Every one of the millions of people who run a marathon is honouring a story that is probably wrong, over a distance fixed by a British royal box. The legend is familiar: after the Athenians defeated the Persians on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC, a messenger named Pheidippides ran the roughly 25 miles to Athens, gasped "Nenikēkamen" — "we have won" — and dropped dead. It is magnificent. It is also missing from the only near-contemporary source. Herodotus, writing within living memory of the battle, tells a different and far more impressive tale: Pheidippides was a professional courier sent from Athens to Sparta, about 150 miles away, to beg for help before the battle — a distance he is said to have covered in around two days. The dying dash from Marathon to Athens only appears in writers such as Plutarch and Lucian, five or six centuries later, and looks suspiciously like two stories welded together. Modern ultra-runners honour the older version in the Spartathlon, a 246-kilometre race from Athens to Sparta.
True or not, the legend was irresistible to the founders of the modern Olympics. For the first Games in Athens in 1896, the French philologist Michel Bréal proposed a race from Marathon bridge to the Olympic stadium, roughly 40 kilometres. To Greek delight it was won by Spyridon Louis, a water-carrier from the village of Maroussi, who became a national hero and, in Greek idiom, gave his name to a phrase meaning to run like the wind. The marathon was an instant institution — but not a fixed one. For more than a decade the distance wobbled between about 40 and 42 kilometres depending on the host city's geography. Nobody much cared; the point was the ordeal, not the number.
The royal 385 yards
London 1908 changed that. The organisers planned a course from Windsor Castle to the new White City stadium of roughly 26 miles. Royal convenience then intervened: the start was placed on the East Lawn at Windsor, by popular account so the royal children could watch from the castle, and the finish was arranged so runners would complete a part-lap of the track and stop directly in front of Queen Alexandra's royal box. The measured result was 26 miles and 385 yards — 42.195 kilometres — a number with no athletic, historical or mathematical significance whatsoever.
That race also supplied the sport's first great melodrama. The Italian Dorando Pietri entered the stadium first, exhausted and disoriented, turned the wrong way, and collapsed repeatedly on the track. Officials, unwilling to watch a man die in front of the Queen, helped him over the line — and he was promptly disqualified after an American protest, handing victory to Johnny Hayes of the United States. Queen Alexandra, moved by the spectacle, presented Pietri with a special gilded silver cup the next day, and he became far more famous than the winner; Irving Berlin even wrote a song called "Dorando".
The odd London distance did not immediately become law — Stockholm 1912 and Antwerp 1920 used slightly different courses — but in 1921 the International Amateur Athletic Federation, standardising the event, settled on 26 miles 385 yards as the official marathon distance. The reasons are debated; the effect is not. Every marathon since has carried Windsor's royal appendix, the ".2" that runners curse in the final mile.
The distance democratised
For most of the twentieth century the marathon remained a niche ordeal for wiry specialists. The Boston Marathon, founded in 1897 as a direct echo of Athens 1896, is the world's oldest annual marathon; women were not officially admitted until 1972, five years after Kathrine Switzer famously ran with a numbered bib as "K.V. Switzer" and race official Jock Semple tried to drag her off the course. The big-city running boom of the 1970s and 1980s — New York's five-borough race from 1976, London from 1981 — turned the distance into a mass participation rite, with tens of thousands of finishers a year and charity fundraising in the hundreds of millions.
The elite end kept its sense of theatre. At the 1960 Rome Olympics the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila won barefoot at night along the torchlit Appian Way, Africa's first Black Olympic champion, then won again in Tokyo in 1964 — in shoes, and weeks after an appendectomy. And in 2019 Eliud Kipchoge covered the distance in under two hours in Vienna — 1:59:40 — though in a paced exhibition that does not count as a world record. The number on the finishing clock changes; the number on the course never does. Pheidippides may never have run it, but 26 miles and 385 yards is now the most faithfully kept measurement in sport — a Greek myth, calibrated by an Edwardian nursery window.
Quiz nuggets
- Herodotus says Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta (about 150 miles) before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC; the fatal Marathon-to-Athens run comes from much later writers.
- The first modern Olympic marathon in 1896 was won by Greek water-carrier Spyridon Louis.
- The 26-mile-385-yard distance comes from the London 1908 course from Windsor Castle to the royal box at White City.
- Dorando Pietri was helped over the 1908 finish line and disqualified; Queen Alexandra gave him a special cup.
- The IAAF fixed the marathon at 42.195 km in 1921, and Abebe Bikila won the 1960 Olympic marathon barefoot.