Collapse of a 30-Year Hoax
And the pioneers who first challenged the AAU ban on women’s distance running.
by Julia Chase-Brand, Md, Phd
This article was orginally published by Marathon & Beyond. It ceased publication in 2016, you can find their archives here. This article was orginally published in March/April 2015. Julia Chase-Brand has given permisson to post. You can listen to our episode with Julia here.
The passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920 raised American women’s aspirations, but it also unleashed a powerful backlash among conservatives. In the United States, this conflict played out strikingly in the world of women’s track: after gaining the right to compete in the 1928 Olympics, American women suddenly found themselves banned for 30 years from all track events except the sprints.
The struggle between the women runners and the American sports authorities was not a clean fight. It was precipitated by a deliberate media hoax in 1928, followed by a nationwide ban on women competing at any distance beyond 220 yards. The Amateur Athletic Union upheld this ban for three decades by threat- ening lifetime suspension for those who would attempt the longer runs. Their coaches and supporters were threatened as well. Ken Foreman was even arrested twice for training Doris Heritage on a university track. It took the International Olympic Committee, the 1960 Olympics, and a decade of escalating challenges by a spirited group of women to force the AAU to back down step by step until by 1974, even the marathon was officially sanctioned for women—a political victory that was capped 10 years later by Joan Benoit’s inspiring athletic victory in that first women’s Olympic marathon in 1984.
The 1928 Amsterdam Olympics
The story begins at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where for the first time, the host country proposed to allow women onto the Olympic track. This proposal was met with fierce opposition at the highest levels of the international sports movement. Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, is quoted as saying in 1928: “As to the inclusion of women to the Games, I remain strongly against it.” Avery Brundage, the up-and-coming head of the American AAU who would dominate American amateur athletics for the next half-century, expressed a similar sentiment. “You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games . . . I’m not so sure but they were right.”
But the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Committee stood its ground and included two track events for women: the 100-meter dash and the 800-meter run. The 100-meter dash was won by American Betty Robinson in a world-record time of 12.2 seconds, and in the 800-meter run, Germany’s Lina Radke also set a world record with a time of 2:16.8, with the second- and third-place finishers bettering the old record as well. American Florence MacDonald was sixth, setting an American record of 2:22.6. In short, it was a fine showing by the women in both events.
What happened next, however, is astonishing and reveals the reactionary agenda that would play out behind the scenes in the United States after the Amsterdam Olympics. One day after the women’s 800-meter final, American papers reported that in the 800-meter final “. . . 6 of the 9 runners were completely exhausted and fell headlong to the ground. Several had to be carried off the track” (New York Times, August 3, 1928). The English paper the Daily Mail confirmed these reports and accompanied its article with head shots of five agonized half-milers grimacing at the finish line. The New York Times’s final assessment was that “this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength.”
The American sports authorities, under new president Avery Brundage, quickly agreed. Within months, the women’s division of the Amateur Athletic Federation, the precursor of the Amateur Athletic Union, announced its opposition to women’s participation in the Olympics and in its stead began officially promoting “play days” for women, which were to be noncompetitive and of a “joyful” nature (American Women’s Track and Field, Louise Mead Tricard, 1996). All distances beyond 220 yards were abolished. Women were encouraged to sprint, play tennis, and enjoy field hockey—but all in a spirit of camaraderie rather than competition. Endurance events were considered “unladylike”—with the obvious exception of childbirth. Within the year, all middle-distance runs for women were banned in the United States, and this ban remained in place for three decades.
A hoax uncovered
But as Daniels and Tedder reveal in their book, A Proper Spectacle (2000), this tale of the “collapsing half-milers” in the 1928 Olympics was a total fiction, and even the photos were faked. When I recently reviewed the film footage of the 1928 800-meter final, it showed a clean, strategically run race in which the first three finishers all broke the world record. One Canadian runner, Jean Thompson, did fall at the finish line but was quickly pulled to her feet by an official. That was all. There was no jostling or crowding and none of the general carnage that was still being described to us runners in the 1950s and ’60s. (You can watch the race by accessing www.olympic.org/videos/amsterdam-1928-radke-lina.)
