Red, white & blueprint
I’ve promised a few times to post the text of the story I wrote for the Boston Marathon program. With the marathon over and all the programs distributed, here’s the text. (Note that I’ve started with the copy I submitted, and may have missed some of the edits made between submission and publication. Also note that the copy deadline, in early March, meant that some of the details here are obsolete; the discussion about the 2012 Trials has progressed since the time of writing.)
Headline: Red, white, & blueprint
Subhead: When it came to staging the Olympic Trials, Boston put on a clinic
In 2008, the organizers of the Boston Marathon added something to the weekend program they had never tried before: another marathon.
The day before 35,000 runners made their way from Hopkinton to Boston, 150 women lined up for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials–Women’s Marathon. The first three finishers would represent the US and run the Olympic Marathon in Beijing in August. The race started in front of the Hynes Convention Center and, after a short loop around Beacon Hill, ran four laps of a 10-km loop which crossed over the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (and featured long segments on Memorial Drive in Cambridge) before returning to Boston. The finish line was the same as that for the traditional Patriots’ Day event.
“I never anticipated what it would be like to come down Boylston Street,” says Blake Russell, “with the church bells ringing and the crowd yelling like thunder.” Russell, who is coached by longtime Boston-area coach Bob Sevene and lived in the area for years before following Sevene to California, finished third in 2:32:40 and went on to place 27th in 2:33:13 in Beijing.
“Everyone was trying to out-yell the person next to them,” says Deena Kastor of Mammoth Lakes, CA, who won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympic Marathon and won the 2008 Trials in 2:29:35.
“We put those women on a whole different stage,” says Dave McGillivray, race director for both marathons.
A whole different ballgame
Beginning in 1984, when two-time Boston Marathon champion Joan Benoit Samuelson won the first Trials in Olympia, Washington, and went on to win the first Olympic Marathon for women in LA, the US has chosen its women’s marathon team at races staged specially for that purpose. Before the US adopted the single-race trials format for men in 1968, Boston was part of the selection process for nearly a dozen Olympic teams.
The Trials were sometimes connected with local races (the 2004 Women’s Trials in St. Louis shared a weekend with the Spirit of St. Louis Marathon and half-marathon), and sometimes not. St. Louis could even claim an Olympic venue, starting the race at Francis Field, site of the 1904 Olympic Games.
Never before 2008, however, had the Trials been associated with an event on the scale of the Boston Marathon. And just as one expects more of a pizza in Naples, one expects more of a marathon when it’s held in Boston.
“St. Louis put on a great race,” says Elizabeth Phillips, who was chair of USATF’s Women’s Long Distance committee when the 2008 Trials was awarded to Boston. “They had a knowledgeable running community, but there just weren’t that many people. Times were changing, and our athletes were getting better. Our athletes deserve better.”
Two marathons in two days
“We were pleased withe the result,” says Guy Morse, Executive Director of the Boston Athletic Association. “The Olympic Trials were carried out with the level of professionalism and class the event calls for, and that’s why Boston and New York were chosen. We wanted a setting worthy of the effort put forth by the athletes, and I think we accomplished that. I’m aware of many compliments; I’m not aware of any complaints.”
The Trials were a two-year project for the BAA and McGillivray, whose DMSE team also produced the 2004 Trials in St. Louis. Boston was announced as the host city in 2006. In 2007, Boston hosted the USATF Women’s Marathon Championships as part of the Boston Marathon.
“I could say it was easy,” says McGillivray, “but it depends on your interpretation of ‘easy.’ We had 150 bodies instead of 35,000. We could put the athletes’ luggage in the trunk of my car and drive it down Boylston Street, not fill 45 school buses to drive 26 miles. We had two tables at every water station instead of 30. The race was over with all the athletes finished in a bit more than three hours, not seven. And when it came to the course, it was really just a 10-K. It seemed like we just shot the gun and picked up the last banana peels a few minutes later.”
The difference between Sunday and Monday was experience. “On Monday, we have lots of people who know what they’re doing, and improvement comes in terms of refinement. The Trials was creating something from nothing. We had to have vision. Creating the event was the challenge. Managing it was a snap.”
“Re-use of certain things made the Trials possible at that level. We already had a photo bridge at the finish line, bleachers at the finish on Boylston Street, and a medical tent at the finish line large enough to hold 600 runners. Those parts didn’t incur any additional expense, and we were able to do it on a much larger scale than a stand-alone event.”
As for last year’s 112th Boston Marathon, “We were all set for Monday on Friday,” says McGillivray to explain his strategy for staging two marathons on successive days. “On Saturday and Sunday, it was like Monday didn’t exist. We made sure everything was tightened up on Friday. We knew we had a big thing on Sunday, so we planned ahead.”
