Going the Distance: The Road to the 1984 Olympic Women's Marathon

The 1984 Los Angeles Games hosted, for the first time in Olympic history, a women's marathon race. It took the efforts of several important factions to accomplish the event. First, women runners demonstrated that they were capable of running great distances in increasingly faster times. Second, the popular media publicised those performances, often mitigating athletic commentary with observations about the runners' femininity, attractiveness and relationships with men. Finally, commercial sponsors joined the ranks in this marathon battle to finance important events, running circuits and advocacy groups while simultaneously promoting their own brands of commodity feminism. In the end, it took the coming together of the physical activists, media advocates and corporate champions to accomplish this milestone in sport history.