt off the paper like a slap to the face. “The audacity,” thought Roberta ‘Bobbi’ Gibb.
The letter she held was the response to her request for an official entry to run the 1966 Boston Marathon – a flat-out refusal, but in addition a derogatory sideswipe of her capabilities as a girl, significantly given she was now operating as much as 40 miles at a stretch.
The Nineteen Sixties have been mid-swing, however attitudes in direction of feminine athletes and their participation in long-distance operating remained archaic. The query of whether or not ladies might run 26.2 miles had been answered numerous occasions earlier than, and but feminine runners remained barred from virtually each marathon occasion around the globe.
“To hell with them,” she thought as she crumpled the letter and threw it on the ground. Bobbi Gibb would run the Boston Marathon – whether or not they’d let her or not.
Ask Google who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon and you will find the title, Kathrine Switzer, together with a picture exhibiting a group of males chasing and manhandling a girl with the quantity 261 pinned to her midriff.
It is a surprising picture that simply matches a narrative of embedded misogyny, however this isn’t the actual story of the primary girl to run the world’s oldest continually-staged marathon. The reality, as so usually, is much from black and white.
Growing up within the suburbs of Boston, Gibb was at all times an lively baby with a sense of awe and a love of nature.
“My mom used to say to me that you just’re by no means going to seek out a husband whereas operating round within the woods with the neighbourhood canines,” says Gibb.
For all the numerous adjustments that occurred throughout the Nineteen Sixties, it was nonetheless a time of inflexible social constructs.
“After the struggle, individuals have been simply completely happy to return to normality – and regular meant the little ladies within the kitchen, washing the dishes, with the great curtains. There have been centuries of well-established beliefs about ladies,” stated Gibb.
“I checked out my mom’s life and people of her associates; they have been such slender lives – you could not even get a bank card with out your husband’s permission.”
Gibb knew she wished one thing totally different, however like many rising up with idealistic goals of nice change, the pathway to it was labyrinthine.
“I wished to vary the social consciousness about ladies from a very early age, however I did not know find out how to do it – at first.”
Despite residing near the Boston Marathon route, Gibb had by no means attended a race till her father took her in 1964. The impact was instant and profound.
“I simply fell in love with it – I discovered it very shifting. All these individuals moved with such energy, braveness, endurance and integrity. Something deep inside instructed me that I used to be going to run this race – this was what I used to be presupposed to do.”
In the mid-Nineteen Sixties, ladies’s long-distance operating was nonetheless thought-about dangerously radical. Female runners had accomplished 26.2 miles many occasions, however groundless concepts lingered that a girl’s physique was not constructed for such excessive exertion. It was feared that permitting ladies to tackle the space would result in harmful ranges of indecency.
“Running was thought-about a breeding floor for impropriety that might overly sexualise ladies,” stated Jaime Schultz, Professor in Kinesiology at Penn State University.
Names that ought to be etched on plaques as nice marathon pioneers at the moment are virtually misplaced. The day after the boys’s marathon occasion on the first trendy Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, Stamata Revithi, a 30-year-old mother from Piraeus, ran the same course unofficially in five and half hours.
Practically no dependable info exists on Revithi, besides that she got here from poverty, had a 17-month-old baby and had misplaced an older baby the earlier yr. Her achievement acquired little to no consideration, with the Athens Messenger reporting briefly that “an lively and decided girl made a trial run of the basic route in early March, with none stops besides a momentarily relaxation to eat some oranges.”
Nothing is understood about this trailblazing girl, usually labelled because the ‘first feminine marathon runner’ after that day. As Greek creator Athanasios Tarasouleas places it: “Stamata Revithi was misplaced within the mud of historical past.”
Thirty years later, in 1926, an English girl, Violet Piercy, ran the London Marathon course unofficially in 3:40:22 and accomplished two official marathons in 1933 and 1936. The Sunday Mirror quoted her as saying her 1936 race was to “prove that women could stick the distance.”
