Читать книгу Long Road to Boston - Mr Mark Sutcliffe - Страница 13

When you first glance at a picture of Bill Rodgers from the 1975 Boston Marathon, you might think he was an eccentric local runner hoping simply to finish, not an elite athlete competing for the podium. He’s wearing a t-shirt – legend says he pulled it out of a trash can – on which he has written with a felt-tip pen “Boston GBTC.” His bib number 14 is attached at a bit of an angle. He has on painter’s gloves that his brother bought for him from a hardware store in Hopkinton because his hands were cold. He’s sporting a headband that makes him look a bit like Wimbledon champion Bjorn Borg. He’s running in brand-new shoes – a cardinal sin among modern marathon runners – that were sent to him by Steve Prefontaine, samples from a relatively unknown shoe company called Nike. He’s not even wearing a watch.

Rodgers was a graduate student at Boston College and ran with the Greater Boston Track Club – that’s what the GBTC on his shirt represented. He failed to finish the 1973 Boston Marathon, dropping out on Heartbreak Hill. In frustration, he quit running for three months. In 1974, he ran Boston again and placed a respectable fourteenth in just over two hours and nineteen minutes. He won that fall’s Philadelphia Marathon, but in an even slower time.

No one thought of him as a future Boston champion. But a few weeks before the 1975 race, he captured a bronze medal at the world cross-country championships in Morocco. Rodgers later told Runner’s World that he felt “I can run with anyone now.”

Rodgers was also driven by a sense of local pride, saying he wanted the race to belong to a Bostonian. Eight miles into the marathon, he was racing side-by-side with Canadian Jerome Drayton.

“I remember someone yelling, ‘Go Canada!’” Rodgers told Runner’s World forty years later. “It really got me fired up, and I surged and I made my move. I think Jerome didn’t know who the heck I was, and he let me go.”

He ran the rest of the course alone. At the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, he stopped to tie his shoe. In the final few miles, he stopped four more times to drink water. Rodgers says he simply found it easier to gulp down fluids while he was standing still.

As he approached the finish, Rodgers was told by race official Jock Semple that he was going to break the course record. Rodgers says he was shocked. He finished in just under two hours and ten minutes, knocking almost ten minutes off his previous best time.

The 1975 race was historic for another reason. Bob Hall completed the course in a wheelchair, finishing in just under three hours. The milestone led to the creation of a wheelchair division.

Rodgers’ victory launched him into the upper echelon of distance runners. Over the next six years, he won sixteen of the twenty-five marathons he entered. He won New York four times in a row, from 1976 to 1979. He won Boston three more times, from 1978 to 1980. In 1978, he won twenty-seven of thirty races he entered.

Boston Billy became an endearing icon of endurance sports, an Olympian and record-breaker who had more in common with the everyday runner than the typical elite athlete. He talked often of his love of cheeseburgers. One of his victories in New York was run in a pair of newly acquired soccer shorts, because he forgot to pack his shorts for the race. He made marathon running seem more accessible and he inspired a generation of amateur runners, launching the first running boom.

Rodgers continued to run long after his competitive days were over. In 1996, he ran a sub-three-hour Boston at the age of 48. In 1999, he fell victim to dehydration and had to pull out. He was determined that would not be his last marathon. He joked to the Wall Street Journal in 2002, “I can’t have my last marathon in Boston be a DNF (did not finish). This is unacceptable.”

In 2009, sixty-one years old and having survived prostate cancer, Bill Rodgers ran Boston again and finished in just over four hours.

When Rodgers won his fourth Boston Marathon in 1980, he raised four fingers as he crossed the finish line. The historic win put him in exclusive company. Other than Clarence DeMar, only Gerard Côté of Canada had won four times (Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot of Kenya later joined the group with his fourth win in 2008). But despite the historic occasion, it was the women’s race that brought the marathon international attention and infamy that year.

Rosie Ruiz was born in Cuba and moved to Florida as a child, then New York City. In 1979, she was the eleventh woman to cross the finish line at the New York City Marathon, earning a trip to Boston. On April 21, 1980, she appeared to win the Boston Marathon in 2:31:56, twenty-five minutes faster than her time in New York and four minutes faster than any woman in Boston history. Very quickly, suspicions were raised. She didn’t have a lot of knowledge about marathon training. She didn’t appear to have the same physique as other elite athletes. And many runners and spectators said they didn’t see her on various parts of the course.

Soon, witnesses came forward to say they had seen her enter the course half a mile from the finish. Another story emerged that she had traveled on the subway during the New York City Marathon. New York officials soon nullified her result from that race, which meant she had no longer qualified to run the marathon in Boston that she had supposedly won. Boston organizers did their own investigation and found no photo or television evidence of her at key points on the course. They soon disqualified her as well.

