Above the colorful sea of 30,000 runners heading toward the starting line for the Boston Marathon on April 20, there’s now something that doesn’t move. A new stationary figure—bronze, midstride, eyes fixed straight ahead—will mark the beginning of a race that has changed a lot since 1966.
“The Girl Who Ran” depicts Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb, the first woman to complete the marathon that year. Ms. Gibb—an accomplished artist—also sculpted the life-size monument, so the statue feels oddly personal for something meant for the public. Sixty years ago, about 100 yards from where it stands now, she hid in a forsythia bush, her long hair tucked beneath a hooded sweatshirt, waiting to leap into an event that wasn’t open to women.
On Monday, when the runners line up for the 130th Boston Marathon, women will make up nearly half of the competitors. Times have clearly changed. Still, the statue isn’t just a memorial to a single moment in her own life. In a phone interview from her home on the North Shore of Massachusetts, she framed it as something broader—something meant to speak beyond women running against old rules.
“I also want it to be for not just women, but men and women, because much as women were locked into a stereotype … so were men. We were segregated,” Ms. Gibb said, and it lands a little heavier than you might expect when you’re imagining a race morning. A recent ribbon-cutting ceremony at “The Girl Who Ran” marked the culmination of a nearly decade-long fundraising effort by Boston Marathon winners and private donors, coordinated by the 26.2 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the sport.
Misryoum reported that the statue is both rare and specific in a way most public works of art aren’t. “The Girl Who Ran” is not only the first Boston Marathon-related statue to represent a real woman, but it is also a rarity among public works of art. Most monuments that portray female figures are allegorical, such as the Statue of Liberty, says Sierra Rooney, an associate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her research shows there are around 400 monuments honoring real women in the United States, about 8% of all monuments.
Dr. Rooney is particularly struck by what she says is its living-presence quality: it depicts a living person, created by the athlete herself. “It is about the physical strength of a female body. And that’s quite unusual in the landscape of public monuments,” she said. “The cultural conception of what it means to be a hero has so long been bounded by sort of masculine ideals of being a politician, being a statesman, being an explorer,”—professions that historically have excluded women. And on a day where people will probably smell coffee and sunscreen and hear the odd squeak of sneakers on pavement, the statue’s bronze stillness will do its own kind of talking.
Still, Ms. Gibb doesn’t present her story as a tidy before-and-after. She grew up outside Boston running in the woods for the joy of movement and to commune with nature, and as a college student watching the marathon runners in 1964, she says it took her breath away. “I had never actually seen a group of human beings running like that together, and I felt very moved by it,” she said. “I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
Over the next two years, she built up her distances between her family’s home in Winchester and Tufts University, and the Museum of Fine Arts where she was taking art classes. She wore sturdy leather nurses’ shoes and a swimsuit under shorts as training gear; in snowy winter months, she layered on long underwear and wore boys’ buckle galoshes over wool socks. A marriage and a move to San Diego, California, didn’t stop her from writing to Boston Marathon organizers to request entry. They refused. Women were “not physiologically capable” of running 26.2 miles, their reply stated, and they couldn’t risk giving her a number. She crumpled the letter and threw it across the floor—rage joining the tranquility she’d felt while running.
Ms. Gibb tells it simply: after a night on Delmar Beach where she fell asleep, she knew she had to run the upcoming marathon. It wasn’t just endurance anymore. It was an opportunity to “prove this misconception about women wrong,” as she put it—so the other false beliefs that had kept women back for centuries could be questioned too. The next morning, her mother—who had disapproved of her free-spirited ways—finally agreed to drop her at the start line. There, Ms. Gibb hid in bushes with her brother’s Bermuda shorts, her swimsuit, a hooded sweatshirt, and brand-new boys’ running shoes.
After the fastest runners passed, she joined 500 men heading toward Boston. Soon she heard people behind her asking, “Is that a girl?” She turned and smiled. “I said, ‘I’m afraid if they see I’m a woman they’ll throw me out,’” she recalled. “And the guys around me said, ‘We won’t let them throw you out. It’s a free road.’ They were on my side. We had a great time.” A local radio station spotted her too and broadcast her progress, clipping along at a sub-three-hour pace until blisters from her new shoes slowed her down. By the time she crossed the finish line in 3 hours, 21 minutes, and 40 seconds—faster than two-thirds of the field that day—the governor of Massachusetts was waiting to shake her hand.
From there, the story kept moving, even when the spotlight didn’t. Ms. Gibb returned in 1967 to run again, without official sanction, and her finish was overshadowed by Katherine Switzer, who disguised her gender as “K. Switzer” on her application. When an official spotted Ms. Switzer on the course, he tried to tear off her bib to prevent the race from losing its accreditation, and a photojournalist caught the scene—photos that later became part of the iconic history of women running in the Boston Marathon.
Ms. Gibb was also the first woman to cross in 1968, then two other women followed, but by then the media frenzy moved on from the first trailblazers. The Boston Marathon officially opened to women in 1972. At the 100th anniversary in 1996, the Boston Athletic Association awarded Ms. Gibb a medal listing her three first-place finishes and including her name in the winner’s ring on the Boston Marathon Monument.
Now “The Girl Who Ran” bookends the course at the start, and it seems to keep pulling new runners into the same lane of purpose. Misryoum newsroom reported that at the ribbon-cutting, Hopkinton resident Joy Donohue described how she will touch Bobbi’s shoes every time she runs by so they “eventually turn shiny and bright.” She’ll join about 14,000 other women at the start of her 10th Boston Marathon this year—nearly half the competitors.
And for Ms. Gibb, the statue is also a reminder that she was not alone in trying to break barriers, even if she was the only woman running down Boylston Street to the finish that day in 1966. “The statue of a young woman wearing a swimsuit and Bermuda shorts ‘symbolizes all the pioneer women in running, but also the way women have fought for and attained equal or almost equal rights, civil and human rights, around the world,’” she said. “My run in 1966 was like a match lighting the fire. And that’s exactly what I wanted to happen.”
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