It Started At The Finish Line

Running pioneer KATHRINE SWITZER was the first woman to complete a marathon, despite being told women weren’t capable of competing. Now, 50 years later, she’s still a force of empowerment.

- Sophie Tedmanson

When Kathrine Switzer set out to run her first marathon she didn’t mean to start a revolution, she simply wanted to prove the boys wrong.

Switzer was a 20-year-old journalism student in 1967 and the first woman to join her university track and field running team. During training, her coach would entertain her with tales of running the Boston Marathon—one of the world’s most famous and prestigious long-distance races in the world. Back then, women were considered physically incapable of running 42 kilometres and were therefore not eligible to enter the marathon. Switzer was determined to change that.

It was snowing in April 1967 when Switzer lined up with her coach and then-boyfriend to start the Boston Marathon. While women were technically not allowed to enter, she had entered under her initials KV Switzer, but did not try to hide the fact that she was a woman: she wore lipstick and earrings. The marathon began well, but about five kilometres in, race manager Jock Semple famously leapt off a media bus monitoring the runners and lunged at Switzer, trying to rip the bib number 261 off her chest, and push her off the course. The images of Semple attacking the lone woman on the course went global, exposing the ugly sexism in sport and turning Switzer into an equality icon for female athletes.

Switzer later recalled the incident in her memoir, Marathon Woman: “A big man, a huge man with bared teeth, was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming: ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!’”