On April 19, 1967, a few miles into the Boston Marathon, Will Cloney stepped off a bus and went after runner number 261. The race director had spotted a woman in a baggy gray sweatshirt, running with a number pinned to her front and back. Cloney reached her first, then backed off. Jock Semple, another official, came next, grabbing at the number on her chest and then the one on her back. A teammate of hers, a hammer thrower named Tom Miller, knocked Semple off the road. Press photographers were a few yards away.
The runner was Kathrine Switzer, a twenty-year-old journalism student at Syracuse University.
How she got the number
Switzer had trained through the winter with the Syracuse Harriers, under Arnie Briggs, an assistant track coach who had run Boston fifteen times. By her account, the two of them checked the rule book and the entry form and found nothing about gender. She signed the form the way she said she always signed her name, "K.V. Switzer." She gave her Amateur Athletic Union number, paid the three-dollar fee, and got a fitness certificate from the university infirmary. Briggs mailed the team's entries and collected the numbers on race morning.
Briggs said much the same the next day. "What rule did she break?" he asked the Boston Globe. The application said nothing about sex, he pointed out, and she was a bona fide member of the AAU. Another club member, the Globe reported, had presented her doctor's certificate.
Cloney saw it differently. He told the Associated Press she had obtained her entry falsely and never taken the required physical, so she had never really been entered at all. Two days later, he called the whole thing "an outright subterfuge," from the initial on the entry blank to the number collected by someone else.
The number
Semple later said he had only been reaching for the number. Anybody could run on the public streets, he told the Evening Globe. He just wanted the number:
"so she wouldn't be considered a contestant."
She kept the number and ran on, and finished in about four hours and twenty minutes. Because she was a woman, the Globe's Carol Liston noted, she got no official time. The wire services didn't agree that she had finished at all. The AP reported that she did not. A California paper ran a UPI photo under the headline "Marathon Miss Makes It," with a caption saying she had failed to finish.
Roberta Gibb had run too, again without a number, and came in nearly an hour ahead of Switzer. According to Liston, an official spotted Gibb as she approached the line and stepped into her way. She was stopped about a foot short of it.
What the photographs did
The pictures went out on the wire that night, a sequence by Harry Trask of the Boston Traveler. Some papers ran them as a story about chivalry: the husky companion who protected a girl from a race official. Cloney's regret, as he told the Evening Globe's Jerry Nason, was that he'd forgotten the photographers were there. Without the pictures, he said, the whole thing would have been a short item in the papers. Semple said much the same: jumping out had given the runners the publicity they wanted.
Not everyone in Boston took the officials' side. In the Evening Globe, Bud Collins wrote that grown men had tried to shove a woman off a public street. After the race, he reported, Cloney said he knew of no women who had run. Collins suggested Cloney apologize publicly to both women. Cloney had already given his own answer for women who asked about running. Tell them, he said to the Patriot Ledger, "to stay in the kitchen and wash the dishes."
The paperwork
A few days later, according to Switzer's memoir, a letter arrived from the AAU expelling her from membership. She had run farther than women were allowed, it said, and had entered fraudulently by signing with her initials. Briggs, Miller and the club were not disciplined.
In 1966, the official answer to Roberta Gibb was that she hadn't run. A year later, with Switzer's photograph in papers across the country, that answer wasn't available. So the officials went after the paperwork instead — the number, the entry blank, the membership card. Each one, taken away, left the same result. A woman had run 26 miles, and she wasn't a contestant. Up the road, the other woman was stopped a foot from the line.
Semple told the Evening Globe that the AAU had already loosened its limits. Women could now race a mile and a half. About thirty years earlier, he said, they had been held to a quarter mile. The idea that women couldn't go the distance had been tested in public before, at an Olympic race in Amsterdam in 1928, and the newspapers had reported what they saw at the finish. That's next.