Allison Roe’s marathon moments
40 years ago a Kiwi runner claimed the Boston Marathon and helped reshape how women were seen.
Forty years ago, in 1981, running was booming. Race numbers exploded, huge new marathons and fun-runs transformed cities as big as New York, London and Sydney, shoes and apparel for running had become an instant industry, media and sponsors brought crowds and cash, and potent new names hit the headlines – Frank Shorter, Grete Waitz, Alberto Salazar, Nike, New Balance, Asics.
It all seemed miraculous. And nothing was more miraculous than the sudden emergence, at the Boston Marathon on April 20, 1981, of an unknown yet wondrous talent – Allison Roe from New Zealand.
Wearing black with a prominent silver fern, Roe ripped the Boston women’s race apart. She won in 2 hours 26 minutes 46 seconds, at that date the world’s second-fastest time, and a Boston race record by a mind-blowing 7min 42sec.
In the full blaze of American publicity, she redefined not only the marathon, but the physical image and potential of women. Roe’s perfect balance of strength, grace and power was something new. (Or something very old, as it goes back to the Greek legend of the golden apples and the alluring super-runner Atalanta, whose name means ‘‘balanced’’.)
Six months later, when Roe equally decisively won the New York City Marathon, an action photo of her featured on page three of Sunday News, controversially displacing the customary topless sun-bathing image.
Editor Judy McGregor in 2018 looked back at that decision as ‘‘a blow for New Zealand feminism ... I couldn’t live with the sexism of page three’’ and women’s groups showed support by buying the paper to boost circulation. Roe’s impact went beyond the mass culture of running.
Born Allison Deed in 1956, in her teens she excelled at many sports, yet her temperament was never fiercely competitive. In track running, she had ‘‘lots of seconds and thirds’’ at national level, and more success in cross-country, where race distances were longer. At 18, she was the youngest woman ever to win that national title, and ran in NZ’s silver-medal team at the 1975 World Championships in Morocco.
She found her true event in 1980, when she impulsively entered the Choysa Marathon on the Auckland waterfront. Her win was painful and unimpressive, but earned her a trip to the Oregon Marathon. Now, as she turned 24, her life changed. She married chiropractor Richard Roe, she went to Gary Elliott as coach, she doubled her training, adding long Sunday runs with men on Arthur Lydiard’s famous circuit in the Waitakere hills, and in Oregon she had the race of her life so far. Third (behind Kiwi Lorraine Moller’s win) in 2hr 34min 29sec, she became eighth fastest woman in history.
She was less than intense about it. ‘‘Some people say you can’t do everything, but I really do enjoy it,’’ she told New Zealand Runner.
She popped over to Japan to run a world-best for 20km in Miyazaki, and won three late-summer 10km road races in Auckland. Then it occurred to her to go to the Boston Marathon. ‘‘I decided only two weeks before, after a good Sunday 32km in the Waitakeres, when I felt so strong and everybody started talking me into going.’’
Boston that year was supposed to lie between local favourite Patti Catalano, who had twice been second, and was desperate to win, and two formidable previous winners, American Joan Benoit, and Que´bequoise Jacqueline Gareau. Apart from her Oregon time, noone had heard of Roe.
‘‘I was a little nervous, but I felt in good shape and quite confident. I remember thinking on the start line, ‘I’d like to win this’,’’ Roe said. She tracked Catalano, and moved close to her up the notorious Heartbreak Hill, which Roe had the effrontery to describe later as ‘‘actually over-estimated’’.
Roe chose her moment. ‘‘I wanted to let her feel the pressure of me behind her. That way I thought I was relaxing and having a holiday.’’ Roe has a habit of remarks like that. Another time she spoke of ‘‘trundling through Manhattan’’ as she broke the world record in New York. She made her decisive move five kilometres from the finish. ‘‘Patti was wobbling and she didn’t respond at all.’’
Boston runner-writer Tom Derderian, who was running alongside Catalano, was smitten. He recalled the moment in his classic history, Boston Marathon.
‘‘Like the crew of a steamship out of coal Catalano threw her own decking into the furnace. Roe by contrast looked peaceful, in control, like an actress coming onstage to take the leading role. Roe took a downward, backward glance at Catalano, then looked forward and smiled.’’
She ran the last 5km with a serene power that people still remember. ‘‘She finished full of energy and talk,’’ wrote Derderian. The world’s media loved her emphatic victory, her accent, and her looks. A star was born.
Six months later, she did it again, in front of even more cameras, in New York City, October 1981. That was the first city marathon to be screened live on network television. As Roe strode majestically through Central Park to break Waitz’s world record, she was also running into global celebrity and New Zealand legend.
The live TV coverage in New Zealand fell early in the morning of Labour Day. With the day off work, a nation cheered her to the finish and some danced on breakfast tables as she won.
She is still the only female runner to win the supreme Halberg Sportsperson of the Year Award. Elsewhere, she got endorsement contracts, advertising decaffeinated coffee along with David Bowie and Dustin Hoffman.
But it ended almost as suddenly as it began. Injuries and a home improvement accident left her out of New Zealand’s team for the first women’s Olympic marathon in 1984, a race that in 1981 looked to be hers.
‘‘I know I had better marathons in me and, yes, naturally, I would love to have an Olympic medal. But that’s not the measure of a life well lived,’’ she said this week.
Now mid-60s, Roe has remained committed to fitness and health.
She was a successful triathlete and cyclist, and she won her agegroup in mountain biking in the World Masters in 2017. She swims, kayaks, bikes, runs, does Pilates, and gets injured kick-boxing. She is re-married, to Alan Barwick, and is a devoted grandmother, stepgrandmother, and gardener.
‘‘I live each day with purpose and passion,’’ she says.
Her current priority is as part of a ‘‘team initiative to build a worldclass, sustainable, multi-use trail from Puhoi to Mangawhai.
‘‘I decided only two weeks before, after a good Sunday 32km in the Waitakeres, when I felt so strong . . .’’ Allison Roe