It was clear to all with their eyes open that ladies might run 26.2 miles, however cynical attitudes lingered based mostly on imaginary proof and infrequently outright lies.
The 1928 Summer Olympic Games noticed ladies compete in monitor and subject occasions for the primary time, and on 2 August three of the 9 ladies who ran within the 800m remaining broke the world report, with Germany’s Lina Radke claiming gold.
However, what ought to have been a big stride ahead for girls’s athletics degenerated into a remarkably nasty media campaign wherein newspapers worldwide reported incorrectly that many ladies had collapsed with exhaustion after the race and that such exploits have been far past the feminine intercourse.
The New York Times falsely reported that “six out of the 9 runners have been utterly exhausted and fell headlong on the bottom”, whereas the Montreal Star shrieked that the race was “clearly past ladies’s powers of endurance and might solely be injurious to them”. The Daily Mail even contemplated whether or not ladies operating over 200 metres would age prematurely.
The media firestorm led officers to chop the 800 metres from the ladies’s Olympics, with the occasion not showing once more till 1960. Women’s perceived fragility was underpinned by some preposterous medical theories that wound their approach into the general public consciousness.
“There have been fears that ladies would grow to be extra ‘masculine’ in the event that they performed sports activities and that that they had a finite quantity of vitality. If they expended it on schooling, politics and sport, it will draw away from their reproductive capabilities,” stated Schultz.
Gibb began quietly coaching for the Boston Marathon in 1964, usually utilizing the Middlesex Fells Reservation close to her house to run away from judgmental eyes.
“I did not know what to do. I did not have a coach, no books, nothing. I did not have any approach of measuring distance, so I simply glided by time. My boyfriend would drop me off on his bike and I’d run house,” says Gibb.
In 1964, her dad and mom went on sabbatical to the UK, leaving 21-year-old Gibb their VW campervan. With a summer time forward of her and a longstanding dream of seeing extra of the nation, she packed up the van and spent the following 40 days shifting slowly from the east to the west coast.
“At evening, I’d sleep out underneath the skies, and every day I’d run in a totally different place. Over the Berkshires, alongside the Mississippi River and throughout the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide, and down into California – earlier than leaping into the Pacific Ocean – multi function summer time. That was my coaching for the 1966 Boston Marathon,” says Gibb.
A number of months earlier than the marathon, she utilized for a runner’s quantity to be one of many 540 that might ultimately begin the race, however was rejected with the now famously curt evaluation of girls’s physiological capabilities.
“I realised that this was my probability to vary the social consciousness about ladies. If I might show this false perception about ladies mistaken, I might throw into query all the opposite false beliefs that had been used to disclaim ladies alternatives,” says Gibb.
Four days earlier than the race, she boarded the primary of a number of Greyhound buses and arrived on the household house 72 hours later.
Her mom drove her to the beginning line the morning of the race that might catapult her into the limelight.
“My dad thought I used to be nuts and refused to come back. I used to be carrying my brother’s Bermuda shorts, a swimsuit beneath, and a huge sweatshirt with a hood that I pulled round my head,” says Gibb.
After operating a few warm-up miles she returned to the beginning space, the place she did her greatest to cover by creeping into a set of bushes close by.
When the beginning pistol cracked, Gibb loitered, permitting the quicker runners to maneuver down the highway earlier than becoming a member of the shifting crowd.
“Very rapidly, the boys behind me might inform that I used to be a girl – in all probability by learning my anatomy from the rear,” says Gibb. “I used to be so nervous. I did not know what would occur. I believed I’d even be arrested.”
Her fears have been unfounded. Instead of hostility, camaraderie rapidly flourished. When it turned clear she wanted to take off her sweatshirt or endure the warmth in it, she expressed her fears of being ejected from the race to the boys round her. “We will not allow them to,” got here their unified assurance.
“There was this fable that males have been at all times in opposition to ladies, however it wasn’t true. Those guys have been nice, upbeat, pleasant and protecting; they have been like my brothers,” says Gibb.
