It was 1967 and Switzer was a 21-year-old student running the famous Boston Marathon in a group with a coach and some members of the Syracuse University track team. Suddenly, she was set upon by a furious Scottish-American named Jock Semple. “Get the hell out of my race!” he roared, tearing at the number 261 bib on her back.
Semple was one of the race directors. Kathy Switzer, the frightened runner, had sent the $3 entry fee to register for the taxing 26.2 mile (42.2 km) race as “K.V. Switzer” and been accepted. She wanted to prove she could finish the “ultimate challenge” road race to Arnie Briggs, her mentor and track coach, and her registration made her the first woman officially entered in the Boston Marathon’s then-70-year history—except that race organizers didn’t know that K.V. Switzer was a woman.
As press photographers captured the startling episode and Semple grabbed at Switzer, Switzer’s boyfriend, 235-pound Syracuse athlete Tom Miller, bodychecked Semple to the curb and Semple rose up, fuming. Switzer and her group ran on and finished the gruelling race. Then they drove back to upstate New York in the dark.
Her time in the race wasn’t special, and she wasn’t the first woman to have run: Roberta Gibb had run well as an unofficial entrant the year before. But the “conflict on the course” got people talking. Switzer was even invited onto The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where the host, a former track-and-fielder, treated her with respect. She returned to school, kept running, and eventually penned a letter of conciliation to Semple. Five years later, in 1972, women were granted the right to run officially in the Boston Marathon.
“But then he saw us run in ’72, because he had to admit us into the race. Honestly, he was fuming about letting us into the race. After that, he said, ‘Oh, they ran really well.’ It’s as though he hadn’t even noticed [female runners] up to that point. After that, we became friends. We would do interviews together. I helped him launch his book, and I visited him a few hours before he died.
As the 1970s unfolded, that revolution gained momentum. Interest in women’s sports surged with Billie Jean King’s launch of a women’s professional tennis tour and her famous victory in the “Battle of the Sexes” over brash 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion, Bobby Riggs.
Switzer did her part. After earning a master’s degree in communication from Syracuse, she promoted women’s running brilliantly. Most notably, in 1978, she launched the Avon International Running Circuit, a program for female runners that extended to about 200 races in 27 countries. That success helped persuade the International Olympic Committee to add the Women’s Marathon to the Games. Switzer was a commentator with the ABC TV broadcast team when Joan Benoit won gold for the USA in the first Women’s Marathon at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Switzer also provided TV commentary on the Boston Marathon for 37 years.
Stepping away from marathons, she redoubled her resolve to promote women’s running.
With the family back in America, Kathy Switzer, age 12, was facing a new school, worried about how to fit in, anxious about tryouts for the junior varsity field hockey team.
The marathon—the most demanding of road races—is now a popular event in cities and towns across Canada. Canadians run well and have succeeded in the Boston Marathon. Ronald J. MacDonald of Antigonish, NS, won the second Boston Marathon, in 1898. Legendary Onondaga distance runner Tom Longboat of the Six Nations reserve, near Brantford, ON, set a course record time in 1907. Quebec’s Gérard Côté won four times in the 1940s. Toronto’s Jerome Drayton set a course record of 2:10:09 in 1977, and Quebec’s Jacqueline Gareau won the race in 1980, the year that the apparent winner, Cuban-American Rosie Ruiz, was discovered to have entered the race near its end and not run the full course.
“I’d stayed in shape and I was seeing all these older women who at 65 and 70 were discovering running for the first time and running well. [Toronto physician Dr. Jean Marmoreo twice set records at the Boston Marathon for female runners 70-plus.] So what about me? Could I, with ‘old legs and an old body,’ start marathon running again? The answer was ‘yes.’ If you take your time and build back, you can! I took great joy in the fact that I didn’t have to run fast, I could just go out there and run for fun.
Switzer resumed running marathons in her mid-60s. The year she turned 70 proved special. Fifty years after “crashing the race” in 1967, Switzer ran the Boston Marathon again, with a team of women from 261 Fearless, and was received with honour. The famous road race officially retired Bib 261, her original number. It was only the second bib to be retired by the Boston Marathon (the other was Bib 61, to mark the 61 marathons run by the American distance runner Johnny Kelley—he ran his 61st at the age of 84).
For more about Kathrine Switzer’s 261 Fearless women’s running groups, visit 261fearless.org.