Daniels and Tedler then examined the five head shots of the agonized finishers that had accompanied the 1928 articles and realized the deliberate nature of this hoax. The headshots were not of half-milers at all. They were selected (and not for their beauty or femininity) from finish-line photos in the 100-meter heats.
In Europe, where spectators had watched the actual race, women continued to compete in the middle distances and cross-country for the next 30 years, but in America, the myth of the “collapsing half-milers” was treated as gospel truth and was used by the women’s AAU well into the late 1950s to justify banning women from all middle- and long-distance competition “for their own good.”
In 1954 an Ohio runner, Grace Butcher, found inspiration in the news stories about Englishwoman Diane Leather, the “female Roger Bannister,” who was repeatedly setting world records in the women’s mile. Grace and her coach tried to persuade the AAU to allow longer runs for women in the United States, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. After several years of campaigning, Grace was warned that if she didn’t desist from this campaign, she would be banned from all athletics.
At about the same time, English middle-distance runner Chris Slecum moved to the USA to marry American Olympian Gordon McKenzie and was stunned to find that in her new country, all her best events were forbidden, so in 1957, she too spoke to the AAU president, Frances Kaszubski, who said to her in complete earnestness: “American women will never run more than the 220, my dear. It makes them too muscular and makes it hard for them to have children” (personal communication, C. McKenzie). Chris endeared herself to us early runners a few years later by running a 10K race in Washington, DC, shortly after her daughter’s birth, wearing a sign that read, “If I can carry a baby for 9 months, I can run a 10K.” But the level of discourse with the AAU was often frankly demeaning. Sara Mae Berman, three-time Boston Marathon winner, and Grace Butcher both had high-ranking AAU officials tell them they were “just too old” or “just publicity seekers” when they sought changes in the rules. When I challenged the AAU in 1961, AAU President Kaszubski put her arm around my shoulders and, pointing to Grace Butcher, said, “You see Grace down there? She used to be pretty like you are, Julia—before she started trying to run distance. Don’t do it, Julia.” When I finally dared tell Grace this story in 2012, a half century later, she hooted with laughter. At least Grace got the last laugh, but it was demeaning at the time.
The turning point: the 1960 Olympic Trials
Then, in 1957, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) dropped a bombshell. After a 30-year hiatus, the European middle-distance runners had finally prevailed: the women’s 800-meter race would once again be contested in the 1960 Rome Olympics. The American Women’s AAU was caught completely off guard and had to hastily backpedal. After banning the middle distances for three decades, it now had only three years to produce a team. Now Grace Butcher found the AAU knocking at her door asking that she and her coach run a “demonstration” 880-yard run for the AAU just to make sure this distance was “feasible.” Next, at the 1958 Indoor Nationals, the Women’s AAU allowed an “exhibition” 880 race for women, which Grace won. Finally, in the Outdoor Nationals of 1958, the Women’s AAU sanctioned the first 880-yard championship in America in three decades, with Lillian Greene and Florence McArdle placing one-two. And now there were only two years left to prepare for the Olympics.
The 1960 Olympic Trials were held in Abilene, Texas, in mid-July. The Olympic standard for the women’s 800 meters that year was 2:12.0, and thus far the best American time was 2:17.5—so unless two or more runners ran 2:12 or better, only the winner of the 800-meter finals would go to Rome.
Yet there we were, a collection of 30 girls and women assembled to compete for that single spot in a race that would have gotten all of us banned by the AAU only three years earlier. Who were we, and where did we come from virtually overnight?
At one end of the age and experience spectrum was 49-year-old Stella Walsh, the Polish 100-meter gold medalist in the 1932 Olympics and silver medal winner in 1936, who had become a U.S. citizen and was trying for one last shot at Olympic glory. Chris McKenzie was now 29 and in the previous two years had gained both American citizenship and the U.S. Outdoor 440 championship. Grace Butcher was 27 and had won the 1959 U.S. 880 Outdoor Nationals—but after years of campaigning for the longer runs, she was prevented from making the finals in Abilene by a stress fracture in her foot.
