Sixty years after she hid in the bushes near the corner of Hayden Rowe Street and Main Street and slipped into a men-only Boston Marathon, Bobbi Gibb has returned to the same spot in permanent form. A life-size bronze of Gibb, depicting her mid-stride in the baggy Bermuda shorts, bathing-suit tank top and nurse's flats she wore to run her pioneering 1966 race, was unveiled in Hopkinton in late March and is now welcoming the field for the 130th edition of the race on Monday. The statue stands less than a hundred yards from the starting line and is the first statue of a woman on the Boston Marathon course.
It is also, remarkably, the first statue on the course sculpted by its own subject. Gibb, 83, trained as a pre-med student at the University of California, San Diego and studied anatomy in depth; she began the piece in clay, building from the skeleton outward through muscle, skin and clothing before the work was cast in bronze. The project took several years to complete and was funded by a combination of private donations, the town of Hopkinton and the Boston Athletic Association, which signed off on the placement on the marathon route itself. The bronze depicts Gibb staring ahead, ponytail swinging behind her, in the confident stride that the handful of contemporary photographs preserved.
Gibb's 1966 run was a quiet revolution. Told by the Boston Athletic Association that the distance was medically beyond women, she hitch-hiked from California, hid in the shrubs near the starting line, stepped into the field after the gun and ran 3:21:40, finishing ahead of roughly two-thirds of the men. She returned in 1967 and 1968 and would later be retroactively recognised by the B.A.A. as the pre-sanctioned era women's champion for all three years. Katherine Switzer's bib-number entry in 1967 and the AAU's eventual sanctioning of women's marathoning in 1972 followed the template Gibb had set in plain sight.
For a town whose identity has been braided with the marathon since 1924, the unveiling carries particular weight. Hopkinton's Main Street fills with thousands of runners on Patriots' Day morning and empties within three hours, but the statue now gives visitors a reason to stop there on the other 364 days of the year. Town officials say they expect the site to join the Spirit of the Marathon statue in Copley Square and the statue of Doroteo Flores in Central Park as one of the route's most-photographed landmarks, particularly after the B.A.A. updated its athletes' village signage to direct race-morning visitors past the piece.
Gibb is scheduled to appear on a panel at the Bank of America Boston Marathon Expo at the Hynes Convention Center on Sunday alongside 1976 champion Jack Fultz, 1986 winner Rob de Castella and recent champions Lemi Berhanu and Atsede Baysa. She will then travel out to Hopkinton on Monday morning to see the field off in person. Asked this week what the statue meant to her, Gibb kept her answer characteristically simple. "It's not really about me," she said. "It's about everybody who was told they couldn't run, and ran anyway." On Monday, around 12,500 women will pass within arm's reach of the bronze in the opening hundred yards of their race.