Who owns the "real" Boston Marathon?

Who owns a marathon? The amorphous traveling mob that shows up on a particular day and runs through the streets splattering cups of water and sticky gu in its wake? The people who filed the permits with city hall? The desk that assigns the numbers? Who owns the idea of the marathon?

This question was terribly relevant back in the early 1980’s when the all volunteer BAA supposedly sold the Boston Marathon to Marshall Medoff who was going to promote the race. There was worry that the professionalism would ruin the marathon. Although it seems silly now, there was quite a debate about gaining sponsorship, with runners making outlandish claims that regular mile markers and water stations and paying to get the best runners to come would “ruin” the race.

The BAA was slow to react to the changes in the sport in the 1980’s and the race paid a steep price. By 1985 it was irrelevant. The traditionalists hugged and nearly loved their marathon into extinction. And now, instead of being extinct, the problem is the opposite: too many want to run the marathon, and, again, the BAA is too slow to react.

And it’s a shame that they didn’t see it coming. They have long since moved from the position, the one position that kept them unique: the idea that you had to qualify. And they did so for one reason: cold, hard cash. And lets be simple and direct, and not answer real, pressing questions with Teflon coated PR doublespeak like Guy Morse did in the recent Boston Globe article: the economics of allowing all the non-qualifying charities and doctors and foreign tours in has allowed the non-profit BAA to get rich. Rich beyond their wildest dreams. And all they had to do was lose the stupid qualifying stuff, which they have, slowly but surely, inch by inch.

So what do they have left? A name, of course, and a ton of happy people who will say that they have run the Boston Marathon and who flew to the Boston area, stayed in Boston hotels, ate at Boston restaurants and who raised a great deal of money for charities and positive press for the race around the world. And it also left a small but vocal number of runners who saw the limbo bar of time and struggled to get under it, as if it meant something. And until last year, there was plenty of room for both. But the race closed in 66 days last year, and this year in less than one day. And those people who ducked under that limbo bar are pissed. Not just because they can’t run the marathon, but because their “Boston” has been taken away from them.

And maybe the BAA gets that, but they’re professionals, and they see all the people who came and spent and were happy and they have to think about them as well. So maybe the mythical idea of the ‘real’ Boston Marathon will eventually go by the wayside. I certainly never thought that I would see New York go to a wave start, putting thousands on the course for even longer numbers of hours.

Or maybe they’ll have the guts to realize that the long time selling point of their race is that you had to work to get into it, and reinstitute the qualifying times again for the early run of the Boston Marathon, and then start the others in the “People’s Boston”. It may sound hard ass to a great many charity runners, but it also may need to be long term strategy to keep the race marketable and on the calendars of many runners. But they might decide that its not necessary, and that they would rather have the money and the numbers and that’s ok. Only time will tell which path the rulers of the Boston Marathon will take.

But if they decide that they want the numbers, will the real owners of the “idea” of the Boston Marathon, serious runners who believe in training and who see goals as sign posts to get past, runners decried as “elitists” by those who lack the talent to run the times, or the will to actually train hard enough to get to those goals, where will they go? And just what will they do with the “idea”, or the ideals of the Boston Marathon?