Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon

by Tim Marshall

  Subsequent records of women’s achievements over the distance are patchily reported. Merry Lepper ran 3.37.07 in October 1963, while in 1966 Roberta Gibb attempted to enter Boston officially. Amongst other long-distance running achievements she had already successfully completed a trans-America run, which rather debunked the official statement that “women are not physiologically capable of running a marathon”. Her application to take part was refused, but she ran the course anyway, finishing in 3.21.25, within the top one-third of all the finishing times. The organisers paid only minimal attention to her since she was an unofficial participant and therefore, officially, nothing to do with them.

  However, the following year Kathy Switzer submitted an entry for Boston, under the name “K V Switzer”. At that time, for runners unknown to the organisers, there was a pre-race medical. Switzer’s coach went along with a health certificate asserting his (actually, her – but with initials instead of a name, who could tell?) fitness to run the distance; “he” was assigned race number 261.

  Only two miles into the race officials realised that a woman had somehow inveigled her way into their men-only race, and they set about trying to stop her. The whole story is entertainingly recounted in Kathy’s own words on the world wide web, where you can read about how matters developed from scratch, so to speak, complete with photographs of the attempted exclusion. Briefly, a couple of officials tried to pull her off the course, or at least to tear off the official entry number from her vest. They were prevented from doing so by members of Kathy’s own running club (from Syracuse University), who were prepared precisely for this sort of attack. In short, the officials lost, and Kathy finished in 4h 20m. Interestingly, Roberta Gibb ran the race again, again unofficially, and despite being forced off the course shortly before the finishing line, managed to do 3.27.17, slower than her time the previous year, but almost an hour faster than Kathy.

  Curiously, there was a logic behind the officials’ attempt to remove her number. At the time the prevailing rule of the IAAF was that men and women could not take part in the same race; and that if a woman was doing so it meant that the whole race would be nullified, including the times recorded by all the men. So removing her number was the simplest way of trying to demonstrate that, actually, she wasn’t part of their race.

  As may be imagined, these events caused something of a furore in athletics circles, particularly in America. But the reaction was not quite what you might think. Rather than adopting a liberal, open-minded approach, recognising that previous attitudes to women’s distance running was perhaps outdated, the authorities went the other way completely. The American Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) announced a complete ban on women running marathons, on two grounds: that their existing rules banned women from competing at distances over 1½ miles (roughly, 2500 metres), and that the same rules also forbade men and women taking part in the same race. (A few years later we shall encounter exactly the same argument with respect to wheelchairs; plus ça change…). Four years later, in 1971, an Australian woman, Adrienne Beames, ran the first known time for a marathon by a woman in under 3 hours, in 2.46.30. Whether alerted by her time, or for other reasons (I have been unable to find out), it seems likely that the IAAF changed its hard-line stance for road-racing, at least in terms of participation though not direct competition, and the following year, in 1972, the AAU reversed its earlier decision and formally allowed women to compete over the marathon distance; Boston complied immediately.

  In 1970 a “Vietnam vet”, Eugene Roberts, who had lost both legs in the war, asked the Boston organisers if he could do the race in a wheelchair. They didn’t give him an official entry number, but he was allowed to start a short time in advance of the main race. (In the light of what came later over here, that’s a far-sighted view of things, curiously at variance with the same organiser’s concurrent attitude towards women.) He finished in something over 6 hours, an inordinately long time by anyone’s reckoning, but at least he finished. Then in 1975 someone called Bobby Hall wrote to the Boston organisers asking if he could enter the race in a wheelchair. The immediate reaction of the Boston hierarchy is not known but, perhaps mindful of the difficulties they had got into over the Kathy Switzer affair a few years earlier, and of the opprobrium then heaped on them, and the (by then) changed attitudes towards women, there was a cautious acceptance of his application. Probably he was allowed to start at the front – I haven’t been able to find out – but Boston said that if he completed the course in under 3 hours they would give him a special award. This was back in the days when, under the rules promulgated by Stoke Mandeville, your sports wheelchair had to be the same as your everyday chair, so 3 hours would have been an all-but-impossible target. However, Stoke – that is the International Stoke Mandeville Wheelchair Games Federation (ISMWGF) – had no position on road-racing: it simply wasn’t part of the canon of sports activities over which they claimed any jurisdiction.

