Joan Benoit Samuelson

Joan Benoit Samuelson. 1984 Olympic Marathon Champion. , Joan Benoit Samuelson made history at the 1984 Olympic Games by winning the first Olympic Women's Marathon, Benoit Samuelson finished the race before a standing, cheering, capacity crowd, on August 5, 1984, in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. , Benoit Samuelson, a Maine native, began running in high school to rehabilitate a skiing injury. She achieved All-American honors in cross country and track at Bowdoin College, before winning the 1979 Boston Marathon in the American-record time of 2:35:15. She underwent surgery on both achilles tendons in 1981, but returned in 1983 to again win Boston and set a world marathon best time of 2:22:43. She also set American records at 10-kilometers, half-marathon, 10-miles and 25-kilometers. , Early in 1984 Benoit Samuelson injured her knee on a long training run and elected to undergo arthroscopic surgery. Just 17 days after the surgery, she won the U.S. Olympic trials. , At the Olympic Games, Benoit Samuelson controlled the marathon from start to finish. She later said about the final moments of the marathon as she entered the Coliseum tunnel, “The noise was muffled and I heard my own footfalls. I thought, 'once you leave this tunnel, your life will never be the same.'” , Benoit Samuelson's race was a seminal moment in women's sport. Her 1984 victory in the Coliseum 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, remarked on the first Women's Olympic Marathon saying, “This is a major victory for the women, but it was not an easy one.” Until 1984 there was no track race for women longer than 1,500 meters in the Olympic Games. In the years after Benoit Samuelson's 1984 performance, the Olympic program evolved significantly with the addition of women's endurance events in several sports and women competing in Olympic sports previously closed to them such as weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, biathlon and ski jumping.