Joan Benoit

About Joan Benoit

Joan Benoit Samuelson (born May 16, 1957) is an American marathon runner who won gold at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the year that the women's marathon was introduced. As a result she was the first ever women's Olympic marathon champion.

Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Benoit took to long-distance running to help recover from a broken leg suffered while slaloming. At Bowdoin College she excelled in athletics and then entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the race, while wearing a Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record. She repeated that success with a victory again in 1983 that took more than two minutes off the world's best time, set by Grete Waitz in the London Marathon just the day before, despite having had surgery on her Achilles tendons two years earlier. Her Boston course record of 2:22:43, set in 1983, was not broken for another 11 years.

At the 1984 Summer Olympics she won the first Olympic women's marathon in a time of 2:24.52 in hot and smoggy conditions, more than a minute ahead of her rivals; again despite surgery, this time arthroscopic surgery on her knee 17 days before the trials earlier that year. The athletes behind her were Grete Waitz, Rosa Mota and Ingrid Kristiansen, all marathon legends in their own right.