Buoyed by the companionship, Gibb eliminated her outer layer and ran freely and proudly – her blonde ponytail swinging backward and forward. Spectators lining the road – males, ladies and kids – applauded her as she handed, with information of her participation spreading alongside the course through radio bulletins.
As she approached Wellesley College, a ladies’s college on the route, pandemonium erupted. The momentous occasion was described 30 years later by Wellesley College President Diana Chapman Walsh, who was present as a student spectator that day.
“Word unfold to all of us lining the route that a girl was operating the course,” she stated.
“We scanned face after face in breathless anticipation till, simply forward of her, by way of the excited crowd, a ripple of recognition shot by way of the strains, and we cheered as we by no means had earlier than.
“We set free a roar that day, sensing that this girl had carried out extra than simply break the gender barrier in a well-known race.”
“The ladies have been crying and leaping up and down. One stored shouting ‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria’. It was an emotional second for me,” says Gibb.
Gibb was not solely blazing a path, she was doing it rapidly. She ran the primary 20 miles at a sub-three hour tempo, however along with her newly-bought males’s trainers reducing into her toes, her pace started to drop.
Her race had modified. Anxiety over being pulled out by officers was now changed by that feeling all too acquainted to any long-distance runner – painful willpower and a eager for the end line.
As she made her approach by way of Boston, spurred on by the super noise that accompanied her, Gibb nonetheless had no thought how shut she was to the tip.
“I did not know the place I used to be or how far I had left – I simply gritted my tooth and ran,” says Gibb.
Turning proper on to Hereford Street, the noise appeared to ratchet up, and a remaining left on to Boylston Street revealed the end line that she had been dreaming of for thus lengthy.
Gibb accomplished her first Boston Marathon in a powerful three hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds – quicker than two-thirds of the opponents.
A now iconic picture exhibits her operating alone, her face grimacing as she nears the end line. On either side, spectators crane their necks, ignoring different runners passing by, determined to glimpse the primary feminine ending the storied race.
Crossing the road, she was greeted warmly by Massachusetts State Governor John Volpe, who shook her hand and provided his congratulations earlier than being ushered into a resort room the place the world’s press waited breathlessly.
After the interviews, the group of males she had been operating with invited her to affix them for the standard post-race stew, however as they reached the door, Gibb was barred from entry: “Sorry, males solely.”
It had been a day of dramatic change, however any notion of true equality was nonetheless a distant dream.
Gibb ran the Boston Marathon twice extra. In 1967, she was joined by Switzer, the runner usually portrayed as the primary girl to run the race, who she beat by greater than an hour. The following yr, 5 ladies ran the Boston Marathon, with Gibb profitable as soon as once more.
For a few years, Switzer’s participation within the 1967 race overshadowed Gibb’s achievement, a incontrovertible fact that by no means sat nicely with the true first girl to run the Boston Marathon. The well-known picture of Switzer turned emblematic of girls’s struggles to achieve equality in sport, however it’s a picture and a context that deserves cautious examination.
It seems to indicate Switzer being harassed by a group of males as she runs, however actually, it was just one man, race co-director Jock Semple, who was attempting to take away her race quantity moderately than bodily assault her, as is commonly reported.
“She had gained her quantity illegally by disguising her gender on the applying and having her male coach choose it up,” says Gibb, who ran with out a quantity or official entry as soon as once more.
Switzer, for her part, has at all times claimed that she by no means deliberately pretended to be something apart from a girl, and that utilizing her initials, moderately than first title, on the entry type was her regular behavior.
She provides that her male coach picked up her race quantity because the nominated chief of the group, moderately than a part of a deliberate ploy.
Gibb says she had some sympathy for Semple, who she believes was motivated by preserving his race’s standing, moderately than outdated social norms.
“Jock was merely frightened that the race might lose its accreditation with the Amateur Athletic Union by having ladies run in a males’s division race.”
Unsurprisingly, it was the picture of Switzer that made the headlines, fuelling anger and controversy, regardless of Gibb as soon as once more receiving a heat welcome.