At the other end of the age spectrum was a group of untested 16- and 17-year- olds, myself included. I had run my first 880 only two weeks before the Trials. From this group, three runners made the finals: Doris Severtson, Judy Shapiro, and Leah Bennett, all of whom would go on to become part of America’s first great wave of women’s middle- and long-distance runners. Doris was a quiet woods runner from Washington State who had traveled 2,500 miles, sitting up in a Greyhound bus for five days, to compete in the Nationals and Olympic Trials. Judy was a California teen whose mom popped her into the family car and drove her cross-country for her first national competition. Leah was discovered in the presidentially mandated 600-yard walk/run fitness test given at her school, and the irony in this is huge. Under President Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership, beginning in 1957-58, all boys and girls in the United States were to be tested in the 600-yard distance—yet as far as the Women’s AAU was concerned, women were still banned from running more than 220 yards.
Rounding out the field of nine finalists in Abilene in the 1960 Olympic Trials was a group of older sprinters who had moved up to the half mile in the previous two years in hopes of securing an Olympic berth in this newly minted event: Lillian Greene, Louise Mead, Ruth Ann Brand, and Rose Lovelace. For Lillian Green and Rose Lovelace, African-American women from New York and Cleveland, respectively, Abilene, Texas, brought them face to face with the legacy of the Jim Crow laws. They were denied access to the restaurants and stores in town, and Judy Shapiro’s mother took on the role of housemother, providing the black competitors with food and other necessities from town. Rose Lovelace remembers that when she appealed to the AAU officials for help, she was told only, “Don’t mention this to anyone when you go back home to Cleveland.”
However, the winner at Abilene was none of the above runners. Taking first place and setting an American record of 2:15.6 was a virtual unknown, 16-year- old Billie Pat Daniels, who had run her first 880 race only four months before the Abilene Trials. Rose Lovelace was second in a time of 2:15.7, missing the Rome Olympics by only one-tenth of a second, a fact that would haunt her for years to come. Doris Severtson placed third (2:17.6), Louise Mead was fourth (2:19.1), and in fifth was Judy Shapiro (2:19.5), followed by Ruth Ann Brand, Leah Bennett, Chris McKenzie, and Lillian Greene. Over the next four weeks, none of the finalists met the 2:12 Olympic standard, so in accordance with AAU rules, only Billie Pat Daniels boarded the plane for Rome. Billie Pat was disqualified for a fall in her heat at Rome but not before almost being sent home by the AAU because she was dating high jumper John Thomas, who was black—and yes, those were indeed the days.
The longer runs
And now that the door had opened a crack, we began to push for the longer distances. In 1961, the year after the Olympic Trials, I openly challenged the AAU ban on women’s distance running by submitting my entry to a five-mile road race in Manchester, Connecticut. The AAU announced that I would be sus- pended if I showed up to run. Headlines proclaimed “Tomboy Out on a Limb” (Life magazine), “Female Huckleberry Finn . . . ,” “College Girl Horning In,” “. . . Marathons to Maintain Nifty 118.” A Finnish nudist asked for the outline of my bare feet, and a South African woman wrote to tell me of an aunt who in the 1920s ran 30 miles to market each week.
To my surprise, on race day I was joined at the starting line by Chris McKenzie and a local high school girl named Dianne Lechausse. From the media’s point of view, the three of us were the antithesis of the “Russian shot-putter” stereotype, and they loved it: Chris, a pretty blond-haired mother with her cute-as-a-button toddler; Diane, a petite high school ballet dancer; and me in my skirted blue Smith College gym suit. Faced with the overwhelming support of the male distance runners and of the media, the AAU backed down. Instead of suspending us, they chose to begin allowing women’s cross-country competition three months later, in the spring of 1962.