Just a few years earlier, Jacqueline Gareau had been working at a Montreal hospital when she joined a group of co-workers who had taken up running. She enjoyed it so much she kept running longer and farther. “I just kept running because running felt good to me,” she said recently. “I loved running long distances.”

She finished second in the Ottawa Marathon in 1978, then won the race the next year. In 1980, she planned to run Ottawa again, but a friend suggested she run Boston instead. It was a historic conversation for two reasons. The friend ended up becoming her husband. And Gareau ended up winning the Boston Marathon under unique circumstances.

Gareau thought she had finished second to Rosie Ruiz in Boston, and had returned to Montreal. A few days after the race, she was flown back down to Boston, where race officials set up a finish line with thousands of spectators so they could photograph her breaking the tape and present her with the medal. While she was denied the experience of winning on race day, Gareau assumed a special place among Boston champions. She has returned to Boston to a hero’s welcome on milestone anniversaries of her 1980 victory. Ruiz, meanwhile, has continued to claim she ran the entire course.

In 1982, two Americans battled each other for twenty-six miles in what became known as the “duel in the sun.” An entire book has been written about that race, featuring two very different but equally appealing stars: Cuban-American Alberto Salazar, who was the favorite and considered almost unbeatable at marathon distance, and Dick Beardsley, the challenger from rural Minnesota whose father had given him an IOU for a plane ticket to Boston as a high school graduation present and who had trained specifically for Boston by running Heartbreak Hill repeatedly, even in a blizzard.

A lot less was known about training methods in the early 1980s. Beardsley used to pound his thighs hundreds of times a day, thinking it was good for his muscles. Salazar ran extraordinary mileage in training, sometimes as much as two hundred miles in one week.

The two runners set a blistering pace and then battled together for the final nine miles. They were so close together that at one point when he was slightly ahead, Beardsley tracked Salazar by watching his shadow on the pavement. Both men described later how much they were hurting in the final five miles – Beardsley said he could no longer feel his legs and kept telling himself “one more mile.” But each runner remained determined not to surrender.

With less than a mile to go, Beardsley’s hamstring suffered and Salazar surged ahead. But somehow Beardsley managed to pour it on in the final few hundred yards and closed some of the gap. Both runners beat the previous course record, with Salazar winning by two seconds. Salazar was rushed to hospital and given six liters of fluid; despite temperatures in the seventies, he’d had barely anything to drink during the race.

The marathon was declared the greatest in Boston history; there were two winners that day, many observers proclaimed. Many thought it would be the start of a rivalry but the race took its toll on both athletes and neither matched that performance in the future. Salazar’s decline was gradual. He won other races, including his third straight New York City Marathon that fall. But he noticed it took longer to recover from workouts and that he was always getting sick. This was no ordinary fall; Salazar was still only in his mid-twenties. A few years later, Beardsley suffered a horrifying accident on his farm. During his treatment he became addicted to painkillers. Now sober, he speaks as often to addicts as he does to runners.

In 1983, Joan Benoit won her second Boston Marathon. The day before the race, Norway’s Grete Waitz broke Benoit’s world record in winning the London Marathon. Benoit reclaimed the record, beating Waitz’s time by more than two-and-a-half minutes. The two met the following year in the first-ever Olympic women’s marathon. Once again, Benoit prevailed, by a minute, over Waitz.

The Boston Marathon has always had an international flavor. From 1946 to 1954, there were winners representing seven different countries. But until 1988, no one from Africa had ever won the race. When Ibrahim Hussein of Kenya won his first of three Boston championships that year, it touched off a remarkable period of dominance for runners from the Great Rift Valley. In the twenty- nine editions from 1988 through 2016, twenty-six of the men’s winners have come from either Kenya or Ethiopia.

One of them, Kenya’s Geoffrey Mutai, ran the fastest marathon ever in 2011, finishing in 2:03:02. It didn’t count as a world record because Boston is a point-to-point course with a net loss in elevation. But it was a remarkable performance on what is often described as a tough course.

African women began their supremacy in Boston in 1997, when Fatuma Roba of Ethiopia won her first of three in a row. After that, Catherine Ndereba of Kenya won four times in five years. From 1997 through 2016, only two runners from Russia interrupted the streak.

Born in 1975 in Eritrea, Meb Keflezighi and his family were refugees who arrived in the United States when he was twelve years old. Keflezighi became a high school and university middle-distance champion. He won a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon, the first American to win a medal since 1976. He won the New York City Marathon in 2009, the first American champion since 1982.

And on April 21, 2014, Meb Keflezighi not only won a race but captured the damaged hearts of thousands of runners and spectators.