Imagine preparing for a 42.2-kilometre race, only to discover that someone wants to throw you out because of your gender.
The photograph looks almost unbelievable: a race official lunges towards a young woman wearing bib 261, while runners beside her try to intervene. It was taken during the 1967 Boston Marathon and has since become an enduring image of the struggle for equality in sport.
Kathrine Switzer, then a 20-year-old journalism student, had trained seriously for the 42.2-kilometre event. Women were excluded from official participation, although the entry form did not specifically ask for an applicant’s gender. Switzer applied under “K. V. Switzer”, her customary signature, and received a race number.
Several kilometres into the event, official Jock Semple rushed towards her and attempted to tear off her bib. Switzer’s boyfriend, Tom Miller, intervened forcefully, allowing her to continue. She was shaken, but rather than abandon the race, she resolved to finish it. Her time was approximately four hours and twenty minutes.
The incident is often simplified into the story of the first woman to run Boston. That description overlooks Bobbi Gibb, who finished the marathon without official registration in 1966 and returned in 1967. Switzer was the first woman to run with an official bib, not the first to cover the distance.
Her experience exposed a wider contradiction: women were routinely considered physically unsuited to endurance events, despite evidence to the contrary. Switzer subsequently devoted much of her career to challenging those assumptions. Boston officially welcomed women entrants in 1972, and the women’s marathon joined the Olympic programme in 1984.
Remarkably, Switzer and Semple later reconciled. In 2017, she returned to Boston, aged 70, wearing number 261 again. The organisers retired that number to honour her contribution.
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