Joan Benoit

Joan Benoit Samuelson (born May 16, 1957) is an American marathon runner who was the first women's Olympic Games marathon champion, winning the gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Benoit enjoyed success at non-marathon distances as well, winning the prestigious Falmouth Road Race (7.1 miles) a total of six times (1976, 1978, 1981–1983, and 1985), breaking the course record on four of those occasions.

In 1977, after two years at Bowdoin, she accepted a running scholarship to North Carolina State, where she began concentrating solely on her running.

She earned All-America honors at NC State in both 1977 and 1978, and in 1978 helped lead the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship.

She won the Broderick Award (Honda Sports Award) as the nation's best female collegiate cross country runner for 1979–80.

After returning to Bowdoin to complete her degree, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown.

She won the race, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record.

She had hoped to be within 40 minutes of her 1979 time, but did even better than that with a time of 3:04:00, within thirty minutes of her winning time, again winning her age group (60–64).

In 1981, she captured the U.S. 10,000 meter championship, posting a time of 33:37.50.

Despite having surgery on her Achilles tendons two years earlier, she repeated her marathon success with a victory in 1983, setting a course record of 2:22:43.

That took more than two minutes off the world's best time, set by Norway's Grete Waitz in the London Marathon only a day earlier.

Her Boston record was not broken for another 11 years.

Winning the race four times, Benoit has run the Bix 7 road race in Davenport, Iowa, annually since 1983.

In March 1984, Benoit injured her knee during a 20-mile training run, forcing her to undergo arthroscopic knee surgery just 17 days before the United States Olympic Women's Marathon Trials were scheduled.

However, she recovered from the surgery much more quickly than expected, and was the favorite in the trials, at Olympia, Washington.

She beat runner-up Julie Brown by 30 seconds, winning in 2:31:04.

Three months later, she competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, winning the first Olympic Women's Marathon in 2:24:52, several hundred meters ahead of Grete Waitz, Rosa Mota, and Ingrid Kristiansen.

She held the fastest time for an American woman at the Chicago Marathon for 32 years after winning the race in 1985.

Her time at the Boston Marathon was the fastest time by an American woman at that race for 28 years.

Although she won the 1985 Chicago marathon, defeating Kristiansen and Mota in an American Record time of 2:21:21 (that would last as the AR for 18 years until broken by Deena Kastor in 2003 in London), Benoit was hampered for some years after her Olympic victory by injuries and struggled to compete in major races.

She received the 1985 James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States.

Benoit wrote Running Tide (1987) and Running for Women (1995).

In 1998 she founded the Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race, a 10 km race held in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, each August, going from Crescent Beach State Park to Fort Williams Park and Portland Head Light.

The race attracts many of the world's top distance runners.

Elite runners often run this race and then, the following weekend, run the Falmouth Road Race on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Benoit won that race several times, and ran it last in 2022, finishing as the 69th woman overall and first in her age group.

She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.

Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Benoit took to long-distance running to help recover from a broken leg suffered while slalom skiing.

At Bowdoin College she excelled in athletics.

In 2003, at age 46, Benoit won the Maine half-marathon, defeating a field dominated by runners two decades her junior, and she was faster than all but six men overall, finishing in 1:18.

In 2006, she helped pace former cycling champion Lance Armstrong as he competed in the New York City Marathon.

At the 2008 US Olympic Team trials, at the age of 50, she finished in 2:49:08, setting a new US 50+ record and beating her personal goal at the time of a mid-2:50s marathon.

When she ran the New York City Marathon on November 1, 2009, she broke the Senior Masters record for runners older than 50 with a final time of 2:49:09.

On October 10, 2010, she ran 2:47:50 for 43rd place at the Chicago Marathon—the site of her American record a quarter century earlier—missing her goal of qualifying for an eighth Olympic Marathon Team Trials race by 1:50, but recording the fastest-ever performance by a woman over 52.

Later that month she ran in the Athens Classic Marathon for fun and finished in 3:02, the slowest time of her career; she was not fully healed from her Chicago performance.

In April 2011, Joan competed in the Boston Marathon, completing the course in 2:51:29 and placing 1st in her age group.

Between 2013 and 2015, Samuelson ran the Boston Marathon each year, and setting three of the four fastest marathon times for the 55–59 age group.

None are recognised by the World Masters Athletics since the Boston Marathon course does not comply with IAAF regulations.

Her times are 2:50:33 (2013), 2:52:15 (2014), and 2:54:26 (2015).

In 2019, Benoit ran the Boston Marathon again, forty years after her 1979 win.