  If you look at the snippets of video-tape that still exist on the web, you can see that Bobby’s chair, though not at all like the high-speed techno-machines of today, is visually rather different from what we were all trundling around in at the time. Though the wheels look as though they were 24 inches, the frame appears to be made of lightweight alloy, the seat is much lower than on an ordinary chair, the wheels have a slight camber and the hand-rims are smaller than was normal at the time. These features would have enabled a much faster time than would otherwise have been possible, and resulted in a time of 2h 58m, still a respectable time a few years later until the design of racing wheelchairs simply took off, and times dropped accordingly.

  The Fellowship

  The man who clapped me on the shoulder was called Peter – Pete – and he was from the New England chapter of the Spinal Cord Injury Foundation (who were in Chicago in large numbers). He had been on the organising committee for the wheelchair section of the Boston Marathon earlier that year, and wondered whether I had been one of the entrants – seen from behind, in the crush of a hotel foyer, and with the SCI group using the hotel for their annual conference, I could well have been. I assured him that I had never been anywhere near Boston, but encouraged him to tell me more.

  That April there had been 18 entrants in the wheelchair race – I forgot to ask if any, or how many, were women – and they started 18 minutes ahead of the foot-race. The winner finished in 2h 26m 59s, two minutes ahead of the leading runner. Pete had been on the “milk float” – or the American equivalent – which filmed the whole event, and which was transmitted live as the local TV station saw fit. As a model of integration this was amazing: a “disabled” event taking place at the same time and place as the equivalent able-bodied event, with as much publicity as you could reasonably expect; I couldn’t see how, for this particular sport, you could improve on it. Something for the future, I thought.

  One other matter of significance to a Brit: the “Chicago Sun-Times”, one of the local newspapers, had on its front page a couple of column-inches headed by the following: “British political leader arrested, charged with conspiracy to murder”. It was the start of what became known as the Jeremy Thorpe affair.

  The rest of the conference can be passed over in a hurry. Like many such meetings there was a curate’s egg aspect to it, but for me the most important encounter was with the head of the Spinal Injury Centre at Craig Hospital, Denver, in Colorado. At the time Craig Hospital was regarded as one of, if not the, best units of its kind in the country, with a large and flourishing Therapeutic Recreation department. When I mentioned to other delegates that I was to visit Craig, they rolled their eyes and uttered sounds of both approval and envy. As I had some spare time to fill on the Fellowship, the director was happy for me to spend a few days in his centre in early September.

  The next stop was at Columbia, Missouri, to look at Therapeutic Recreation, with particular reference to how people with a disability were included in the programmes run jointly by the university and the city council. Apart from being mistaken b
y the college president (the equivalent of a vice-chancellor here) for a new, overseas, post-graduate student, the main memory was of hearing about someone called Jeff Minnebraker who had been experimenting with altering his wheelchair. His particular contribution was the invention of the axle plate. Hitherto, the rear wheels of the most commonly-used wheelchairs were fixed to the chair by screwing the axle-bolt through a housing in the upright stem post at the back of the chair. The invention of the quick-release axle meant that by pressing a pin in the middle of the wheel, you could release the whole wheel and its axle as one unit, which could therefore easily be replaced; very important if you had developed a puncture playing basketball, for example. But more than that: if you had an array of holes to receive the wheel and its axle, you could choose where to put the axle-bolt, according to the bio-mechanical requirements of the sport you were doing. This was eventually accepted as being within the letter of the Stoke rules, and so was embraced as part of the general guidelines for wheelchairs in sport. Lastly, and probably more important than any of the above, by moving the axle forwards on the axle-plate, the chair became much lighter to push, facilitating a back-wheel balance and so making bouncing up and down kerbs and single steps much easier or everyone. To my regret I never met Jeff. He founded the Quadra company to make and sell wheelchairs, and was one of the earliest proponents of wheelchair tennis, which I first came across a few weeks later in San Jose.

