Tales from a terrific run

A zoned-in runner misreads the course and stumbles in midstride or falls. The latter happened to Bill Rodgers in the 1980 New York City Marathon when he fell over Dick Beardsley, who had tripped in a pothole, and finished fifth. Rodgers had won New York the four previous years.

 A lot of memorable moments have happened over the course of the New York City Marathon’s 42 years. There have been close races, tumbles by top runners, wrong turns, a short course and even a dust cloud that obscured the top men as they neared the finish. Perceived social injustice prompted a sit-in at the 1972 race. The Amateur Athletic Union, then the governing body for marathoning in the United States, thought that women should not run more than 10 miles. The AAU also thought that women should start at a different place or time from the men in a marathon. In New York in 1972, that was to be 10 minutes before the men.

To protest, the six women who officially started the race sat down on their starting line, with a few other women, for 10 minutes, then started with the men. As a penalty, 10 minutes were added to their times.

Nina Kucsik, who won the 1972 race and fought for years for women’s equality in athletics, says she helped organise the protest along with the race director, Fred Lebow. “He ran just a little bit of the race and didn’t finish just to support us,” Kucsik said. “It made a huge difference because it happened in New York. After that, the AAU allowed women to run with men.”

In a twist, in 2003, New York became the first major marathon in the US to start women ahead of men by 35 minutes to better showcase their race.

By the time Joan Benoit Samuelson made her New York City Marathon debut in 1988, marathoning had become popular among women, in large part because of Samuelson’s success. She won the Boston Marathon in 1979 and the 1984 Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. After winning the Chicago Marathon in 1985, injuries and the birth of a daughter sidelined Samuelson from competition until New York in 1988, where she was set to duel the eight-time winner Grete Waitz, who finished second in Los Angeles.

Samuelson and Waitz ran together through the halfway point. Samuelson was still contending at Mile 21, until she fell after colliding with a child trying to give water to another runner.

“It caught me totally off guard,” Samuelson said. “If I had seen it coming, I would have broken every bone in my body. I wouldn’t call in a memorable moment. I’d just as soon forget it.”

Samuelson finished third, four minutes behind Waitz, and has never won New York. She has run it a few other times, but only one other time in her prime, finishing sixth in 1991. Unlike Samuelson, Alberto Salazar had repeated success in New York, winning from 1980 to 1982. He was involved in two unusual outcomes. In 1981, he predicted he would become the first American to run the distance in less than 2:09. He did, finishing in 2:08:13, a world record by 20 seconds.

But new measurement guidelines for marathon courses established in 1982 determined that the 1981 course was short by about 150 yards, based on measuring the shortest path covered from start to finish. It was not until early 1985 that Salazar discovered that his world record was wiped out.

“There’s no doubt I ran the world record,” Salazar said. “I ran it according to the standards. They measure it now as a prudent path that a runner would take. But what’s the most prudent path? It might be two yards out from a turn because of a gutter.”

In addition to close finishes, there have also been long ones record-wise. Bob Wieland, a Vietnam veteran who had lost both legs to an exploding mine in 1969, competed in the 1986 and 1987 marathons propelling himself with his arms. He finished the 1986 race in 98:48:17, but his time would have been quicker if Lebow had not asked him to pull off the course and sleep overnight in a hotel with about two miles to go so he could finish in the late morning in front of a few hundred people to better promote his achievement. Lebow called it a world record for slow marathon.

Taking only occasional naps, Wieland finished the 1987 New York City Marathon in a little more than 81 hours, probably a world record for improvement. He started a few days ahead of the lead runners and finished at about noon on race day. Wieland remembers being clueless about why the crowds had assembled at the finish. “I thought there was a tragedy, or a disaster going on in New York,” he said.

Far from it. It was just another grand moment in New York City Marathon history.