by Tim Marshall
This merely highlights that the AAA has lost control, and that many of its rules are stupid and unenforceable. They are also out of step with international thinking on the subject.”
There was more, castigating the incompetence of the AAA in attempting to enforce rules dating back to Victorian times and the era of high amateurism, whilst simultaneously managing to fall out of step with their own international governing body, which was at last beginning to move with the times.
I knew nothing of any representations made by British race organisers to the IAAF about this matter, nor whether a similar problem arose in other countries where mass fun-running was becoming part of the normal sporting spectrum. Suffice it to say that, in very short order, the IAAF changed its rules to allow professional sportsmen and women from any sport other than athletics to take part in fun-runs and the like, without sanctions against amateur runners of any ability level; and the AAA at last went along with it. Amateurs and professionals … Hmmm.
This ruling was the key which began to unlock things. I composed a letter, complete with references to horses and amateurism. (Unfortunately, I cannot now remember the relevant dates, which I provided in the original letter).
“Dear Sir
Now that:
a) Men and women may take part in the same race
b) Amateurs and professionals may take part in the same event (IAAF)
c) Men and horses may take part in the same event (Llanwrtyd Wells) all of course under AAA laws, how long do you suppose it will be before the organisers of the London Marathon consider wheelchair users, who clearly qualify under none of the above headings, to be a suitable sub-species to be admitted to their event?
Yours faithfully
Tim Marshall
BSAD National Wheelchair Marathon Co-ordinator”
and sent this to the sports editors of all the “heavy” newspapers: “The Times”, “Daily Telegraph” and “The Guardian” for the dailies, and “The Sunday Times”, “Sunday Telegraph” and “The Observer” for the Sundays. I sent it on February 18th, sat back and waited. This nasty little missive was intended to make the recipients think, perhaps first of all about the ugliness of the way in which wheelchair users were described, but then, I hoped, about the substantive issue. If the sports editors knew anything about the Great North Run, they might begin to wonder why London hadn’t embraced what appeared to be a practice successfully adopted elsewhere. Or they might just be curious about an issue that had provoked such intemperate language. I also sent a copy to Andy Etchells, the editor of “Running” magazine. He had been very supportive in publishing a couple of articles about wheelchair road racing, and so allowing the issue to be aired, and I felt it was worth keeping him in the loop as far as what I was doing.
Before any replies rolled in, there was a Department of Education weekend conference on Physical Education and Recreation for the Handicapped. Liz Dendy had told me about it back in the autumn, so I had applied and was accepted for it. Helpfully, it was held in Birmingham, so it was easy to get to. Most of the content was above me, though I remember thinking that there was a lot being said, a lot of theorising, which seemed to be about what I was actually doing in practice. But rather more important than that was the simple opportunity to meet people, specifically Julia Allton from Tower Hamlets Adult Education Institute, who had organised the “qualifying race” in Docklands just before Christmas, and Margaret Talbot from Trinity and All Saints College in Leeds. With Julia I began discussing how we might develop an effective protest on the day (April 17th); not that I wanted her overt participation in it, because she shouldn’t compromise her professional position by getting involved in something which might “attract the attention of the authorities”, and because any protest had to be by the athletes themselves, so that we would take the rap for anything that went wrong. Her college was manning one of the feeding stations, so she was thinking of festooning the station with appropriate pro-wheelchair material.
In her professional life Margaret was particularly concerned with inequality in sport and recreation, especially gender inequality. But she was happy to take up the cudgels on this matter, and wrote to Lord Birkett at the GLC, with a copy to Chris Brasher:
“Dear Lord Birkett
You will remember that I spoke at the GLC “Sport for All” conference in December on “disadvantaged groups”. [This was the same event where Jenny had met Chris Brasher.] I write to register my dismay that the GLC has chosen to exclude wheelchair entrants to the London Marathon. Events of this kind offer a rare opportunity for real integrated competition for the disabled, and I am surprised that the GLC has made this decision after the Sport for All conference papers had identified the disabled as a group needing special consideration.
With sensible precautions, elements of safety can be catered for, to allow wheelchair entrants (e.g. the Great North Run): I hope the GLC will reconsider its decision.
Yours sincerely …”
Just a couple of comments. Although Lord Birkett was in an executive position within the GLC, it won’t have been he who took the decision. In any case, it wasn’t the GLC who had done the excluding: Illtyd Harrington’s last letter made it quite clear that they were not at all happy with the situation. And finally, if the letter ever reached Chris Brasher, it was just another bit of pressure coming from a different angle; all grist to the mill.
Then responses from the newspapers began to come in; firstly the dailies:
The Times: Dear Mr Marshall,
Thank you for your letter. I have made our athletics correspondent aware of your thoughts.
The Daily Telegraph: Dear Sir,
I fear I cannot tell what flight of fancy will be tried by the organisers of the London Marathon. But as the penny-farthing experiment is not to be continued, I imagine that wheels of any kind would not be acceptable, which seems logical, if not helpful to your cause.
