As with all such key moments in history, it was made seminal by a conjunction of factors – when, what, where, who.
When: By 1984, the pioneering work for women's running had been done. Since 1970, the world record had been broken 17 times, coming down from 3:02:53 to 2:22:43. The United States and other nations had held highly competitive trials for their teams for the first women's Olympic marathon. Benoit Samuelson, only days after knee surgery, could well have been a casualty of the competitive depth.
The New York City Marathon had accepted women officially in 1970, Boston in 1972. The United States created the world's first national women's marathon championship in 1974. The Avon global circuit of women's races had developed talent in places with no previous women's sports, and helped marathon athletes to be in Los Angeles from Bolivia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, and more. Avon had held six global marathon championships since 1977, and the women's marathon had been included in the European championships in 1982, and the IAAF World Championships in 1983. Women had raced marathons fast, competitively, and globally – but never before as Olympians.
What: When the Los Angeles Olympic Committee agreed to lobby for one (but only one) women's distance event to be added to the Olympic program, the decision was to go for the marathon. It proved inspired. Women worldwide saw women racing not in the elitist, inaccessible environment of a stadium track, but on regular city streets, passing stores and gas stations, schools and churches, scenery every woman in the world is familiar with. It's on the roads that women's running has boomed. It was the Olympic marathon, not the Olympic 3000 meters, that was their first inspiration.
Where: It was women's good fortune that their first Olympic marathon was run in America, in Los Angeles, the media capital of the world, and above all, on television. Billions watched women complete the sporting event that has always symbolized the ultimate in courageous endurance. Billions watched Benoit Samuelson give a superlative display of something every woman can do at some level – not perform agile miracles on the parallel bars or the diving board, but, in her rumpled uniform and quirky hat, simply run. Billions could relate to a distance that they knew was a long day's walk, and admire a woman running that far with such resilient power.
Who: Grete Waitz, who was second, would have been a deserving and admired gold medalist, but Grete was with every stride an elite athlete, a tall blond elegant track-honed thoroughbred. Whereas Joanie… “My mother later said that I looked like a little gray mouse skittering out of a hole,” she wrote of her iconic moment in Running Tide. Can you imagine Shalane Flanaghan or Kara Goucher revealing that? Benoit Samuelson always makes her heroic victory sound as homey as baking blueberry pie.
“I decided to break away because I felt hemmed in,” she wrote “[When] the first water station came up, I was darned if I was going to get into a crowd again just for a drink, so I skipped it.” That's her version of how she broke from the field, a move that has inspired a million words of tactical analysis.
Benoit Samuelson that day gained, and ever since has retained, such an enormous affectionate following because she manages to combine her extraordinary running with a persona of disarming ordinariness. The growth of women's running owes a lot to that no-fuss home-body image, as well as the time and place of her moment of history.
One other key thing historically happened in that race, 24 minutes after Benoit Samuelson finished. Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, an American-based Swiss, suffered extreme heat exhaustion, and staggered around her final lap on the horrifying edge of collapse. There were fears the episode would set women's running back, reviving talk of impropriety and gynecological damage.
But in the context of the supreme achievements of the 43 other finishers, no one made such an interpretation. Women showed that day that they can truly race the marathon. They also showed – for the first time in history – that they had earned the right to suffer physical exhaustion in public.
In the darkness of the tunnel, Benoit Samuelson had some moments for reflection.
“The noise was muffled and I heard my own footfalls,” she wrote. “I thought, 'Once you leave this tunnel, your life will be changed forever.'”
It was in fact a changed new world, one where women's running would become a mainstream culture, that she entered when she left the tunnel and ran out into the sunlight.