The Marathon’s Accidental Route to 26 Miles 385 Yards (original) (raw)

Sports|The Marathon’s Random Route to Its Length

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/sports/the-marathons-accidental-route-to-26-miles-385-yards.html

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On Olympics

The Marathon’s Random Route to Its Length

April 20, 2012

London

At the Summer Olympics, the marathon will be the only foot race measured by the standard system instead of the metric system.

And yet the precise distance of 26 miles 385 yards is entirely random, established at the 1908 London Games at least in part as an accommodation to the British royal family, not as an adherence to historical imperative.

When the modern Olympics began in Athens in 1896, a race of 40 kilometers, or 24.85 miles, was held to commemorate the legend of Pheidippides. He is the messenger who is said to have run from Marathon to Athens to announce a Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. And to have promptly died.

The 1900 Olympic marathon in Paris covered just over 25 miles, and the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis returned to the distance of 24.85 miles. This was more like cooking than civil engineering. Race directors designed their courses by a sense of feel, not by a fastidious recipe.

In Paris, according to David Wallechinsky’s “The Complete Book of the Olympics,” the route was so badly marked that some runners veered off course and had to share the road with bicyclists, automobiles, recreational runners and the occasional animal. One of the favorites stopped for a beer early in the race and dropped out.

The 1908 London Games established what is now the customary distance of the marathon. The exact reasons are in dispute, myth intertwining like a vine with fact over the past century. But the result, Wallechinsky said, was a race length that was “completely arbitrary.”

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