On June 17, Benoit had won the Olympic Trials Exhibition 10,000 meters race by an impressive margin. Fittingly, the sculpture was created by none other than Roberta Gibb, who had broken the gender barrier of the Boston Marathon so many years before. Benoit and the two other qualifiers, Julie Brown and Julie Isphording, each received a bronze figurine of a running woman for their success in the Olympic trials. She recovered quickly and won the qualifying race to secure one of three spots on the American team. Seventeen days before the Olympic trials she had undergone knee surgery. With the promise of the first ever women's Olympic Marathon in 1984, Benoit hoped to be in her best shape ever so she could make a run for the gold.Īs she lined up for the start of the Olympic race, though, Benoit felt lucky to be in the field at all. In 1979 she entered the Boston Marathon, her second marathon ever, as a Bowdoin College senior and won the women's division, setting an American record in the process.Īfter graduation, Benoit worked as the women's track and cross-country coach at Boston University while she continued to train 100 miles a week. When she showed up at practice one day sore from a thirteen-mile run the day before, the coach made her sit out the rest of the season and Benoit quit the team and started running full time. In college she played field hockey while continuing to run. As part of her recovery from that accident she began to run and she found that she liked running just as much as skiing.
As a high school sophomore she broke her leg on the slopes. Her earliest athletic passion was skiing, taught to her by her father who had been an army skier during World War II. Among the favored starters were Norwegian Grete Waitz, who had never lost a marathon she had finished Portugal's Rosa Mota, who had won the marathon in the European Championships in 1982 and American Joan Benoit, who had set the world record of 2:22:43 in the woman's record many times and had run the first sub-2:30 marathons, had never met Benoit in a marathon race.īenoit was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1957. Olympic Marathon Los Angeles 1984 XXIII Olympiadīack to History & Records | Previous Chapterįollowing as it did the long battle for inclusion in Olympic competition, the race that took place on Augwas something like a victory lap for all women marathoners.