Women worldwide saw women racing not in the elite, inaccessible environment of a stadium track, but on regular city streets, passing stores and gas stations, schools and churches-all scenery that was familiar to everyday people, both women and men.
Front Row at the Women’s Running Revolution. What: When the Los Angeles Olympic Committee agreed to lobby for one (but only one) women’s distance event to be added to the Olympic program, they decided to push not for a track event like the 3,000 meters, but for the marathon. But until that year in Los Angeles, women had never raced 26.2 miles as Olympians. The Avon global circuit of women’s races had developed talent in places where women’s sports were not previously popular-such as Bolivia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Peru-and runners in these regions would soon flock to Los Angeles for the debut Olympic race.īefore 1984, there were championship races women could enter: Avon had held six global marathon championships since 19 European championships included a women’s marathon and the 1983 IAAF World Championships also hosted a marathon. America created the world’s first national women’s marathon championship in 1974. The New York City Marathon started accepting women officially in 1970, while Boston did in 1972. Samuelson, only days after knee surgery, could well have been a casualty of the competitive depth. The United States and other nations had held highly competitive trials for their teams for the first women’s Olympic marathon, scheduled for Los Angeles in 1984. Since 1970, the world record had been broken 17 times, coming down from 3:02:53 to 2:22:43 (the latter of which Samuelson set when she won Boston in 1983). 
When: By 1984, the pioneering work for women’s running had been done.
On the 35th anniversary of Samuelson’s historic win, we’re looking back on what pushed her to that Olympic finish line, paving a path for so many women after her. That was the moment when women's running worldwide moved from the margins to the mainstream.Īs with all such key moments in history, it was made seminal by a conjunction of factors: when, what, where, who.
Even more than a symbol, the message Samuelson gave as she moved from obscurity to acclaim triggered a transformation that 35 years later is still gaining momentum. The moment when Joan Benoit Samuelson emerged into the sunlight of the Los Angeles Olympic stadium was the perfect symbol for how far women’s running had come.
Joan Benoit Samuelson Aiming for Sub-3:00 in 2020.
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