Joan Benoit Samuelson's 1984 Olympic marathon win was a game-changer for women's sports

As Joan Benoit Samuelson negotiated the hairpin turn into the Coliseum tunnel, ran past the USC locker room and onto the stadium’s red synthetic track for the final 400 meters of the 1984 Olympic marathon, her focus wasn’t only on finishing, but on finishing strong.

Women never had been allowed to run farther than 1,500 meters in the Olympics because the Games’ all-male guardians long harbored antiquated views of femininity and what the female body could do. If Samuelson struggled to the line, or worse yet dropped to the ground after crossing it, that would validate those views and set back for years the fight for gender equality in the Olympics.

“They might have taken the Olympic marathon off the schedule,” Samuelson said by phone two days before Thanksgiving. “This is an elite athlete struggling to finish a marathon. It never happened, thank goodness. But that could have changed the course of history for women’s marathoning.”

Actually, that race did change the course of history because nothing remained the same after a joyous Samuelson, wearing a wide smile and waving her white cap to the sold-out crowd, crossed the finish line. This year marked the 40th anniversary of that victory, and when the Olympics return to Los Angeles in four years, the Games will be different in many ways because of it.

Since 1984, the number of Summer Olympic events for women has nearly tripled, to 151, while last summer’s Paris Games was the first to reach gender parity, with women accounting for half of the 10,500 athletes in France. Fittingly the women’s marathon was given a place of honor on the calendar there, run as the final event of the track and field competition and one of the last medal events of the Games.

None of that seemed likely — or even possible — before Samuelson’s win.

“I sort of use marathoning as a way to storytell,” Samuelson said from her home in Maine. “And I tell people LA 84 and the first women’s Olympic marathon was certainly the biggest win of my life.”

It was life-changing for many other women as well.

Until 1960, the longest Olympic track race for women was 200 meters. The 1,500 meters was added in 1972, yet it wasn’t until the L.A. Games that the leaders of the International Olympic Committee, who had long cited rampant myths and dubious sports-medicine studies about the dangers of exercise for women, approved the addition of two distance races, the 3,000 meters and marathon.

Which isn’t to say women had never run long distances in the Olympics. At the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, a Greek woman named Stamata Revithi, denied a place on the starting line on race day, ran the course alone a day later, finishing in 5 hours and 30 minutes, an accomplishment witnesses confirmed in writing.

Her performance was better than at least seven of the 17 male runners, who didn’t complete the race. But she was barred from entering Panathenaic Stadium and her achievement was never recognized.

Eighty-eight years passed before a woman was allowed to run the Olympic marathon.

“There are men that are raised with resentment for women, except for their own mothers. That’s just a part of their nature,” Hall of Fame track coach Bob Larsen said. “A lot of good things have happened in the last couple of decades. Old men are passing away and opening doors [for] people who have a more modern understanding of what women are capable of.”

In between Revithi and Samuelson, women routinely were banned even from public races like the Boston Marathon, which didn’t allow females to run officially until 1972. Even then, women had to bring a doctor’s note declaring them fit to run, said Maggie Mertens, author of “Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women.”

Seven years later Norway’s Grete Waitz became the first woman to break 2:30 in the marathon, running 2:27.32 in New York, a time that would have been good for second in the elite men’s race in Chicago that same day.

Because of that, Samuelson said she hardly was blazing a trail in L.A. Instead she was running in the wake of pioneers such as Kathrine Switzer, Bobbi Gibb and Waitz.

“I ran because there was an opportunity, not because I wanted to prove that women could run marathons,” said Samuelson, who still is running at 67. “Women had been proving themselves long before the ’84 Games.

“If anything, maybe my win inspired women to realize that if marathoning were a metaphor for life, anything in life is possible.”

Joan Benoit Samuelson receives a laurel wreath after winning the Boston Marathon in April 1983. At left, then-Lt. Gov. John Kerry.

(Associated Press)

Still, when Samuelson beat Waitz in Los Angeles, running in prime time during a race that was beamed to television viewers around the world, “that was the game-changer,” Switzer, the first woman to run Boston as an official competitor, told Mertens.

“When people saw it on television … they said, ‘Oh my God, women can do anything.’”

A barrier had fallen and there was no going back.

“You could make the argument that in women’s sports in general, we had to see, we had to have these women prove on the biggest stage possible that they were capable so that these gatekeepers would let women come in and play sports and be part of this world,” Mertens said. “I think it really did help burst open those ideas about what we could do and what we could see.”

As a result, the elite runners who have followed in Samuelson’s footsteps never have known a world in which women were barred from long-distance races.

“I grew up believing that women ran the marathon and that it wasn’t a big deal,” said Kara Goucher, a two-time Olympian and a world championship silver medalist who was 6 when Samuelson won in L.A. “I grew up seeing women run the marathon as the norm. That 100% is a credit to Joanie going out there on the world’s biggest stage and normalizing it.”

Paige Wood, a former U.S. marathon champion, said her high school coach was inspired to run marathons by Samuelson’s story and passed that inspiration on to her runners.

“She used her as an example of why we shouldn’t put any mental limitations on ourselves or shouldn’t let others tell us what we are capable of,” Wood said.

Wood was born in 1996 and remembers her mom, who was very athletic, saying that cheerleading was the only sport available to her in high school in the pre-Samuelson days.

“It’s undeniable, right? The courage she gave other women to start running and start competing,” Wood continued. “The trickle-down effect, it’s not even limited to running. It affected all sports and just made women less afraid to be athletic and try all different sports.”

A year after Samuelson’s victory, the U.S. women’s soccer team played its first game, although it was more than a decade before the WNBA, the country’s first professional women’s league. There are now leagues in six other sports, from ice hockey and lacrosse to rugby and volleyball, and female athletes like Caitlin Clark, Alex Morgan, Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky are household names.

Joan Benoit Samuelson, first women’s Olympics marathon winner, walks from the finish line after running in the 2019 Boston Marathon.

(Winslow Townson / Associated Press)

Last summer in Paris, Sifan Hassan won the women’s marathon in an Olympic-record 2:22.55 after taking bronze in both the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, events that weren’t even on the Olympic calendar when Samuelson won her race. Two months later Kenyan Ruth Chepng’etich became the first woman to run under 2:10 when she won the Chicago Marathon in 2:09:56, averaging 4:57 a mile.

Until 1970, two years before the Boston Marathon was opened to women, only one man had broken 2:10 in the race.

“It says so much about sport and the way that humans don’t quite know what we’re capable of until we do it,” Mertens said. “We’re going to keep pushing those goalposts back. We’ve come so far, and I think that’s more to do with just having the opportunities and know that there aren’t really limits.

“That’s the power of sports. These people are inspiring us; [they] help us see women as powerful athletes but also powerful in politics, as leaders.”

Did Samuelson make that happen? Or did she simply make it happen faster?

“You’d have to decide whether it was a huge defining moment or just a general wave of athletic events that made this possible,” Larsen said. “You know, the more times you put someone up at the plate, sooner or later somebody’s going to hit it out.

“Now it’s acceptable to have a woman running for president. So things are happening and it’s more acceptable to the general public. Was Joanie a big part of it? I would think so.”