One of my favorite sayings is that talent is everywhere; it only needs an opportunity. By 1972 it was clear that plenty of women had talent but didn’t even know it. You don’t often know you can do something if the event isn’t there for you to imagine it, much less go for it. It was critical to get a women’s marathon in the Olympic Games if women were to be taken seriously in arduous activity at the highest levels of sport. Several strong women runners were active in different ways to make this happen, but for me the most important thing was to create long-distance road running events all over the world. Only then could women everywhere have the opportunity to experience running in events of different distances and actually fee/ the power and strength running was giving them.

After writing a lot of proposals seeking sponsors for my idea of a women’sonly global running program that had a truly international women’s-only marathon as an annual culmination, cosmetics giant Avon Products hired me in 1977 to put my dream in action. The huge amount of time and work involved meant the end of my own marathon career, but it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Within 18 months, the program had been introduced in several countries, each of which had an Olympic committee and federation that now endorsed our women’s running events. Within three years we were closing downtown London streets for the first time in history for a sports event with the third annual Avon International Marathon. The event was significant for several important reasons:

¢ First, we had women runners from 27 countries and five continents. One of the IOC (International Olympic Committee) requirements for an event to be added to the Olympic Games was for it to be practiced in 25 countries and three continents.

¢ Second, we had been working assiduously with the now-congenial IAAF, which governed running events and made recommendations to the IOC. London was its headquarters city, and we were right there with the federation involved.

¢ Third, the next Olympics were going to be in Los Angeles, and we were working closely with Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee President Peter Ueberroth and his team to press for the inclusion of a women’s marathon in the LA Games. They liked women’s running and wanted to see the marathon happen, and the Avon International marathons gave them the stats and data they needed to convince other nations.

¢ Fourth, when the USA boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980, NBCTV needed some events to replace that coverage. It sent a team to cover the Avon Marathon in London. BBC and Eurovision did not want to be outdone on their home turf, so they broadcast the event as well. O Globo

came from Brazil. We had massive worldwide publicity; women’s running was truly getting global coverage.

¢ Fifth, Sir Horace Cutler, leader of the Greater London Council, loved the idea of a marathon in downtown London and closed the streets for the women. The race went on to become what is now the huge London Marathon.

¢ Sixth, although the field was loaded with elite women runners who had won their way to this event, any woman could come on her own and participate. The event was glamorous, unintimidating, and exciting, and it produced great performances.

Games. I knew nobody would really understand how important this was until the first woman came out of the tunnel and into the Olympic stadium. That is when the whole world, which knew that 26.2 miles or 42.2K is a long race, would be watching television and would see women running the historic, death-defying, and truly arduous marathon and think Wow! Women can do anything.

To me, getting the marathon in the Olympic Games was the physical equivalent of giving women the right to vote. It was global physical acknowledgment that women were capable of participating in the toughest event in the Olympics and were entitled to do so. It changed world thinking on women’s capability.

So it was with a happy poignancy that the 2004 Olympics in Athens featured the marathon on the fabled Marathon-to-Athens course and that arguably the stars of this show were the women. The four chief protagonists were deservedly storybook perfect: a Japanese and an African, for both of whom the marathon represented the overcoming of thousands of years of cultural and social repression; an upand-coming American with only an outside chance who started slowly behind the

YV The 1980 Avon International Marathon in London featured top runners from 27 countries and 5 continents, exceeding the International Olympic Committee’s global participation requirement. The speed of these women runners—Lorraine Moller, center, from New Zealand (first); American Nancy Conz, left (second); and Canadian Linda Staudt, right (third)— showed widespread talent. This race led to IOC approval for a women’s marathon in the Olympics in 1984.

Kathrine Switzer/ Marathon Woman