McGillivray’s team plans to carry that experience forward this spring, when the B.A.A. will add 5-K and one-mile races on Sunday (see page 116). “We’ll still need our game face on” to handle the three-race weekend, says McGillivray. “We’ll need to have the hay in the barn on Friday for years to come.”
The Boston difference
Ask athletes who ran the Trials in both 2004 and 2008 about what made Boston different, and they invariably mention the crowds. “The biggest difference was [the] huge fan base in the city for the citizens race the following day,” says Kastor. “This made for a thrilling and enthusiastic crowd lining the course.”
Robyn Friedman of Lambs Grove, Iowa, adds, “In St. Louis, we knew there would be a lot of people in some spots. They were packed in a few places on the course. In Boston, there were a lot of people everywhere.”
Friedman thinks the combination of the Trials with Boston Marathon brought in more fans. “There were a lot of runners from the Des Moines area who may not have made the trip just to see me run, but went for the Marathon.” Those runners included Friedman’s husband, Bryan, who ran 3:09:35 on Monday after Friedman’s ninth-place finish in 2:35:02 on Sunday.
“I knew many people that went to run Boston because of the bonus of the Trials also being there,” echoes Kastor. “There were runners from my husband’s running club, the High Sierra Striders.” (The tiny town of Mammoth Lakes, where Kastor is based, had three finishers on Monday.)
“[Boston] went far beyond our expectations,” said Phillips, who watched the race from a media vehicle. “Every time we made the loop, the crowd got bigger and louder. It was a exciting for our athletes to have a showcase like that.”
Local favorites
BAA runner Carly Graytock of Cambridge qualified for her second Trials by running a PR 2:43:19 at the 2006 Boston Marathon. Graytock had an idea what the Boston Trials was going to be like, because the previous fall, her fiancé, Terry Shea, had run the men’s Trials, which were held in Central Park the day before the New York City Marathon.
2008 was the second Trials for Shea, too, and Graytock’s one-word description for his first – the 2004 men’s Trials, held in Birmingham, Alabama – is “lonely.” New York, by contrast, had crowds three-deep along the course in the self-styled media capital of the world.
For 2008, Graytock sent an email to her research group at Cambridge-based ImmuniGen. “I didn’t know who would actually come. Running was an aspect of my life that didn’t come up much at work.” On race day, Graytock found a crowd of co-workers on Memorial Drive. “My boss had found a photo of me from the 2006 Boston Marathon, cropped it down to my face, printed several copies, and put them on sticks, like masks. It was a whole row of people with my face.”
“All my old co-workers were out,” adds Russell. “Plus, my husband’s family is huge, about 20 strong, and all of them came out.” Russell knew other friends who came to run the marathon and came a day early to watch the Trials, including her high-school track coach, whose daughter ran the marathon on Monday.
High visibility
One worry about placing the Trials races so close to a major marathon like Boston was that the Trials would be lost in the glare of the headline event. As it turned out, that didn’t happen.
“The Trials got every bit of the exposure it deserved,” says McGillivray. “You’re not going to see five Americans in the top five of any of the World Marathon Majors. There’s some excitement to that, and with the Trials it was guaranteed.”
“Boston did a much better job following up on the race in the media,” Russell adds. “It’s hard enough to get media attention for running as it is. The BAA had us in a convertible in front of the marathon on Monday, all the way back from Hopkinton. We were leading the parade.”
“I would like to see more creative ways of promoting our Olympic marathon team,” says Kastor. “After all, we showed how popular marathon running is on the streets of Boston.”
“We set an exciting example with the races in New York and Boston,” says Phillips. “We would be looking for an atmosphere like that again in 2012.”
Parker Morse, of Amherst, MA, covered his first Olympic Marathon Trials in 2000 for Runner’s World, and hasn’t missed a Boston Marathon since 1995. He has also written for the IAAF, Running Times, and New England Runner.
SIDEBAR: Looking ahead to 2012
While the USATF and the USOC have not yet announced plans for selecting the 2012 London Olympic marathon teams, Guy Morse, Executive Directory of the Boston Athletic Association says the BAA is enthusiastic about bidding again, but only if a new revenue model is put in place.
“Under the right conditions, we’d certainly consider doing it again,” said Morse. “The athletes enjoyed the experience, the federation and the athletes enjoyed the media attention, and the support from spectators was tremendous. The only obstacle to doing it again is purely one of finance.”
“It’s exciting to bid, but it’s expensive, too,” says Elizabeth Phillips of USATF. Among other expenses, the host organization takes on obligations for prize money ($250,000 in 2004 and 2008) and travel and lodging for athletes who qualify with “A” standards. Although the joint sponsorship packages presented by the New York Road Runners and Boston Athletic Association for the men’s and women’s Trials received interest from Olympic sponsors, at the end of the day, each organization footed virtually the complete bill for the respective Trials on its own, to the tune of $1 million each.
Would Dave McGillivray direct another Trials, balance-sheet aside? “Absolutely, yes.”