Who is marathon named after

The winners were given crowns of olive like the Olympic victors, and they also received a portion of a heifer sacrificed to Hera. Just as the Olympic prize-winners were allowed to dedicate statues of themselves, so the girl victors were granted the privilege of setting up their images in the temple of Hera, but these were paintings and not statues. At Sparta, girls seem always to have undertaken the same athletic exercises as boys, because tough, strong mothers were believed to produce good Spartan soldiers.

The bronze statuette of a girl runner above is probably from Sparta, where women were also expected to take part in athletics. Map Data. Terms of Use. Report a map error. Museum stories The marathon's ancient origins Senior Curator Judith Swaddling uncovers the ancient Greek origins of the long-distance endurance race, revealing the original 'marathon runner'.

Adapted from a Panathenaic amphora made in BC. Buy the book. More stories. Back to top. There are two roads out of the battlefield of Marathon towards Athens, one more mountainous towards the north whose distance is about It has been argued that the ancient runner took the more difficult northern road because at the time of the battle there were still Persian soldiers in the south of the plain.

Mount Penteli stands between Marathon and Athens, which means that, if Pheidippides actually made his famous run after the battle, he had to run around the mountain, either to the north or to the south. The latter and more obvious route matches almost exactly the modern Marathon-Athens highway, which follows the lie of the land southwards from Marathon Bay and along the coast, then takes a gentle but protracted climb westwards towards the eastern approach to Athens, between the foothills of Mounts Hymettus and Penteli, and then gently downhill to Athens proper.

This route, as it existed when the Olympics were revived in , was approximately 40 kilometres 25 mi long, and this was the approximate distance originally used for marathon races. However, there have been suggestions that Pheidippides might have followed another route: a westward climb along the eastern and northern slopes of Mount Penteli to the pass of Dionysos, and then a straight southward downhill path to Athens.

This route is considerably shorter, some 35 kilometres 22 mi , but includes a very steep initial climb of more than 5 kilometres 3. Another consequence of the London Olympics was that the British, disappointed by the poor performances of their runners who had led the mad charge out of Windsor , held an annual Polytechnic Marathon, named after the organising club, over the same course.

This became the stage for many world-beating performances, from the inaugural race in Henry Barrett, through the golden years of Jim Peters —4, during which he reduced the world record to , and then to the s Basil Heatley, ; Buddy Edelen, ; Morio Shigematsu, Apart from the Olympic Marathon and Boston, there were few other significant races established before the Second World War.

After Marathons were started in Japan at Fukuoka , Twente in Holland and the Athens Classical Marathon was resurrected over the original course with an additional m in The Japanese took to Marathon running with enthusiasm, and by the s the Fukuoka race was indisputably the best in the world. It was an elite race, featuring the top Japanese and a few runners invited from overseas, and drew widespread public attention.

Other races at this time may have had more runners, although none had more than a few hundred, but no other had the quality of Fukuoka. Toru Terasawa had already run in , but in the race the Australian Derek Clayton reduced the record to Clayton purportedly beat his own record time in in Antwerp, recording The figures had a spurious accuracy to them.

Doubts about the accuracy of the course have never been conclusively resolved, since the method of measurement employed by the organisers, the average of car odometer readings, is known to be extremely unreliable.

At the same time as the top Marathon runners were beginning to run inside five-minute mile pace for the distance, the seeds of a popular revolution were being planted. A New Yorker, Fred Lebow, organised a Marathon on a shoestring, comprising a short lap to start and then four full laps of Central Park.

Attracting little over runners it was no different to many other races at the time, struggling to find the space on the road, a modest budget and enough competitors to make it all worthwhile. The number of runners grew slowly but steadily, and Lebow secured a sponsorship deal with Olympic Airlines for the race. The sponsorship lapsed, and Lebow was thrown back onto his own resources.

The American Bicentennial fell in , and Lebow used his connections with City Hall to move the Marathon out of Central Park and run it through the five boroughs of the City.

The route started at the Staten Island end of the Verazzano Narrows Bridge and ran through all the various ethnic districts of Brooklyn before crossing into Queens at halfway, and then over the 59th Street Bridge at 25km. Up First Avenue for 5km before passing into the Bronx, runners then returned to Manhattan on Fifth Avenue through Harlem, turning into Central Park only for the final 5km.

Shorter himself lined up for this race, alongside Bill Rodgers who had won the Boston Marathon in and now recorded the first of four consecutive wins in New York.

Some more runners finished behind Rodgers in the first-ever Marathon race for the masses. People could not help but notice the new phenomenon when it took place through the centre of the cities in which they lived.

Berlin established not just a city-wide Marathon in , but also a 25km race on a different date. The London Marathon was first held in , after Chris Brasher, overwhelmed by his experience of the New York Marathon, resolved to organise something similar in London. Suddenly, no major world city was complete without its own Marathon, and a lot of minor cities got in on the act, too.

Inclusiveness was the watchword, as many cities tried using Marathons to boost their tourist industries. In a marked turn-around from pre-New York days, women, as well as men, were welcome. The Boston Marathon had gained notoriety when an official tried to eject a woman in mid-race Katherine Switzer, who had entered under her initial and surname only.

Although the attempt was unsuccessful few other Marathons at the time were more accommodating. The burgeoning mass movement changed all that.

New York admitted women from the inaugural race and Boston followed suit in , as women increasingly moved centre stage. She reduced it to in and in Unfortunately, when the course was checked by relatively newly accepted accurate methods in it was found to be short by about m.

Waitz, Kristiansen and Mota were lonely pioneers — Rosa Mota won the World Championships at which Kristiansen won the m by a margin of 2km. Radcliffe is also out on her own, but Naoko Takahashi and Catherine Ndereba broke before she did, 50 years after Jim Peters did so. There are other women who have approached or surpassed this mark since, and many of them are Kenyan. Part of the explanation is the globalisation of a sport, freed from its amateur past, which offers rich rewards to those who excel.

But there are rewards of a different kind for all participants in the Marathon. Quite what they are is sometimes hard to define, but they are none the less real for that. For the latest race dates please consult the official online AIMS calendar. You can also subscribe to the AIMS calendar in your calendaring application of choice, whether on your phone, tablet or computer. History of the Marathon by Hugh Jones.

AIMS Patron. Sports Partner.