April 19th, 1966. Patriots’ Day. Roberta “Bobbi” Louise Gibb Bingay steps out of the shadows and onto the course of the Boston Marathon at Hopkinton, Massachusetts. She’s wearing no number and is not an official participant in the race, but that doesn’t stop her running the 26.2 miles into Boston alongside the 540 official, male, participants. In a smidge under three and a half hours, she changes the course of running as a sport forever, trailblazing a way towards equality and a race that in 2021 boasted of 49 percent female starters.
–Bobbi Gibb, METER 2016
–Bobbi Gibb, METER 2016
Now aged 80, Bobbi Gibb works from a home studio in Massachusetts, where she spent much of career practicing law. She paints and she sculpts, and approaches her work with the same awe and inspiration she ever did. In early 2023 Tracksmith visited her to see how the Eliot sculpture was progressing before this little hare was sent to the foundry to be forged in bronze and made into a trophy that will stand the test of time.
First to the Trackhouse is a not-so-secret race-within-a-race with a prize and no small amount of glory for the first man and the first woman to make it back to the the Trackhouse after crossing the finish line on Boylston Street. Open exclusively to amateurs, it’s a race we’ve repeated annually ever since we opened, and it’s something we’ve exported to other territories. This year, to celebrate the opening of our new home in London and the return of a more traditional spring marathon season, we commissioned Bobbi Gibb to create trophies to celebrate our champions. As is traditional, Boston’s up first: that we were able to engage Boston’s first woman to bring our Eliot Hare to three-dimensional reality is a true moment of pride.
–Bobbi Gibb, METER 2016
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