Women to Close Out Olympic Track Meet with Historic Marathon

For the first time in Olympic history, women will close the track meet with a marathon, underscoring gender equality progress. This notable event occurs 40 years after the first women's Olympic marathon. The course follows the historic Women's March on Versailles path, highlighting women's enduring impact on history.

There was a time, not that long ago, when those in charge of the Olympics thought it was too dangerous for women to run a marathon.

On Sunday, in a break with tradition that stamps an exclamation point on how much has changed over the last 40 years, the women, not the men, will have the honour of closing out the Olympic track meet with the traditional 26.2-mile run.

Organizers of the Paris Games are using the Sunday women's marathon as another way to highlight the conquering of a long-sought benchmark at the Olympics; these are the first Summer Games to have an equal number of men and women competing. In another nod to the historical significance of the moment, the marathon route traces the steps of the Women's March on Versailles.

That was a seminal moment during the French Revolution when women in a Paris marketplace organized a march to Versailles to bring their complaints to King Louis XVI over the high price of bread.

Joan Benoit Samuelson, who won the first Olympic marathon in Los Angeles 1984, noted, “All these years later, all these centuries later, women are again tracing routes that changed the course of history, and in this case, certainly for the positive.”

For years, women were restricted to shorter races, with the 1,500 meters added only in 1972. Despite arguments that long races could cause infertility, trailblazers like Roberta Gibb, who ran the Boston Marathon unofficially in 1966, paved the way for women's inclusion in marathons.