By 1963, two women had completed marathons—Arlene Pieper at Pikes Peak (1959) and Merry Lepper at Culver City (1963). (Lyn Carman, also running in that 1963 race, was grabbed by AAU officials; she punched free, but was shaken, and dropped out after 18 miles.) In 1966, Bobbi Gibb made headlines by running the venerable Boston Marathon, and a few months later, Lyn Carman completed Culver City, now the fourth American woman to complete the marathon. In 1967, Kathy Switzer joined Gibb at Boston, and when race director Jock Semple attempted to tear off Kathy’s race number, her boyfriend body-blocked Semple. The iconic photos of this encounter clinched it: American women were not going to be pushed off the roads, and now a sports issue became a feminist issue—which of course it always had been.
Bobbi Gibb was the first woman in Boston in 1966, ’67, and ’68, and Sara Mae Berman in the next three years: 1969, ’70, and ’71. The number of women running Boston each year was increasing steadily, and in 1972 the Boston Marathon officials officially recognized a women’s division, making that year’s winner, Nina Kuscsik, the first official women’s Boston Marathon champion. Nina and other distance runners formed the Women’s Long Distance Running Committee that began the organized movement for full equality for the American women distance runners at home and in the Olympics. (See accounts by Kuscsik,1978, and Hansen, 2013).
In 1974, the AAU belatedly held its first National Marathon Championship for women. The winner was Judy Ikenberry, which is the married name of Judy Shapiro, the teenager who had placed fifth in the 1960 Olympic Trials in Abilene. Doris Severtson, the third-place finisher in Abilene, had become Doris Brown Heritage, who made the U.S. Olympic Team in both 1968 and 1972 and was five-time winner of the International Cross-Country Championships. Billie Pat Daniels, the first-place finisher in Abilene, went on to win the 880 again in the 1961 Nationals and then switched to the pentathlon, making the Olympic team in both 1964 and 1968 under her married name Pat Winslow Connolly. Leah Bennett Ferris, the seventh-place finisher in Abilene, went on to win seven national medals in the half mile, including three gold medals.
And now comes the truly sweet ending to this story. In 1984, when American Joan Benoit won that first women’s Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles in a time of 2:24:52, she stood on the podium and publicly thanked the pioneer women runners who had come before her. What she did not know was that standing there among the thousandsof cheering spectators were the first-,third-, and fifth-place finishers fromthat Abilene 800-meter race a quarter century before along with the firstofficial woman’s Boston Marathonwinner. Pat Winslow Connelly was on the infield coaching Evelyn Ashford,who would win Olympic gold the next day in the 200 meters. Doris Brown Heritage was there as an assistant coach for women’s long-distance running, and in the stands above were Nina Kuscsik, the 1972 winner at Boston, and Judy Shapiro Ikenberry, fifth in Abilene and first in that first U.S. Marathon Championship in 1974. How far we had all come in a quarter century, and how fitting that they were there!
The lingering question
One question still hangs in the air: why? Why did the American Women’s AAU, the very organization that was supposed to support and develop women athletes, fight so long and so hard against allowing women to run the middle and long distances? After all, AAU President Kaszubski had been a top field athlete herself who had won nine national medals over a 20-year career and competed in the 1948 Olympics. Why was she willing to play the “bad guy” in this struggle?
The answer, I believe, is twofold. First, Kaszubski seems to have believed the myth of the “collapsing half-milers of 1928.” Grace Butcher recalls that at that first 1958 “exhibition” half-mile race, Kaszubski actually came down on the track, interrupted the starter’s commands, and lectured the runners that under no circumstances were they to sit or lie down after the race or give the appearance of collapse. Pat Winslow Connelly and Judy Ikenberry have told similar stories.
Equally important is the fact that for a half century, American amateur athletics was dominated by Avery Brundage, and those who served in the AAU were bound by his policies. And Brundage had the dubious distinction not only of opposing the participation of women in the 1928 Olympics but later, as president of the AAU, of suspending both Babe Didrikson and Jesse Owens from amateur sport and blocking the return of Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals until long after Thorpe’s death.