  From Columbia, I flew via Chicago to Duluth for the Outward Bound course in Minnesota. The course was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, before or since. We went out in groups of two or three aluminium Canadian canoes, into which was piled all the equipment needed for five days by six or nine people: food, cooking equipment, wheelchairs, personal gear, tents and so on. We moved from the base across a lake to a pre-designated campsite which consisted of a flattened area with a couple of seats or benches, a metal cooking grid and, somewhere back in the woods, a long-drop wooden toilet.

  Between campsites we either paddled or pushed along rough woodland tracks. There were two wheelchairs per group, and all the equipment, and the canoes, had to be carried along the tracks between landing and launching points. Very often the terrain was so rough that the wheelchairs, including their occupants, needed man-handling over the tracks too. I felt at the time that too much was expected of the able-bods in the group: to move across a track from a landing to the next launching often required them to make three complete round trips: once to carry the canoes, once to carry all the food and equipment, and once to assist the wheelies as well. All too often there wasn’t much that the wheelies could do to help, and I felt pretty useless for much of the time.

  Once back at the base, the course was completed with a seven-mile trot along forest tracks, ending on a pontoon stretching out into the lake, from which all the course participants were ceremonially thrown by the centre staff into the lake; we were required to wear life-jackets! I enjoyed this a lot (the run through the woods, not so much being thrown in the lake): I was doing something I was familiar with, and didn’t depend on others to make any progress. And there was one useful contact made in Minnesota: someone called Jim Covino, who had done the same course the year before, and was back advising the school on various aspects of the course. He was from the west coast, San Jose, so we arranged that I would stay with him when I got over there.

  Then to Champaign-Urbana, where both I and my wheelchair had to be patched up. I had scraped some skin off, and the wheelchair frame was cracked as a result of the rough terrain it had been dragged over on the portages. This was a useful resting-point before going to Denver and Craig Hospital, of which there were three main memories. The staff had taken late-stage rehab patients away for two days “camping”, American style, in huts out in the countryside. I was lucky enough to be allowed to sit in on their staff de-brief, which was eye-opening in its frankness, and in particular over the widespread “confession” that, although they were working day in and day out with some severely-disabled people, they simply hadn’t realised just how hard it was to be with them for 24 hours a day … and the effect this must have on the family who, after discharge, would be doing all the caring.

  The other two memories concern equipment. Firstly, I was shown a “pulk”, a Norwegian sledge made from glass fibre, with a back-rest and a foam rubber cushion, on/in which the wheelchair user sat and pushed him/herself about using cut-down cross-country ski sticks. For use in the winter only, of course – there was no snow in Denver in August – but in the winter … Secondly, they had something they called Cyclops, a hand-powered bicycle. This was a bicycle with three wheels, one at the front and two at the back. Instead of a saddle to sit on, as in an ordinary bike, it had a seat and back-rest; and instead of pedals and a chain-ring at the front, with gears attached to the rear wheel, it had crank-handles worked by your arms, and gears attached to the front wheel, operated by levers attached to the front steering column.

  I never found out if it was their own invention quite out of the blue, or whether a local bike retailer with connections to the hospital had suggested it and they had worked on the idea together; or whether they had simply imported Cyclops from somewhere else in the country. Within my limited experience, though, it was something completely original, so of course, with encouragement from the staff, I had a go. Transferring across to the seat was OK, and the seat itself had a lap-diagonal safety belt. The seat was roughly at the same height as the wheelchair seat, and the crank-handles were within easy reach at chest height. But it was very hard work to pedal it, mostly, I think, because the gearing was too high, but that was easily altered.

