In typical Chicago fashion, Mayor Michael Bilandic gave businessman Lee Flaherty the city’s blessing to stage the city’s first marathon in 1977.
“I was in the mayor’s office and brought up the idea of the marathon,” Flaherty recalled. “He then gets on the phone with the commissioner of streets and sanitation, Francis Degnan, and says, `Flaherty’s a good guy, give him a hand.'”
Bureaucratic mountains moved with that simple request, and the Chicago Marathon, celebrating its 25th anniversary Sunday, was born. Flaherty believes it was because he and the late mayor both liked to run.
“Bilandic was a [fine] athlete,” Flaherty recalled. “We had a city that worked and a mayor that ran. If there were another mayor, it would never have happened.”
Today, the race that began a quarter-century ago as an ill-received, 26.2-mile run for 5,000 people through the North, West and South Sides has evolved into one of the world’s premier races–and an event that unites the city in a celebration of diversity and its neighborhoods.
On Sunday, Mexican mariachi musicians, Italian singers and Chinese dragon dancers will rise before dawn and head out to aid stations to hydrate and motivate more than 37,000 runners.
Male Cheerleaders in Lakeview will chant slogans like “Hi-ho, hi-ho, 20 miles to go.” In Greektown shouts of “Opa!” will be heard, and in Chinatown, a good-luck dragon will undulate to the beat of a giant gong. Gospel singers will sing and sway in Bridgeport.
“What happened was, we got caught up in it,” said Celia Cheung, who has coordinated the Chinatown aid station volunteers since 1981. “Initially people here thought, `We can’t have this–they will block our street, wreck our business.'”
Cheung now refers to the South Side neighborhood, Mile 19 on the course, as the spot where runners are cheered most strongly before the finish.
“We are proud to be known as the meeting point where runners really need it the most,” she said.
Each of the race’s 17 aid stations will be staffed by as many as 500 church, school and running club volunteers responsible for distributing thousands of water cups while entertaining runners with music, dancing and outlandish costumes. Other rally stations with singers and cheerleaders are scattered throughout the course.
“Clearly, some of this represents a Disneyfication of minorities,” said DePaul University professor Andrew Suozzo, who last month published a journal article titled “The Chicago Marathon and Urban Renaissance.”
“But it is also an attempt to applaud diversity within the marathon, to send a signal that this event and the city work because of an atmosphere of cooperation and tolerance.”
The beginnings were rocky. In 1976 a group of avid runners convened at a local YMCA to answer one question: Why doesn’t Chicago have a marathon? After all, running was beginning to take off around the country, spurred by Frank Shorter’s 1972 Olympic marathon victory, new general interest in fitness and Jim Fixx’s “The Complete Book of Running.”
“I always thought, `Boy, wouldn’t this be great in Chicago?'” said Wendell Miller, who at the time was the chairman of Midwest Masters, a 40-and-older running club. “We kicked around ideas but never came up with anything we could get our hands around.”
Wayne Goeldner, then the physical education director at the Hyde Park YMCA, dreamed of seeing a great mass of people running through the streets of Chicago.
The Y sent him to scout the New York City Marathon in 1975, but the group ultimately decided it couldn’t afford to put on such an event here.
Flaherty ultimately provided more than political connections. As chief executive officer of a communications company, he put together a business plan allocating $350,000 to put on the marathon.
“There were more fathers of this marathon than you can imagine,” Flaherty said. “But money is the grease that makes things go.”
Over subsequent years, the marathon went through three title sponsors, five names and more than a little animosity. Twenty years ago, one North Side alderman asked for a reroute after irate residents threatened to drive around street barricades.
Until Carey Pinkowski stepped in as race director in 1990, Suozzo said, the marathon was grappling for an identity. After years of losing sponsors that included Beatrice Foods and Old Style beer, LaSalle Bank took over in 1996.
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Pinkowski also assembled a field of up-and-coming runners, drawing attention to Chicago, and offered big prizes to the winners who dazzled crowds. This year there is a $500,000 purse, along with a $150,000 bonus for setting a world record.
This is all a far cry from the beginning. Goeldner still has a letter from Dan Cloeter, the winner of the first and third Chicago marathons, asking for travel expenses. Race officials, who had charged a registration fee of $5, couldn’t afford it. There was no prize money.
“But [Cloeter] was a poor vicar, and I remember telling him to expense me for his walking-around money, taxis or whatever,” Goeldner said. “He billed me for $4.19.”
Like Goeldner before him, Pinkowski was influenced by the New York Marathon and its course through the city’s boroughs. Years later, as the Chicago race director, he vetoed suggestions for an all-North Side course starting in the Loop, because it would have eliminated Latino and African-American communities.
Just about every neighborhood initially resisted involvement, he said.
“Twelve years ago running was still considered an extreme sport for a bunch of crazy oddballs and solitary figures marching down a lonely road,” Pinkowski said.
On Sunday, the marathon is expected to draw 37,500 runners and close to 1 million spectators. Live broadcasts beamed as far away as Britain and Japan will showcase elite athletes, including world record-holders Khalid Khannouchi and Catherine Ndereba.
The local impact is tremendous. Since early September, room blocks in 35 hotels throughout the region have been booked for race weekend. Last year’s race funneled $90 million into the local economy, according to a study by the University of Illinois.
But for Erma Tranter, the director of Friends of Parks who served as race coordinator for the first race and has run many of them, the marathon remains, at its heart, a good run.
“It’s a celebration of the city, about seeing the joy of folks in all the different neighborhoods,” said Tranter, who plans to race Sunday.
David Reithoffer, who heads the Chicago Frontrunners, said he has been delighted by the opportunity for the city’s gay and lesbian community to take a more active role in a major civic event, after years of what he called “being the odd neighborhood out.”
He said he knew his group’s efforts had succeeded when, on a Paris subway three years ago, he overheard a conversation between two French runners talking about the Chicago Marathon.
“They said, `The best moment was that neighborhood with the cheerleaders,'” Reithoffer said. “When I heard that, I just melted.”
Race at a glance
What: 25th LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon.
When: 7:30 a.m. Sunday (wheelchair race begins at 7:25).
Start/finish: Grant Park.
TV: WMAQ-Ch. 5, 7 a.m.
Radio: WMVP-AM 1000, 7 a.m.
Field: 37,500.
Prize money: Paid to top 10 men and women finishers, with $100,000 to winners; $1,500 to masters (over-40) winners; $1,000 to wheelchair winners; $1,000 to top Illinois finishers. Time bonuses also available.
2001 champions: Ben Kimondiu, Kenya, 2:08:52; Catherine Ndereba, Kenya, 2:18:47.