The History of the London Marathon: 1908 to 1981

The London Marathon officially began in 1981.

But its story started much earlier.

More than seven decades before thousands of runners gathered on Blackheath for the first London Marathon, another marathon had already left its mark on the capital — and on the distance every marathon runner now knows.

It happened almost by accident.

The year was 1908. London was hosting the Olympic Games, the marathon was still a relatively young event and its distance was not yet fixed at the familiar 26.2 miles.

What followed gave London one of the most dramatic finishes in Olympic history, helped create a distance that would eventually become the worldwide standard and started a marathon tradition in the city long before Chris Brasher and John Disley imagined something very different.

This is the story of what came before the London Marathon.

1908: The Race That Helped Define the Marathon

When London hosted the Olympic Games in 1908, there was no universally fixed marathon distance.

Previous Olympic marathons had varied in length. The important thing was essentially that they were long-distance races inspired by the legendary run from Marathon to Athens.

For London, the organisers wanted something more specific.

The race would begin in the grounds of Windsor Castle and finish at the newly built White City Stadium.

Getting from one to the other produced a course measuring 26 miles and 385 yards.

Today, we barely question that number.

A marathon is 26.2 miles. Or, more precisely, 42.195 kilometres.

In 1908, it was simply the distance required by this particular race.

But the distance wasn't what made the 1908 race famous.

That happened inside the stadium.

Dorando Pietri and an Unforgettable Finish

Italian runner Dorando Pietri entered White City Stadium first.

He had covered almost the entire marathon and appeared to be heading towards Olympic victory.

Then his body began to fail him.

Disorientated, Pietri initially turned the wrong way. Officials redirected him, but exhaustion had taken over. He collapsed.

He got up.

He collapsed again.

With the finish agonisingly close, officials eventually helped the exhausted Italian to his feet and across the line.

Pietri had arrived first, but the assistance meant he was disqualified. American Johnny Hayes was declared the Olympic champion.

Yet it was Pietri who became the enduring story of the race.

Queen Alexandra later presented him with a special cup in recognition of his extraordinary effort.

There is something remarkably modern about the fascination with Pietri's finish.

The result mattered, of course. But the story that survived was about something else: a runner pushing himself beyond what his body could sustain and somehow continuing towards a finish line he could almost see.

More than a century later, that remains part of what makes the marathon compelling.

Not everybody wins.

Everybody has to get to the end.

From One Extraordinary Race to a London Tradition

The public fascination surrounding the 1908 Olympic marathon did not simply disappear when the Games ended.

The following year, another race began.

The Polytechnic Marathon — commonly known as the Poly — was first held in 1909 and became Europe's first regular marathon event.

Once again, runners started at Windsor Castle. The early races finished at Stamford Bridge before the finish moved over the years, including periods at White City and later Chiswick.

More importantly, the Poly continued using the 26 miles and 385 yards distance.

What had been the particular measurement of one Olympic course was becoming something more permanent.

The marathon distance was eventually standardised internationally at 42.195 kilometres.

London hadn't simply hosted an Olympic marathon.

It had helped shape what a marathon would become.

When the Poly Was One of the Great Marathons

It would be easy to look back at the Polytechnic Marathon simply as the forgotten predecessor of today's London Marathon.

That would undersell it.

At its height, the Poly was one of the important races in international marathon running.

Some of the world's finest distance runners came to race it, and a succession of world-best performances were recorded on its courses.

One of the most significant came in 1953.

British runner Jim Peters completed the Poly in 2:18:40.2, becoming the first man to run a marathon in under two hours and 20 minutes.

The significance is easier to appreciate when viewed through modern eyes.

Running eventually became obsessed with another seemingly impossible marathon barrier: two hours.

For an earlier generation, 2:20 was one of those barriers.

And it fell on the roads between Windsor and west London.

The Poly would produce further world-best performances during the 1960s.

But running itself was beginning to change.

And eventually that change would matter more than any record.

The Marathon Was Still a Different World

For much of the twentieth century, running a marathon was not something ordinary people routinely decided to do.

The marathon belonged predominantly to serious runners.