  The other reason it was such hard work was because, whereas on an ordinary push-bike you pedal right and left alternately with your legs whilst steering with your arms, on the handbike (as they came to be called) you both cranked and steered with your arms. And the alternating motion of the arms induced a sort of side-to-side rocking which tended to make the rider, probably paralysed from the waist down, increasingly unstable. Nevertheless, it was an imaginative development, one which subsequently has become extremely popular as a recreational activity amongst wheelchair users. And nowadays, symmetrical cranking is standard.

  Off to the west coast, meeting and staying with Jim Covino, who introduced me to the principal of his Community College (who did not mistake me for being a new, overseas, post-graduate student!), and also to the game, new to me, and something I had not yet seen in the pages of “Sports ’n Spokes”, wheelchair tennis. This was pretty simple, really: all the normal rules of tennis applied, but you were allowed two bounces rather than one. Jim was the college champion, but it gave me a kick to beat him in only two sets. The other abiding memory was of the inordinate amount of time spent retrieving balls that had finished either in the net, or behind the baseline, or off the sides (we played on a two-court terrain, so there was often a long way to go to retrieve a ball). Jim had hoped to introduce me to a friend of his, Pete Axelson, who was a paraplegic and an engineer from Stanford University, whose inventions of equipment seemed to turn up several times a year in “Sports ’n Spokes”, but he wasn’t around, so this was another meeting which never happened.

  Looking back on what I had experienced so far, a couple of things became clear. Firstly, the Americans were more than willing to push the boat out and challenge a cushioned life-style for wheelchair users: “You can do more than you think you can”. And secondly, they were imaginative in inventing equipment, or altering rules, to make a wider range of recreational activities accessible to wheelchair users; whether you wanted to go there was up to you.

  A short stay in San Francisco, including a visit to the Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento to look at the integrated sports programme (it wasn’t really, at least not the bit I saw), and a crossing of the Golden Gate bridge (at the northern end of which there was a sign at the start of an exit ramp saying “Wheelchairs only” – I thoroughly disapproved!), saw the end of the first part of the Fellowship. Almost. The in
augural San Francisco marathon was much advertised around the city, and I very much wanted to have a go – but it was to take place a week after I was supposed to return, alas.

  There were two matters which seemed almost mirror images of events in Chicago and Heathrow over six weeks earlier. Firstly, the front page of the “San Francisco Examiner” had a small paragraph headed “Smallpox in Birmingham, England”. Reading further, it revealed that a technician working in the Medical School of the university had contracted smallpox and died from the disease. The Medical School was exactly where I worked: it was going to be an interesting return. (A few days later, on returning to work, there was a notice stuck on every external door: “No-one may enter this building except those who work in here or who have business in here”. That didn’t seem to exclude many people: why would you try to come in if you didn’t have any business to do? Was it meant to put off journalists, who of all people might think they had business in there? But that’s another story.)

  Secondly, and of rather greater importance to my immediate situation, there was a sort of mirror image of the trouble I’d had at Heathrow. I’d presented myself at the Pan Am check-in desk and they did all the usual stuff, including giving me a boarding card – and then, 20 minutes before departure time, came and told me I wouldn’t be allowed on board. The booking had been made weeks earlier by the Churchill Trust, and they had told the airline I was a wheelchair user, but there was no calling on them for assistance at this stage. Pan Am were adamant – they wouldn’t let me board without a designated carer who would look after me should the need arise. Eventually, one of the staff found an Englishman on the flight who was willing to take on the rather non-specific role of carer, and I was allowed on; I didn’t have to call on him during the flight. I did, though, take some Pan Am writing paper, in the pocket of the seat in front of mine, intending to write to Pan Am with a copy to the Federal Aviation Administration, complaining about the company’s policy, but never got round to it (unusual, for me).