The marathon is a long-distance race of 42.192 kilometers inspired by the legend of a Greek messenger who ran this distance from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory in the Battle of Marathon and died of exhaustion immediately after delivering the good news.
When Pierre de Coubertin decided to revive the Olympic Games, the organizers started looking for a glorious event from ancient Greece to popularize the games. The French philologist Michel Bréal remembered the legend and suggested to Coubertin to organize a marathon race at the 1896 Olympic Games, and Coubertin supported the idea.
The U.S. delegation to the 1896 Olympics included a team of athletes from the Boston Athletic Association. Inspired by the revived marathon race, they decided to organize a similar race in the United States and thus the Boston marathon was born. The inaugural edition of the Boston Marathon was held on April 19, 1897 with fifteen participants. The winner was John J. McDermott, who ran the distance of 24.5 miles (39.4 km, slightly shorter than the standard marathon) in 2:55:10.
The date of the first Boston Marathon was chosen to celebrate Patriots’ Day, the then newly established holiday commemorating the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy, which sparked the American Revolutionary War. The marathon was held every April 19 until 1969 when Patriots’ Day was moved to the third Monday in April in Massachusetts.
The Boston Marathon was held continuously for more than 100 years, including races during both World Wars, although the event was modified from a marathon to a long-distance relay race in 1918. The only exception was 2020, when the event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The next edition was moved from Patriots’ Day to Columbus Day. The 2013 Boston Marathon was disrupted and largely overshadowed by a bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds.
Today, the Boston Marathon is one of the largest marathon races in the world. Each year, it attracts approximately 30,000 registered participants from around the world and 500,000 spectators along the route from Hopkinton, Middlesex County to Copley Square in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. The race is open to amateur and professional runners, as well as para athletes in several divisions: wheelchair, para athletics (vision impairment, lower limb impairment, upper limb impairment, coordination impairment, intellectual impairment), hand cycle.
The Boston Marathon is one of the seven major marathon races that make up the World Marathon Majors, along with the Berlin, Chicago, London, New York, Sydney, and Tokyo marathons. Athletes competing in these marathons earn points for finishing in the top five (the higher the place, the more points), and at the end of the season, the winners of the series are determined by the number of points earned.
Photo: baa.org