Epilogue
I have tracked down about half the runners from the 1960 Abilene 800-meter race and most of the early marathoners. We are all in our 70s and 80s now. Most married and had children. Many coached, ran, and competed into their 50s, 60s, and even beyond. Billie Pat Daniels married Olympian Hal Connolly, raised seven children, and coached until two years ago—so much for exercise-induced infertility. Grace Butcher at age 80 still rides horseback and runs the woods of her Ohio farm. She won a total of 25 masters titles, is a published poet, a motorcyclist, and a retired English professor. Sara Mae Berman made the U.S. team in Nordic skiing in 1968-69 and was a five-time member of the U.S Ski-Orienteering team. Bobbi Gibb became a lawyer and a sculptor.
Louise Meade was a top sports historian. Lillian Green got her PhD and was appointed director of the UNESCO Physical Education and Sports Program. Nina Kuscsik, an RN, won both the Boston and New York marathons and went on to head the AAU Long-Distance Committee. Leah Ferris, Chris McKenzie, and Doris Brown Heritage spent their working years coaching, as did Judy Ikenberry, who also runs Race Central, a race-scoring company. Merry Lepper got her PhD in biology, taught at the University of Wisconsin, and then in her 40s became a veterinarian. I got my PhD in animal behavior, studied bats and gorillas, taught at Barnard College, and then got my MD at age 53.
Some of these early runners have died. Lyn Carman, who ran with Merry Lepper, succumbed to ALS in 2014. Louise Meade, Lillian Greene, Diane Gallardo, and Sandra Knott have all passed as well. Stella Walsh was murdered in 1980 and found by autopsy to be a genetic mosaic, neither wholly male nor female. Many of the early runners had some sense that this was the case, but most expressed a certain compassion for someone who had been dealt such an anomalous hand by nature and felt she had handled it with dignity.
Some of these early runners were never recognized until recent years for their accomplishments. Merry Lepper’s 3:37:07 at the 1963 Culver City Marathon was largely overlooked until the publication of David Davis’s book Marathon Crasher in 2012. But perhaps the most delightful “where are they now” story is that of Arlene Pieper Stine, the young mother who spent more than nine hours walk-jogging the Pikes Peak Marathon in 1959, accompanied on the ascent by her 9-year-old daughter, Kathy. After the race, Arlene went back to running her ladies-fitness gym and went on with her life. She did not find out until 2009, when she was 79 years old, that she is technically the first American woman to complete a sanctioned marathon, and her proud grandsons have set up a website so she can sell autographed photos of herself standing in her sneakers atop Pikes Peak in 1959.
In June 2014, Gary Corbitt arranged a tele conference call among nine of the surviving pioneers: Chris McKenzie and Arlene PieperStine (age 84), Grace Butcher (80), Sara MaeBerman (78), and Judy Ikenberry, Doris Brown Heritage, Bobbi Gibb, Merry Lepper and me,all 72. It was the first time that some of these women had ever had a chance to speak to each other, and the mood was exuberant and joyous. We had lived to see “running the roads” become a symbol of the emerging women’s movement. As Bobbi Gibb put it, “They were not going to put me in a box on the shelf because I was a woman.” For many of us, running the woods and roads had been our personal liberation as girls raised in the conservative 1940s and 1950s. As Doris Heritage, who spent her entire career running and coaching, put it, “We have spent our lives passing on this freedom to the next generations.”
—To my husband, George, and brother Charlie, who read innumerable drafts, and to the wonderful women runners who have shared their stories with me over the past two years.
References
Daniels, S. & Tedder, A. 2000. A Proper Spectacle. Women Olympians 1900-1936. Dun- stable, England: Priory Press.
Davis, D. 2012. Marathon Crasher. The Life and Times of Merry Lepper, the First American Woman to Run a Marathon. An eBook published by Thomas Dunne Books.
Hansen, J. 2013. A Long Time Coming. Running through the women’ s marathon revolution. An eBook printed by CreateSpace.
Kuscsik, N. 1978. “The History of Women’s Participation in the Marathon” The Long Distance Runner. New York: Urizen Books.
Tricard, Louise Meade. 1996. American Women’ s Track and Field. A History, 1895 through 1980. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
