All Things Boston
Joan Benoit
Joan Benoit-Samuelson will long be remembered as the gutsy runner who ran away with the gold at the first-ever women’s Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles in 1984. Coming off knee surgery a mere 17 days before she won the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, she completely dominated the Olympic event. When the pace seemed too slow for her, she made the audacious move to run away from the pack and looked over her shoulder to find that none of her competitors was coming with her.
Joanie had burst onto the marathon scene five years previous when she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon wearing a Bowdoin College shirt and a Boston Red Sox cap backwards and ran a 2:35:15, slicing a massive eight minutes off the course record; she came back to Boston in 1983 and ran an astonishing 2:22:43, a then world record.
Not to be pigeonholed as merely a fierce runner, she is also a race director, heading up the very popular Beach to Beacon 10K in her native Maine. In addition, she is a master gardener.
