Kuscsik Broke the Marathon's Gender Barriers

Nina Kuscsik, the first woman to enter the New York City Marathon and the first official female winner of the Boston Marathon, who in the 1970s repudiated the widely held and unfounded belief that women could not and should not run such races of 42.195km, died June 8 in Brookhaven, New York. She was 86.

- Jere Longman

NEW YORK - Nina Kuscsik, the first woman to enter the New York City Marathon and the first official female winner of the Boston Marathon, who in the 1970s repudiated the widely held and unfounded belief that women could not and should not run such races of 42.195km, died June 8 in Brookhaven, New York. She was 86.

Her daughter, Chris Wiese, said Kuscsik was diagnosed with cognitive impairment in 2014 and had recently been treated for bouts of pneumonia. She died in a hospital.

A superb all-around athlete and a New York state champion as a cyclist, speed skater, and roller skater, Kuscsik took up distance running in 1967 to keep fit when her bicycle needed repair.

She ran more than 80 marathons, raising three children for part of that time as a single mother, all while working as a patient representative at Mount Sinai Medical Centre in Manhattan.

But Kuscsik and other female runners first encountered fierce resistance from a male-dominated running establishment, which believed, along with many scientists and doctors, that women would risk infertility and even possibly lose their uteruses if they competed in marathons.

Kuscsik often responded that "I proved it over and over — my uterus didn't fall out; I'm fine," her daughter recalled in an interview.

Still, female marathon runners encountered formidable roadblocks in the 1960s. When Roberta Gibb tried to enter the Boston Marathon in 1966, she was told in a letter by the race director that women were "not physiologically capable" of running a marathon.