I appear not to have any reply from The Guardian, but this may be attributable to my filing system rather than that they didn’t reply.
And then, the Sundays:
From the Sunday Telegraph, nothing at all.
From The Observer (I was surprised to hear from them, because Chris Brasher was their star columnist, and the risk that my letter would be ignored was obvious).
Dear Mr Marshall
Thank you for your letter. I sympathise with your wish to be included officially in the London Marathon, but I fear there is little I can do to help you. On the other hand, I should be glad to have news from you of the national wheelchair marathon when the time comes…
Whilst not practically helpful, this was at least encouraging; but there wasn’t actually any progress.
That left The Sunday Times – then seen as a main rival to The Observer in capturing the quality market for Sunday papers; they rang me up. They must have obtained my number either through BSAD or (more likely) through the address from where the letters had been sent. At the time I was still living as an assistant warden in an undergraduate hall of residence, so there was someone in the office during office hours, and they would have given my work number. I was holding a post-graduate tutorial in the department’s main meeting room and the phone rang in my office next door. People on legs can accelerate far faster than someone in a wheelchair, so one of the students – Paul, who had written earlier about the validity of his marathon time if there was a parallel wheelchair event – rushed next door, and returned saying “It’s The Sunday Times”.
“Mr Marshall,” they began, “we’re ringing about your letter, and wheelchair marathons. Has anyone ever done a marathon in a wheelchair?” What a gift! At that time the fastest wheelchair marathon reported in “Sports ’n Spokes” was 1 hour 48 minutes 9 seconds, by the Canadian Rick Hansen in the 1982 Boston Marathon. There were, of course, several other records of times under two hours, and although, as far as I knew, no one in this country had yet broken three hours, there were plenty of examples of finishing times between three and four hours. I
put together an information pack, including the paper from “Sports ’n Spokes” entitled “Sharing the Road”, about how successfully to integrate wheelchairs and runners in a single event, and including such copies of correspondence with the organisers of the London Marathon that I’d kept. I also included my letter to John Disley after the 1982 race, along with his intemperate reply (the “perjury” letter). Again, I sat back and waited.
A week later The Sunday Times rang me again.
“We’ve had an interesting time,” they said. “We couldn’t contact Chris Brasher – he was in Rome – so we spoke to John Disley instead.” A slight pause before they continued: “He’s a difficult man, isn’t he.” I shrugged my shoulders, though there was no one there to see. “I dunno, I’ve never met him. But I suppose he is, over this business anyway.”
They went on to explain how interesting, enlightening even, the paperwork I’d sent them about wheelchair marathons had been, and they hoped to be able to pull it all together for an article in the paper sometime soon. It sounded promising, but then how many more times in the past, stretching all the way back to November 1979, had I been saying that, only to be confounded a few weeks later? So yet again, it was simply a matter of waiting.
Another Enquiry
A few weeks earlier there had been some correspondence with Stoke Mandeville. This is yet another area where the correspondence is incomplete, though enough remains to get the gist of what it was about. I had had no contact with them about wheelchair road racing, not that I had any official position within the organisation itself. But BSAD had recently moved into offices within the Stoke Mandeville complex, and it is inconceivable that BSAD and the British Paraplegic Sports Society – the BPSS – didn’t talk to each other. At any event, I had a letter from Joan Scruton, Director/Secretary General of the BPSS, enquiring about wheelchair marathon times in the UK in 1982. I replied, along with information about times in the big American events like Boston and the Orange Bowl. Joan replied on February 8th:
“Dear Tim
Thank you for your letter of 24th January, giving me recorded wheelchair times for marathons in 1982. This is indeed very interesting information and I have passed on copies to Roger Ellis, Chairman of the Track and Field section of the British Paraplegic Sports Society. From the times given, the Americans certainly seem to have the edge on us!
With kind regards and best wishes
Yours sincerely …”
It is worth noting Joan Scruton’s position, and the influence it gave her. As Director/Secretary General to the BPSS she was the queen bee of what happened in spinal injury sport in the UK. And she also had a high-up position within the International Stoke Mandeville Wheelchair Games Federation, which gave her a lot of influence internationally too. But both these organisations were about supporting and promoting sport for people with spinal injuries, not sport for wheelchair users. If BPSS or ISMWGF were to get hold of things nationally or internationally, what was going to happen to the non-spinal injury athletes who I was meeting every other week or so on “the circuit”?
Ten days later I had another letter, from Roger Ellis, Chief Remedial Gymnast at the Pinderfields (Wakefield) spinal injury unit:
“Dear Mr Marshall
I recently had a letter from Joan Scruton in which she passed on your comments concerning marathons. As we had only received information about the Orange Bowl marathon in mid- November, we had very little time to make arrangements, therefore we selected the best two performers from the GB athletics squad. We did realise that there were people who had recorded faster times but as you are aware [I wasn’t] we cancelled due to the absence of funds. We have been instructed by the BPSS to form the Great Britain Paraplegic Athletic Association and intend to hold the inaugural AGM this summer. Once this is formed we would hope to have a marathon sub-committee, perhaps you might be interested in becoming involved in this.
