On the morning of April 19, 1966, a car pulled up in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, near the start of the Boston Marathon. Roberta Gibb's mother was driving. Her daughter, twenty-three and newly married, got out in a hooded sweatshirt and her brother's Bermuda shorts. She hid in the bushes about 400 yards from the starting line. After the gun, once a good part of the field had gone by, she stepped out and joined the pack.
She had no number. In February she had written to the Boston Athletic Association for an entry, and the race director, Will Cloney, had turned her down. The wire stories that week gave his reason as the rules of the Amateur Athletic Union, which governed amateur racing in the United States. A year later Cloney spelled the rule out himself: no AAU competition for women longer than a mile and a half. Gibb has said his letter also told her women were not physiologically able to run a marathon, and that the association did not want the medical liability.
The run
She had trained for two years, mostly in nurses' shoes, because nobody made running shoes for women. To get to the start she rode a bus from San Diego for three days. By her account, she expected to be pushed off the road during the race. Instead, once the men around her realized a woman was running with them, they talked with her and promised no one would throw her out.
She reached the finish in about three hours and twenty minutes. The Associated Press placed her just behind the first hundred runners. United Press International counted her 124th in a field of more than 400. By either count, she finished ahead of most of the men. The AP reported that even though women were not allowed to run, she had gone along anyway "just for kicks." UPI described her as a slender bride, five-foot-five and blonde.
Asked fifty years later why she ran at all, Gibb said the point was to show she could. She asked how she could prove it "if they wouldn't allow me to try."
The morning after
Boston's morning papers printed photographs of her running and crossing the finish line. By the afternoon, some editions were asking in their headlines whether she had really run.
Cloney said she had not, at least not in his race. He told reporters she might have run in a road race but not in the BAA Marathon. None of his officials had seen her at the checkpoints, he said, and for all he knew she had jumped in near the end, at Kenmore Square. Then he put it more simply:
"There's no such thing as a marathon for women."
Gibb said it made her angry to have to prove she had run. She told anyone who doubted her to ask the runners and spectators who had seen her. Her mother said she hadn't watched the whole race but had no doubt her daughter ran it.
A year later
On April 19, 1967, Gibb came back and ran it again, from the brush near the start and still without a number. She was timed at 3 hours, 27 minutes and 17 seconds, though the Boston Globe reported that an official stepped into her path and stopped her a foot short of the finish line. When the AP asked whether she wanted to be an official entrant, she said it didn't matter to her; racing was fun. The wire service now called her a freckle-faced redhead. An AP photo caption printed in North Carolina noted that she hadn't won the marathon but had come "first with spectators in the fashion race," in a print blouse and black tights.
The day after that second finish, a reporter for the Patriot Ledger in Quincy asked Cloney whether a woman had really run the full course in 1966. He said the association had been "unable to find anyone who saw her start the race." Asked whether he would accept entries from women that year, he said no.
That answer held for five more years. The Boston Marathon admitted women as official entrants in 1972. In 1996, at the race's hundredth running, the BAA recognized Gibb as the women's winner of 1966, 1967 and 1968.
The rule and the record
Gibb's run is usually told as a woman breaking a rule, but the newspapers show something narrower. The rule said a woman couldn't run that far. When one did, in daylight, past crowds and press photographers, the official answer was that she hadn't run. She had no number, she appeared in no checkpoint record, and the association found no witnesses it would accept.
Elsewhere in this collection, the pattern is a woman's claim to something being recast as a danger. Here the claim was recast as something that hadn't happened at all. The rule stayed intact because the record was kept in a way that left her out of it.
In the 1967 Boston Marathon, Gibb wasn't the only woman on the course. The other had entered under her initials, and had an official number. Two officials stepped off the press bus to take that number from her. That's the next essay in this exhibit.