Registered as 'K.V. Switzer' to obscure her gender, Switzer ran with official bib number 261. Race co-director Jock Semple tried to tear off her bib mid-race, but her boyfriend, a hammer thrower, shoved him aside, and Switzer finished in roughly four hours and twenty minutes. The photographs of the confrontation became a landmark image in the fight for women's equality in sports; women were not officially allowed to enter Boston until 1972.
Switzer, a 20-year-old Syracuse University journalism student, trained with the men's cross-country team and signed up for Boston with her coach's blessing, using her initials to avoid drawing attention—not deception, she later insisted, since that was simply how she always signed her name. Race organizers had no formal rule against women at the time, but the assumption that only men would enter went unchallenged for decades.
Miles into the race, official Jock Semple, enraged at seeing a woman with a bib number, chased her down and grabbed her, shouting to get out of his race. Photographers captured the exact moment. Switzer's boyfriend Tom Miller, running alongside, body-checked Semple out of the way, and Switzer resolved to finish no matter what. She completed the marathon and went on to become a driving force behind the creation of the women's Olympic marathon, first run in 1984. Switzer would run Boston again in 2017, fifty years later, wearing the same number 261.
Key people: Kathrine Switzer, Jock Semple