Some photographs transport us to other places, or rather moments back in time.One such photo is of a scene: A man mid-hunch, with a big grin, grabbing at a runner’s bib number while other runners scatter around them in shock. It looks planned, posed, theatrical, the kind of image you’d expect from a movie poster rather than an actual sporting event.But it was real; it was captured by a press photographer doing his job on an ordinary Patriots’ Day, and it ended up changing the future of an entire sport.But what makes this photo memorable isn’t what happened in that moment but what happened in the seconds right after it, and how a young woman’s decision to refuse to stop running at a marathon turned out to matter far more than anyone standing on that road in 1967 could have predicted.
Kathrine Switzer : The woman who dared to run the Boston Marathon when women were barred
In 1967, marathon running was considered entirely a men’s domain, surrounded by ideas about women’s bodies that had no real medical proof that they could be athletic enough to run marathons. Kathrine Switzer, then a 20-year-old Syracuse University student, described the thinking of that era in an interview with Sky Sports News, “The perceptions of women back when I was running were that you were going to get big legs, grow hair on your chest, your uterus was going to fall out.” She added that female athleticism itself was seen as socially unacceptable, since “it looked like they were working hard, they were sweating.”Switzer registered for the Boston Marathon under her initials, “K.V. Switzer” not to disguise her gender, she has said, but simply because that’s how she always signed her name. She slipped through unnoticed, and she was issued bib number 261.
She was tried to be removed nearly after 2 miles
Everything changed at nearly two miles in. A press truck slowed beside her, photographers suddenly pointed towards the ‘woman’ running, and moments later race co-director Jock Semple got off an officials’ bus and came after her.Switzer recalled the moment, saying, “This fierce face was right in my face, and he screamed at me and said: ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!'” As Semple tried to tear off her bib, her boyfriend at the time, college football player Tom Miller, shoulder-charged him out of the way, letting her keep running.
Photo via katherineswitzer.com
Switzer then became resolute, and her fear quickly turned into resolve. She told her coach, “I’m going to finish this race on my hands and knees if I have to,” reasoning that if she dropped out, “nobody’s going to believe women can do it.” She completed the marathon in 4 hours and 20 minutes, becoming the first woman to officially finish it with a registered bib.
What came after was nothing short of a miracle
It took another five years for that resolution to become a policy. According to Boston Athletic Association records, women were not permitted to officially enter the race until 1972, when eight women, including Switzer, participated and all eight finished. The following year, Semple and Switzer crossed paths again at the start line, and this time, he greeted her warmly instead of attacking her.Women now make up close to half of the modern Boston Marathon’s field, and according to RunRepeat’s 2019 State of Running report, women outnumbered men among American runners for the first time that year.