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Where are the Contenders?
Why Americans don't win the
Boston Marathon
by Hal Higdon
It's a classic movie moment, but even if you haven't viewed the 1954 film, On The Waterfront, you probably have seen a clip or at least know the line spoken by Marlon Brando, pugilist turned longshoreman: "I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum."
Those words echoed in my mind as I rode the press truck preceding the lead pack in the Boston Marathon last week. Into the Newton hills, a half dozen Africans had taken control of the race with a lone American gamely hanging onto their pace: Alan Culpepper. When Ethiopia's Hailu Negussie made his break, Culpepper vanished from view, but survived and eventually finished fourth, best showing by an American since Dave Gordon's fourth in 1987.
That's two decades of frustration for fans of American road racing, but it's not that Americans don't run well at Boston. We don't even run! Where are the contenders? No slam at Alan, but I could probably name five or ten other Americans capable of running with or near him and the top Africans. This is true on the distaff side as well, given the success of our women recently in world cross-country. Winning is another matter, but you can't win--or even contend--if you don't show up.
Granted, runners have various reasons for selecting the one or two marathons they run a year, one of them being money. It's no fun to train your heart out for a year and finish 16th and out of the money at Boston when you can stay home and pick up $500 checks for winning 5-K races. But maybe it's more a fear of getting beat.
Why the Kenyans
Win
Has anybody figured out why Kenyans have won 13 out of the last 15 Boston Marathons? Okay, talent. They're poorer than us, thus more motivated. They were born at altitude and ran to school. Ho hum. You'll never be a contender if you believe those excuses. Alan Culpepper figured that out, as did Peter Gilmore and Ryan Shay, who finished 10th and 11th at Boston.
Everybody pay attention to my next words: The Kenyans throw a dozen or so runners at the Boston course each year, run together as a team, and when one of them has a good day, he wins. Look at the list of recent Boston champions, and you'll see several runners nobody heard of before and nobody has heard of since. To beat them, we need more than one Alan Culpepper with the guts to show up in Hopkinton and go for the win.
If we had a slightly more totalitarian government, we could conscript the top ten American finishers in NCAA cross-country and send them to camp for a year to run 120 miles a week with one purpose: to show up at Boston and run in the lead pack until they dropped. Would one of them win? Maybe not, but you'd see a few more American names in the top ten, and that certainly would inspire others.
There are no World Championships next year to divert the attention of our top distance runners, including those who compete only on the track. Boston is the great American marathon. For an American to win it again, even apart from prize money, the rewards would be incalculable. Can I find ten brave Americans-men and women-willing to spend this next year with the single goal of becoming a contender, of becoming somebody instead of a bum? I'd like to see another American win Boston at least in my lifetime.
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Hal Higdon, a Contributing Editor for Runner's World, finished fifth in the 1964 Boston Marathon, the first American.
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