Joan Benoit Samuelson

Joan Benoit Samuelson made history at the 1984 Olympic Games by winning the first Olympic Women's Marathon before a standing, cheering, capacity crowd on August 5, 1984, in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. A Maine native, she began running in high school to rehabilitate a skiing injury and earned All-American honors in cross country and track at Bowdoin College before winning the 1979 Boston Marathon in an American-record time of 2:35:15. After surgery on both achilles tendons in 1981, she returned in 1983 to win Boston again and set a world marathon best of 2:22:43, while also setting American records at 10-kilometers, half-marathon, 10-miles, and 25-kilometers. Early in 1984 she injured her knee on a long training run and chose arthroscopic surgery, then won the U.S. Olympic trials just 17 days later. At the Olympic Games she controlled the marathon from start to finish. She later recalled that as she entered the Coliseum tunnel near the end, the noise was muffled, she heard her own footfalls, and she thought, "once you leave this tunnel, your life will never be the same." Her 1984 victory was a seminal moment in women's sport that helped change public perceptions of women's endurance events and women's sport generally. Monique Berlioux, executive director of the International Olympic Committee in 1984, called the first Women's Olympic Marathon a major victory for women that was not easily won. Until 1984 there had been no Olympic track race for women longer than 1,500 meters, but in the years after her performance the Olympic program expanded to include women's endurance events in several sports and women's competition in sports previously closed to them, including weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, biathlon, and ski jumping.

Los Angeles, California · United States