California Track & Running News July-Aug 2013, VOLUME 39 NUMBER 3 | Page 15

Culver City, and then my second the next year—
the first sub-2:40—which was the most important
one.
Joe [Henderson], Nina [Kuscsik], and myself
were on the International Runners Committee, a
13-member worldwide lobbying committee for
getting the women’s 5000 meters, 10,000 meters,
and marathon into the Olympic Games. The committee was sponsored by Nike. [Hansen was the
executive director of this committee—Editor]
I had just set two world records in the
marathon with no Olympics to go to—unlike
when I was a 1500-meter runner, and I knew I
could go to our Olympic Trials and move on. I
bumped up against a glass ceiling with nowhere
to go. I was naïve enough to think in ’74 that a letter-writing campaign, petitions, calling Nina [who
was involved with the AAU, would change this]. I
didn’t know it was going to take 10 years of lobbying and that it would culminate in a lawsuit
against the IOC, IAAF [International Association
of Athletic Federations], the USOC, the
AAU/TAC/USATF, and even the Los Angeles Organizing Committee where the Olympics were
going in ’84. At least we had anti-discrimination
laws in California, so we had our best chance [for
winning a lawsuit] here—as opposed to Moscow
[1980 Olympic host] or Seoul, South Korea [1988
Olympic host].
Without going into the details, [in 1981] the
marathon for women was successfully lobbied in
[to the Olympic Games via the IOC]. But the orphaned events were the [women’s] 5000 and
10,000. The president of our international [track

Tell us how she inspired you.
JH: Lazlo Tabori had been coached by Mihaly Igloi
[who defected to the U.S from Hungary at the
same time as Tabori]. Igloi is considered the
grandfather of interval training. So my workouts
were all intervals. Cheryl Bridges, one of my LA
Track Club teammates, didn’t train with me. She
lived in the San Luis Obispo area and was coached
by her husband, Larry Bridges. We had just finished our cross country season, and for whatever
reason, she came down to run the [1971] “Western Hemisphere” Culver City Marathon, the second-oldest consecutively run marathon at the
time to Boston. I thought that anyone crazy
enough to run 26.2 miles deserved a cheerleader,
so my teammates and I went out to cheer her on.
And Lazlo was there because he lived on the
course. It was the first marathon I’d ever seen. I
watched Cheryl become the first woman in the
world to break 2:50. She ran 2:49:40 [bettering
the mark of 2:55:22 set by Beth Bonner several
months prior at the New York City Marathon].
I looked at Cheryl and I thought, a little bit
precociously, “I can do that.” I could beat her
sometimes in the 2-mile on the track. Sometimes
I could beat her in cross country. Right there, I
made a vow that the next year I wanted to do that
[run a marathon]. That was like fun. It wasn’t
about speed workouts.
I vowed to run the Culver City Marathon the
next year [1972], but I had to ask permission from
Lazlo, fig