Nina Kuscsik, marathoner who broke gender barriers, dies at 86

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.

To become the first woman to unofficially run Boston, Gibb hid behind bushes near the start. Then she jumped into the race wearing a hoodie over her long blonde hair, having trained for the marathon in cushioned nurse’s shoes because running shoes had not yet been made for women.

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was famously confronted on the Boston course by a race official who grabbed her and tried to tear off her racing bib, only to be body-blocked by her boyfriend.

Kuscsik first ran the Boston Marathon in 1969 as a so-called “bandit” – without a bib or an official entry.

By 1970, attitudes had begun to change when Fred Lebow, a showman who organised and promoted the inaugural New York City Marathon that year, sought women to compete in the race, which was then held entirely on hilly loops of Central Park.

In New York, Kuscsik was the lone woman among the 127 entrants. Experiencing a cold and a stomach virus, she dropped out at 22.5km, concerned about the optics of “look what happens when a woman runs”.

In a 2004 interview, she told The New York Times that had she known how huge the race would become – in 2024, it had more than 55,000 finishers, including 24,732 women and 120 non-binary runners – she “would have gone back and finished”.

She got another chance in New York in 1971. This time, Beth Bonner (2hr 55min 22sec) and Kuscsik (2:56.04) became the first American women to run in under three hours.

That same year, Kuscsik persuaded the Amateur Athletic Union, then the sport’s governing body, to begin giving “certain women” permission to run a full marathon. It was a dramatic shift from the 1960s, when the organisation allowed women to run no farther than 2.4km in sanctioned races.

“Nina did all the AAU work; she was willing to go to all the meetings,” Switzer said in an interview. “She would take medical data with her.”

Kuscsik became the first official women’s winner of the Boston Marathon in April 1972.

Change, though, came gradually. An Olympic marathon for women would not be held until 1984, after she and others had lobbied for its inclusion.

After running the Boston Marathon three times as a “bandit,” Kuscsik and seven other women were officially permitted to enter the race in 1972.

Despite experiencing stomach distress again, she became the first acknowledged women’s winner and received a laurel wreath, with her time of 3:10:26 entered into the results.

On Oct 1, 1972, at the start of the New York City Marathon, Kuscsik joined a publicity stunt that would help eliminate the AAU’s rule that women should start marathons separately from men, such as 10 minutes before or after.

At Lebow’s behest, and with reporters having been alerted beforehand, Kuscsik and five other female runners sat down in protest when the starter’s gun fired. They carried signs that called the AAU rule “archaic” and medieval. Ten minutes later, the women got up and began running.

Kuscsik finished first among women, though 10 minutes were added to the protesters’ finishing times.

Kuscsik and others had filed a lawsuit challenging the separate-start requirement: It was discontinued later in 1972.

Eventually, though, she came to agree with separate starts, which are the standard today for elite runners at some major marathons, allowing women to receive more prominent coverage during television broadcasts.

Kuscsik went on to win New York again in 1973 and Boston again in 1974, and also ran races as varied as a run to the top of the Empire State Building.

She was born Nina Louise Marmorino on Jan 2, 1939, in Brooklyn.

Fascinated by the first sub-four-minute mile achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister, she began running in 1967 while pregnant with her third child, doing laps around the block in New York.

Her marriage in 1961 to Richard Kuscsik ended in the early 1970s, partly, she told the Times in 1973, because of her running. She lacked confidence, she said, until she began running and “came out of my shell”.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Stephen and Timothy; a sister, Helen Flamini; a brother, George Marmorino; and two grandsons. NYTIMES