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City marathons: When the city dwellers learned to walk – how it all began

2022-04-24T10:21:41.406Z


Hamburg and Berlin, New York, London and Tokyo: almost every cosmopolitan city can afford this major event – ​​marathons have long been both extreme and popular sports. It all started very small, 125 years ago in Athens and Boston.


When Spyridon »Spyros« Louis entered the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens on April 10, 1896, the 40,000 spectators couldn't keep their seats.

Even the Greek Prince George and later King Constantine were infected by the enthusiasm and ran the last lap to the finish line alongside the young soldier.

The crowd went wild.

A few weeks earlier, Louis, 23, had no idea that he would have such a short and glorious career as a long-distance runner – he ran once and never again.

With the still respectable time of 2 hours and 58 minutes for the 40 kilometers from Marathon to Athens, he won the first Olympic victory in marathon running, albeit not a gold medal, because that didn't exist in 1896.

His recipe for success: sufficient liquid intake (supposedly also brandy in addition to wine) and small calorie intake (sheep cheese).

It was also helpful that he actually ran the entire route and didn't get caught driving parts of it in a carriage – like his competitor Spyridon Belokas, who was disqualified as a result.

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125 Years of the Modern Olympic Games: When Olympia's Fire RekindledBy Danny Kringiel

It came as no surprise that a Greek would win this toughest competition of the first modern Olympic Games: 13 of the 17 runners were Greeks, in the end they occupied seven of the first eight places.

After all, they were real amateurs.

Private Louis had noticed his superiors as a tough runner and had been ordered to run the marathon.

The race was only invented for the Olympic Games - an idea that was as romantic as it was advertising, which was supposed to enhance the sporting event with alleged history.

"Marathon" was reminiscent of the mythical-legendary run of Pheidippides, which allegedly took place 2,200 years earlier.

Like Louis, this ancient runner was also a soldier and is said to have brought news of the victory over the Persians to the city of Athens.

A PR campaign becomes the initial spark

The history-packed PR stunt was a complete success: the world had discovered a new sport that excited the masses.

Among the witnesses was John Graham, manager and coach of the US First Olympic Team and a member of the Boston Athletic Association (BAA).

Upon his return, Graham reported on the first marathon competition.

His idea: how about organizing a marathon as a city run?

40 kilometers criss-crossing a big city: That meant a lot of spectators without much effort!

Sounds good, officials thought, and Graham set about organizing with the help of businessman Herbert H. Holton.

On April 19, 1897, the time had come: 18 men started the first city marathon and thus established a tradition that nobody could have imagined would one day become a global trend - albeit much later.

Measured by the standards of the time, this first city marathon was already a huge event: all the Boston newspapers and numerous other reporters sent from all over the country witnessed the “crowds” of spectators.

Their number could hardly be counted, because the spectators weren't the only ones who created a good atmosphere along the running route.

Many also followed the runners, on foot and on horseback, in carriages and in electric cars, which were far more popular and common than petrol ones at the time.

From the finish of winner John J. McDermott, it was reported that law enforcement was struggling to keep all traffic out - especially since the route was by no means completely cordoned off.

Runners and their entourage made their way through the normal traffic of Boston over long distances.

The race ended at the Irvington Street Oval, an outdoor sports facility probably around 200 meters in diameter;

How exactly it looked and where exactly it was is not known.

A few years later it was apparently built over.

The world starts to run

Not only in Boston did the first Olympic race arouse »marathon mania«.

Other countries tried it after the Olympic experience with long-distance running.

The German premiere took place in Leipzig on September 5, 1897: 18 runners (eight more had ducked before the start) dared to run the “distance run over 40 km”.

The audience was "numerous," reported the "Leipziger Latest News."

The people watched the spectacle "unprecedented in Leipzig" and gave a "lively welcome" to the 13 runners who made it to the finish.

The following year the event was already called a marathon – the new running distance was on the way from being a curiosity to becoming an established sport.