“I stood overtly at first line in 1967. Nobody tried to take away me, there was no bother. All the boys have been nice – even Jock Semple,” stated Gibb.
But it was Switzer’s story, becoming a narrative of antagonism and confrontation, that chimed with the Nineteen Sixties zeitgeist, moderately than Gibb’s.
Over the next a long time, that picture turned incorrectly woven into the story of the primary girl to run the Boston Marathon.
However, Gibb’s stance is obvious.
“Switzer was neither first, nor official. She was, actually, the second-place girl within the second yr of what’s now referred to as the ladies’s pioneer division Boston Marathon,” says Gibb.
Though it would not be till 1972 that ladies got numbers and allowed official entry, the pioneers had lit a fuse.
“It modified how individuals thought of ladies operating,” says Gibb.
In 1973, the primary all-women’s marathon was held in Waldniel, West Germany, however because the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow got here and went, nonetheless with out a feminine marathon occasion, endurance was carrying skinny.
Especially for the reason that American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) appeared to have put the matter of medical proof in opposition to ladies operating lengthy distances firmly to mattress with a assertion in January 1980.
“There exists no conclusive scientific or medical proof that long-distance operating is contraindicated for the wholesome, skilled feminine athlete,” it learn.
“The ACSM recommends that females be allowed to compete on the nationwide and worldwide degree in the identical distances wherein their male counterparts compete.”
The following yr, when the International Olympic Committee met in Baden-Baden, Germany, a vote handed that meant that on the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, a feminine marathon occasion was included – and has been ever since.
The impact this has had on ladies’s marathon operating has been dramatic. In the final 60 years, the ladies’s world report for 26.2 miles has plummeted by an astonishing one hour and 23 minutes. As a comparability, the boys’s report has dropped by solely 54 minutes within the final 115 years.
Gibb continued operating every day, however her life moved in a totally different route. She had helped redefine attitudes in direction of feminine operating, however that was only one chapter in a life that has been splendidly different.
“After that, I wished to problem every little thing – hold the ball rolling,” says Gibb.
In 1969 she graduated from the University of California with a premedical curriculum main in philosophy and minor in arithmetic.
She wished to go to medical faculty however, like in Boston, it was arduous for a girl to get a place. In one interview she was instructed she was “too fairly” and “would distract the boys within the lab”.
Instead, she started working in epistemology and neuroscience on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whereas taking regulation courses within the night.
In 1976 she based the Institute for the Study of Natural Systems, a non-profit academic and analysis group, and handed the bar two years later.
She practised regulation for 18 years earlier than shifting again to scientific analysis, this time in mobile molecular biology specializing in neurodegenerative illnesses.
She can be a effective artwork sculptor and up to date painter, and has written a number of books, together with her memoir Wind within the Fire.
Her operating exploits proceed to encourage. In 1996, Gibb was lastly recognised as an official three-time winner, receiving her medals whereas additionally having her title inscribed on the Boston Marathon Memorial in Copley Square.
In 2016, 50 years after that momentous race, Ethiopia’s Atsede Bayisa introduced Gibb along with her Boston Marathon winner’s trophy after studying of the occasions of 1966.
“Each yr, they have a good time me as a three-time winner, which is enjoyable, however the principle factor is I get to fulfill all these superb individuals from everywhere in the world, all social teams, all ethnic teams, races, genders – we love one another – we make associates,” says Gibb.
A runner, scientist, lawyer, artist, and creator – Bobbi Gibb has carried out all of it and continues to advertise a constructive message concerning equality.
“One of my functions was to finish the silly struggle between the sexes, the place males needed to dwell on this little field and ladies needed to dwell in one other little field,” says Gibb.
“I’m at all times combating in opposition to false messages. The reality units us free. Back then, males weren’t allowed to have emotions and ladies weren’t allowed to have a mind. What if a man desires to knit? Is he any much less of a man? No. What if a girl desires to drive a truck? Is she any much less of a girl? No.
“All individuals may be who they need to be.”
