Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe

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СКАЧАТЬ Pan, go shout!” He flung down his shield

      Ran like fire once more: and the space ’twixt the fennel-field

      And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,

      Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay,

      Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died – the bliss!

      Whether or not he had ever experienced it himself, Browning captured the joy a runner feels when finally able to stop running after more than 26 miles. But while most marathoners relish the elation of a finish line, they prefer to escape the “bliss” of having their hearts actually burst.

      Browning’s tribute to Pheidippides likely would have been just another piece of art devoted to Greek history, if not for Michel Breal. A French semantics expert, Bréal was friends with Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was then creating the modern Olympic movement. Bréal suggested that a 40-kilometer race be added to the first Games in Athens, as a way of adding a tough physical test and celebrating Greek history. De Coubertin liked the idea and placed the event on the final day of the Olympics, a tradition that lasts to this day.

      Determined to see an athlete from the host nation win the special event, the Greeks ran a trial exactly one month before the Olympic marathon, a race that is believed to have been the first-ever marathon. The winner, Charilaos Vasilakos, finished in three hours and eighteen minutes. A few days before the Olympics, a second trial was organized. This time the winner was Ioannis Lavrentis, who finished in about three hours and eleven minutes.

      A photo taken by Burton Holmes shows Greek runners training for the Olympics in 1896. It’s not clear whether the picture was candid or staged, but it shows three men running in long pants along deserted roads.

      At 2:00 in the afternoon on April 10, 1896, the first Olympic marathon was launched. A total of seventeen athletes started the race. Rather than rest for the endurance test, some of the runners had already competed in other distances in the same Olympics, including the 1,500-meter. Because of their unfamiliarity with the distance and perhaps due to fatigue from other events, seven men didn’t finish.

      As many as 100,000 people lined the roads and filled the stadium where the marathon would finish. Spiridon Louis of Greece won the race in just under three hours, capitalizing when the early frontrunners went too fast and eventually dropped out or even collapsed. He even had time to stop for a glass of wine in a village along the route, in what passed for an aid station in the nineteenth century. The win gave Louis the only gold medal for Greece at the Olympics and made him an instant national hero.

      It also launched the marathon as the ultimate test of human endurance. It would take a long time before it became so popular that tens of thousands would attempt it at a time, in events around the world. But other similar races were soon being planned. And it was only a year later that another marathon was held in Boston.

      CHAPTER 3

      Were it not for that epic finish to the first Olympic Games and the heroic efforts of a few New Englanders during the American Revolution, there would be no Boston Marathon on the third Monday of every April.

      Only fourteen Americans competed at the 1896 Olympics, and the majority of them were from Boston. Several were students from Harvard University, but a few were members of the Boston Athletic Association.

      In 1887, only nine years before the Olympics, the Boston Athletic Association had been founded with the goal of promoting “physical culture” and encouraging “all manly sports.” The specifics about gender turned out to be a bit of unintentional foreshadowing of an event eighty years in the future, when a BAA official tried to tackle an unwelcome woman on the Boston Marathon race course.

      The original BAA clubhouse was built on the corner of Exeter and Boylston Streets, on the site where the Boston Public Library’s modern expansion is located today and only a few yards from the current finish line of the Boston Marathon. The club’s facilities included a gymnasium, tennis courts, and a bowling alley. In 1890, the association launched its first track-and-field competition, a program which yielded some of America’s first Olympians.

      John Graham, a member of the BAA, was the manager of the first U.S. Olympic team. Tom Burke, a Boston University law student, won gold in the 100 meters and 400 meters in Athens. The two men were among those who watched the Olympic marathon on the final day of the Games, and they returned from Greece with the inspiration to launch a similar event in Boston.

      In September of 1896, just a few months after the Olympic marathon, the Knickerbocker Athletic Club held its annual fall track- and-field competition. While other athletes competed in the usual events, about thirty long-distance runners took a train to Stamford, Connecticut and then ran back to the Columbia Oval in the first marathon held on American soil. The course was muddy, and even the leaders walked at several points on the course. The winner was John McDermott, in a time of three hours, twenty-five minutes and fifty-five seconds.

      Only two years before the Olympics, the governor of Massachusetts, Frederic T. Greenhalge, had declared April 19 as Patriots’ Day. Greenhalge was a native of Lancashire in the north of England who had moved with his parents to Lowell, Massachusetts when he was a teenager. He studied at Harvard, fought for the Union side in the Civil War, became a lawyer, and was eventually elected mayor of his adopted hometown.

      The date was chosen in part to mark the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first clashes of the American Revolutionary War, which occurred on April 19, 1775. On the night before the battle, Bostonian Paul Revere famously rode from town to town, warning of the approaching British army.

      In other words, if Pheidippides had owned a horse or Paul Revere hadn’t, then there probably wouldn’t be a twenty-six-mile race every April in Boston.

      Boston Athletic Association officials decided to hold the first American Marathon, as it was initially called, on Patriots’ Day. In 1897 that happened to be on a Monday, but the tradition of Marathon Monday was more than seven decades away. Until 1969, Patriots’ Day was always on April 19, no matter what day of the week that was. The marathon was always run on the holiday, unless it fell on a Sunday, in which case the race would be held on the Monday. In 1969, just months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the holiday was fixed as the third Monday in April, and the marathon has been held on Monday ever since. So while most major marathons are held exclusively on Sunday mornings, the Boston Marathon has occurred on every day of the week except Sunday.

      In 1897, Boston was approaching the end of a century of explosive growth. The city had struggled during the revolutionary war, as Britain first blockaded its port in response to the Boston Tea Party and then laid siege to the city when they were driven back from Lexington and Concord by the revolutionary militia. The effects on Boston’s economy and population were damaging. But during the 1800s, the city doubled in size roughly every twenty years.

      With the end of the century approaching, Boston was bustling, one of the largest, busiest and most prosperous cities in America, with a population of half-a-million. The main downtown thoroughfare, Tremont Street, was routinely congested with a combination of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, trolleys and electric street cars. The solution, the first subway tunnel in North America, was almost finished. It wasn’t quite the Big Dig that would dominate Boston headlines a century later, but the tunnel was a stunning example of modern infrastructure when it opened on September 1, 1897. In its first year of operation, it served fifty million passengers.

      On the day of the very first Boston Marathon, cries of “play ball!” were heard, just as СКАЧАТЬ