When Chicago followed Boston's example in 1905 and held its first marathon, a good 100,000 people lined the streets to see "the toughest of all athletes" (New York Times) in action.

From 1911, it wasn’t just children who collected the photo cards of the marathon heroes that came with the cigarette packs from the Mecca Cigarette Company – nobody discovered the irony in that at the time.

But it would be a long time before the marathon attraction became a real sports spectacle, for which amateur athletes also prepared for months.

Because in the first decades, the race track belonged solely to the athletes, the extreme long distance was considered a race for a running elite.

There was still no mass sports movement that could have turned the quite popular event into »pop«.

The field of starters grew year by year, but very slowly at first.

In 1906 more than 100 competitors started in Boston for the first time, three years later 182, then the race lost popularity again.

The First World War was by no means to blame for this, because even before that only 82 men ran through Boston – times were simply hard.

The picture in the years between the wars was very similar: 48 starters in 1919 were the low point, after that the number of participants rose rapidly, only to collapse with the onset of the global economic crisis from 1929 and remain at a low level.

It was not until 1955 that the marathon reached the number of active participants again, as it had before 1938. From then on, things slowly but steadily improved until, in 1967, Boston reported an impressive 741 runners.

The women brought about the greatest upheaval

The fact that the numbers should multiply from 1968 is also due to the "scandal" that women fought to take part.

Roberta Gibb just secretly ran along from 1966 to 1968 and caused a lot of hellos.

Katherine Switzer went even further: she shortened her first name to "KV" when registering and "forgot" to indicate her gender.

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Boston Marathon: Start number 261 - the forbidden woman by Heiko Oldörp

The pictures of how an official tried so furiously and in vain in 1967 to jostle her off the track during the run and snatch her start number 261 went around the world and turned the marathon into a political issue.

From then on, it was a requirement of emancipation to also let women run long distances.

In 1971, the American Amateur Sports Association officially allowed them to participate - and the marathon mutated into a mass sport.

After just a few years, women made up 30 to 40 percent of the participants.

Liberalization fit the zeitgeist of the early 1970s.

The wave of leisure sports known in Germany as »Trimm dich fit!« set Western societies in motion.

People began to change their lifestyle for exercise, from daily routine to diet.

Nowhere was it clearer than in the marathon how rapidly the level of performance in mass sport rose.

At the big city marathons, athletes now competed with ambitious amateur runners.

The majority, however, understood the matter in an Olympic way: Being there was everything – and soon also in garish costumes or in a wheelchair (in Boston from 1975).

The "agony" of the marathon became a celebrated pop event.

That makes this sport unique: on the one hand, record times were and are set in the big city marathons (a first world record in Boston in 1947).

On the other hand, the events also move masses of recreational runners, who have increasingly made city marathons the focus of popular sport.

Participation ticket by lottery wheel

As early as 1970, the BAA introduced qualification times to maintain the level.

What hardly slowed down the amateur athletes: In 1996, 38,708 runners managed to qualify and some of them achieved respectable times in costume.

The organizers were literally overwhelmed.

In Boston they temporarily limited the size of the field to 20,000 runners starting in 2003.

And it wasn't just there that recreational athletes had to win the start clearance by drawing lots.

Since 2006, it's mainly the big city marathons that decide who can call themselves "world champion".

The season runs from spring to autumn and takes running enthusiasts all over the world.

Marathon has long been part of urban culture, often marking both the sporting highlight of the year and the largest folk festival in the host cities.

This applies in particular to the »World Marathon Masters« races, in which you can collect championship points by placing.

This includes runs in Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York, as well as runs at the World Athletics Championships and Olympic Games when they take place.

Even terror could not break the enthusiasm for the city marathon.

On April 15, 2013, the Boston Marathon experienced its darkest hour when two young, fanatical Islamists planted bombs among spectators in the finish area - three people died and more than 260 were injured, some seriously.

The following year, around 500,000 spectators celebrated the 35,671 athletes who ran the Boston Marathon.

There were more than ever.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-04-24

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