Yours sincerely …”
I replied a week later, but don’t have a copy.
Two main issues arose from this correspondence. Firstly, if BPSS were to organise a marathon race in this country, in conjunction with a running event, would they allow only spinal injury wheelchair users to take part? And secondly, if BPSS received an invitation to send athletes to an event overseas, would they select (and pay for) only spinal injury cases? Or would they tell non-spinal injury racers too, who might have faster times than spinal injury athletes, but who would need to raise funds from elsewhere? These thoughts were hovering in my mind, but not for long, as London took centre stage once again.
A Last Throw
I’d heard nothing further from The Sunday Times; all had gone quiet. I assumed that their apparent interest had come to naught, and that wheelchair marathons had somehow slipped off their agenda. This year’s race was barely 5 weeks away. If anything was to happen, it had to do so very quickly. As a last, almost desperate, attempt to get the issue in the public eye, I decided to send a letter to: past and present ministers for sport; past and present ministers for the disabled; my MP; and the Lord Mayor of the City of London, through whose fiefdom the marathon wound its way. What I didn’t do was include MPs through whose constituencies the marathon went, whether because I didn’t think of it or for some other reason I cannot now remember. The letter had to be concise, but take each of the arguments advanced against wheelchair participation and blow it to pieces. So it was going to be longer than I wanted. I sent it from my home address, the flat I’d bought some three years ago and was about to move into full time, and gave myself the semi-official label that Mike O’Flynn had given me long ago.
“Dear …
Wheelchairs and the London Marathon
For the third year running, the organisers of the London Marathon have banned wheelchair athletes from taking part in their event. All representations to them, formal and informal, directly and indirectly, ever since the first event was first announced, have been ignored, or have met with increasingly uncompromising refusals. I am therefore writing to ask for your help in reversing this unnecessary and discriminatory exclusion.
Background
Wheelchair athletes have been competing in running marathons since 1974 in the USA, [actually, since 1975. This may be a typo, but the difference is hardly material] and since 1981 in Britain. Over 20 different running marathons in this country have had wheelchair athletes completing the course successfully and safely. The fastest time recorded here is just over 3 hours (though in the USA, sub-2hour wheelchair marathons are common). A formal proposal put in July last year, to stage the British National Wheelchair Marathon in conjunction with the 1983 London Marathon, was turned down flat last month.
The objections
Those offered are many and various, and seem to depend on who the organisers talk to. It is against international regulations. People on wheels may not compete against runners, but it is a simple matter to conceive of their competing against each other rather than against the runners, in their own event which happens to be going on simultaneously. It is also against international regulations for men to take part in the same event as women, and for professionals in any sport to take part with amateurs, but the organisers seem to have no difficulty in circumventing these problems.
It is dangerous. An incident on a narrow footbridge in the New York marathon 6 or 7 years ago [actually, it was 4 years ago] caused wheelchairs to be banned from that event. There are no similar places anywhere on the London course. [NB this was not correct, and reflected my ignorance of the course. Just before reaching the Tower, there is a footbridge over the approach to St Katharine’s Dock; but by then, about 22 miles into the race, both runners and wheelchairs would be so strung out as to make the likelihood of an accident pretty small.] All that is necessary is for wheelchair entrants to be identified beforehand, and to be started at the front some five or ten minutes ahead of the runners. This is standard practice in the USA, in many marathons in Britain, and in the Great North Run (Newcastle – South Shields ½ marathon), which l
ast year had 20,000 runners and 61 wheelchairs. The proposal for the London Marathon this year was for exactly such a structure to the start, and only 20 wheelchairs.
It will interfere with the Changing of the Guard. This is one of this year’s new excuses. The timing of the event must be such that the guard has changed before the first runners pass [before they reach The Mall]. Therefore, it is argued, since the wheelchair entrants might get there ahead of the runners, and contravene the regulations laid upon the organisers, wheelchairs may not be allowed in. This would only be a problem if British wheelchair athletes were recording times in the sub-2¼ hour range. As indicated above, this is not so. In any case, the fact that this is offered as an excuse simply reveals that the organisers have completely ignored the representations made to them over the last 2½ years.
There are narrow streets, sharp corners, and cobblestones! The latter are uncomfortable, but hardly a valid reason for exclusion. As to the former, the streets are no narrower and the corners no sharper than on many courses already completed successfully and safely by wheelchair athletes.
If it is known that wheelchair athletes are to take part, it will not be possible to attract top-quality overseas runners. Another new excuse this year, and one which makes one wonder who the event is supposed to be for.