Out of the Shadows

Bobbi Gibb and a History of Firsts

WORDS BY ANDY WATERMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS MILLIMAN

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.

“Before my run in 1966, it was generally believed that women were physically unable to run marathon distances. This is the key point. It is not as if there were dozens of well-trained women running marathon distances – women didn’t run! Women themselves didn’t know they could run those distances because they were never allowed to.”

–Bobbi Gibb, METER 2016

Renaissance Woman

Bobbi Gibb is a true renaissance woman. In addition to her athletic accomplishments and her role as a catalyst in the move towards gender equality, she is a painter and sculptor, has worked as a researcher at MIT and practiced law while raising a family. As a sculptor she created three statues for the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials (the first year women ran the marathon at the Olympics), which were given out as awards for the podium finishers. Joan Benoit Samuelson finished first that year before going on to win the 1984 Olympic Marathon in LA. Samuelson treasured her prize, telling Running Times, “there are only three in the world. It's irreplaceable.”

“Running expresses my love of life. It’s a unity of the physical and the spiritual. I feel the life force of the earth flowing through me when I run. I feel a sense of joy. Art comes from my same love of life and nature and seeing the beauty within and outside of us. My love of science, physics, and biology, in particular, are part of my sense of awe and mystery of the sublime beauty of nature.”

–Bobbi Gibb, METER 2016

Forged in New England

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

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.