You trained for it. You raced it. Spectators might gather at particular points, but the idea of closing the centre of a major city so tens of thousands of ordinary runners could take part while huge crowds lined the streets was not yet the model.

Even participation itself reflected another era.

Women were not permitted to compete officially in the Polytechnic Marathon until 1978.

By then, however, running culture was already changing.

The jogging and recreational running boom of the 1970s was bringing increasing numbers of people into the sport. Running no longer belonged exclusively to athletics clubs, tracks and serious competitors.

People were discovering that they could run simply because they wanted to.

The marathon was beginning to look less like an event reserved for exceptional athletes and more like a challenge ordinary runners might attempt themselves.

But Britain had not yet seen what happened when that idea took over an entire city.

Chris Brasher and John Disley were about to.

New York, 1979

Chris Brasher already had an extraordinary athletics story.

He had helped pace Roger Bannister during the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954 and won Olympic gold in the 3,000m steeplechase in Melbourne two years later.

His friend John Disley was an Olympic steeplechase medallist himself.

They understood competitive running.

What they encountered in New York in 1979 was something different.

The New York City Marathon had taken the marathon out onto the streets and turned it into an event involving not just the runners, but the city around them.

Brasher ran it.

And what stayed with him was not simply the race.

It was the people.

Thousands were running. Vast crowds were watching. The streets were alive with noise, encouragement and a shared sense that everyone — runners and spectators alike — was somehow part of the same event.

After returning home, Brasher wrote about the experience in The Observer.

He described what he had witnessed as “the greatest folk festival the world has seen.”

Then he asked the question that changed British running:

Could London do the same?

A Different Kind of London Marathon

Brasher and Disley were not trying simply to organise another marathon.

London already had one.

The Polytechnic Marathon had existed for 70 years by the time they ran New York.

What they had seen was a different idea altogether.

A marathon could still be a serious international race.

But it could also belong to the ordinary runner.

It could bring spectators onto the streets.

It could showcase a city.

It could raise money.

And, perhaps most importantly, it could give thousands of people their own finish line to chase.

That distinction matters.

The London Marathon wasn't born because nobody had thought of staging a marathon in London before.

It was born because the possibilities of what a marathon could be had changed.

Turning that idea into reality was another matter.

Convincing London

Closing roads across a capital city for thousands of runners was a considerable undertaking.

Brasher and Disley needed support from the authorities, the police and the organisations whose cooperation would make the race possible.

There was also the question of money.

The Greater London Council made clear that public money would not be there to rescue the event if it failed.

Commercial backing therefore became crucial, and Gillette provided the sponsorship that helped make the first race possible.

The organisers established a structure under which profits could support recreational facilities, while the ambitions for the event extended well beyond producing fast marathon times.

They wanted to promote British marathon running.

They wanted to bring people together.

They wanted to benefit London.

And they wanted people to have fun and experience the sense of achievement that running could provide.

The response suggested they had understood the moment perfectly.

They initially imagined a first race containing perhaps three or four thousand runners.

More than 22,000 people applied to take part.

Only 7,747 could be accepted.

Before the first starting gun had even been fired, London had already demonstrated that the appetite was there.

29 March 1981

On a damp Sunday morning, 7,055 runners started from Blackheath.

This was the moment the story changed.

The marathon had first captured London's imagination in 1908 through the suffering of one exhausted Italian inside White City Stadium.

The Polytechnic Marathon had carried the distance through generations of British running and witnessed some of the greatest marathon performances of its time.

Then recreational running changed who believed the marathon might be for.

New York showed what could happen when a city joined in.

Brasher and Disley brought those ideas home.

Seventy-three years after Dorando Pietri staggered towards the finish at White City, thousands of runners were now moving through London together.

The modern London Marathon had begun.

And perhaps appropriately, its first great image wasn't of one man defeating another.

Dick Beardsley of the United States and Inge Simonsen of Norway approached the finish together and crossed the line hand in hand.

Two winners.

Behind them came thousands more, each running a completely different race of their own.

The idea Brasher had seen on the streets of New York was suddenly real on the streets of London.

The story that began in 1908 had reached a new starting line.

But 1981 was only a new beginning. The London Marathon story that followed would turn the event into something even its founders could scarcely have imagined.