A Dam-Break Moment for Women in Olympics

When Joan Benoit Samuelson was born, in 1957, the longest race that women were allowed to compete in at any international sporting event was 800 meters—well under a mile—according to the international track-and-field federation’s rules.

Twenty-seven years later, the longest race was a marathon. Benoit Samuelson ran it in the Olympics and won gold, proving to the world all that women were capable of.

The women’s marathon had been left off the Olympic program for nearly a century because of rampant myths that running was dangerous for women. As I wrote in my recent book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, track organizations around the world once banned women from running long distances, citing questionable sports-medicine studies, which claimed that women couldn’t tolerate heat well, that extreme exertion would harm their reproductive organs, and that the activity would make them more masculine. Others simply believed that women didn’t have the endurance—even though, by the time Benoit Samuelson was a teenager, many had already proved they did.

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Still, adding a women’s marathon to the Olympics seemed nearly impossible. Before Benoit Samuelson’s race, men made up 78 percent of Olympians, and the Games’ longest running event for women was 1,500 meters. Women weren’t yet allowed to compete in other distance events. But women runners advocated for the marathon anyway, in a years-long campaign in which they organized races and teamed up with sports-science researchers to change the public perception of women runners. Kathrine Switzer, a runner and one of the campaign’s organizers, guessed that if the advocates had followed protocol, they would have had to wait decades for the marathon. Instead, it was added in 1984.

The magnitude of that success set a powerful precedent. In the years that followed, the Olympics opened up not just to women marathoners but to female athletes in all sports. When the modern Games began, women weren’t allowed to compete at all. Over the next roughly nine decades, 50 women’s events trickled in; men, meanwhile, earned nearly 100 new opportunities to show off their athleticism. But since the marathon was added, the number of total Summer Olympic events for women has nearly tripled, to 151 today, and the number of men’s events has stayed close to steady. Soon all new sports had to have female competitors. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the women’s marathon, the Olympics has finally achieved 50–50 gender parity.

Women had been running marathons for nearly a century before the Olympics allowed them in. At first they did so illicitly—including at the inaugural 1896 Olympic marathon, when one female racer completed the 26.2 mile course the day after the men. Seventy years later, when the young runner Bobbi Gibb applied for the Boston Marathon, she said the race director told her that she would not be “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles.” Gibb snuck in anyway, and beat three-quarters of the men. The next year, a race director tried to grab Switzer, who had registered with just her initials to disguise her gender and gotten an official race number, in an attempt to pull her out of the race. (He failed.) Even after the Boston Marathon created an official category for women in 1972, female runners continued to be treated as outliers rather than real marathoners. When Jacqueline Hansen showed up for Boston’s second women’s marathon, she told me, the women runners had to bring a doctor’s note declaring them fit to race; the men, meanwhile, just had to show up. Hansen went on to win that race and set multiple records for the fastest women’s-marathon time.

After these women’s achievements, the U.S. Olympic Committee proposed a women’s marathon to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for inclusion in the 1980 Games. The IOC rejected this, on the basis of its physical demands for women, cost, audience interest, and international appeal. So a group of mostly female marathoners founded the International Runners Committee to lobby for the inclusion of women’s distance races in the Games. They got funding from Nike and ran ads that portrayed the IOC as ostriches with heads in the sand, unwilling to see the truth about women’s athleticism. They teamed up with a cohort of doctors and researchers, who found that women can succeed as endurance runners. And Switzer helped organize international marathons in Atlanta, West Germany, and London.

They slowly earned the respect of competitive running’s male gatekeepers. In 1979, Grete Waitz of Norway won the New York City Marathon women’s race in 2:27:33—not only a women’s world record, but a time that would have earned her second place among the men in that year’s Chicago Marathon. Later that year, the international federation for track and field (now called World Athletics) sanctioned its first women’s marathon in Tokyo; 20 women finished in under three hours—what many consider the dividing mark between a casual runner and an elite one. After the race, the organization’s president declared, “The athletes running today, by careful preparation and gradual buildup, are therefore ready for the challenge which the summit of distance races presents.” When the IOC voted again on the women’s marathon in February 1981, the vote passed, with only one member, the Soviet Union, dissenting.

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Three years later, on August 5, 1984, Benoit Samuelson quickly took the Olympic marathon’s lead and held it. She crossed the finish line in the Los Angeles Coliseum in 2:24:52, mere months after undergoing knee surgery. “That was the game changer. When people saw it on television … they said, ‘Oh my God, women can do anything,’” Switzer told me. Benoit Samuelson became a superstar overnight. “The neighbors didn’t know her from Adam and Eve before, but when we got home, they were lined up for autographs,” Hansen, a friend of Benoit Samuelson’s, said.

After this, the argument that women didn’t belong in running—whether because of physical incapability, potential harm, or lack of interest—began to collapse. The very next games, the IOC added a 10,000-meter race. In 1996, the 5,000-meter race replaced the 3,000-meter one. A few differences did linger. The women’s program didn’t include the 3,000-meter steeplechase, an obstacle race, until 2008. And this is the first year that men and women are competing in the same number of track-and-field events, after the IOC cut the men’s 50-kilometer race walk. Four decades after women runners demanded equal space for themselves—and for other female athletes—in the Olympics, they’re finally starting to get it.