Fifty years later, Bob Hall’s example — and his racing wheelchairs — are still going strong

By Canadian Press on April 19, 2025.

BOSTON (AP) — Bob Hall and Bill Rodgers were teammates training for the 1975 Boston Marathon — Rodgers on his feet, and Hall in his wheelchair.

Rodgers would go on to win that year, the first of the four victories in his hometown race that earned him the nickname “Boston Billy” and set off a national running craze. But when he gave Hall’s wheelchair a try, he was outmatched.

“I tried to push myself in that chair. I couldn’t move,” Rodgers said this week. “But he had the eye of the tiger, Bob did.”

Fifty years later, the chairs are sleeker, the fields are bigger, and Hall’s successors are literally leading the way at the Boston Marathon: The push-rim wheelchair division will be the first to depart from Hopkinton on Monday morning, the better for them to avoid the much slower runners as the field makes its way to Boston’s Back Bay.

“Bob Hall is an incredible man,” five-time Boston winner and eight-time Paralympic gold medalist Tatyana McFadden said this week as she prepared for Monday’s 129th edition of the race and 50th anniversary of Hall’s pioneering push. “I’m so thankful for him. And I think we all are, as wheelchair racers, because he really paved the way.”

Vietnam veteran Eugene Roberts, who had lost both of his legs in the war, in 1970 became the first wheelchair athlete to complete the Boston Marathon course, finishing in a little over six hours. Hall talked his way into the field in ’75 race by promising race director Will Cloney he could do it in just three.

Hall, who survived childhood polio that cost him the use of his legs, covered the distance in 2 hours, 58 minutes. His prize: a certificate of achievement – just like the ones the runners got.

“It had nothing to do with, per se, the marathon, but it was about the inclusion,” said Hall, who is serving as the grand marshal of this year’s race with Rodgers on the 50th anniversary of their ’75 victories. “I didn’t care if anybody got on my coattails. It was that I was bringing people along.”

When he returned two years later, Hall led a field of seven men – and one woman – in a race that also served as the National Wheelchair Championships. On Monday, more than 40 men and women, many of them with paralympic and major marathon victories on their resumes, will leave Hopkinton ahead of a field of 30,000 runners, with the wheelchair winners expected on Boylston Street a mere 1 hour, 15 minutes or so later.

“Because of him crossing that finish line, we’re able to race today. And it’s evolved so much since then,” McFadden said. “It was him. It was him being brave and saying, ‘I’m going to go out and do this because I believe that we should be able to race Boston Marathon just like everyone else.’ So he had the courage to do that.”

McFadden didn’t just follow Hall to the course: Her first racing chair, at the age of 7 or 8, was one of the youth-sized models that he designed and built for aspiring wheelchair athletes. Daniel Romanchuk, who has won Boston twice, and Marcel Hug, a seven-time winner and the defending champion, also got started on Bob Hall models.

“The chairs still hold up today,” McFadden said. “Eight-year-olds, 9-year-olds, are in that chair, and it’s still going strong. He’s also given back a lot too, in that way.”

The men’s and women’s wheelchair winners on Monday will claim top prizes of $50,000 from a purse of more than $250,000, with a possible $50,000 extra for a course record – the same bonus as the open divisions. There are also para divisions — with a total purse of $91,000 — for lower-limb, upper-limb, vision, coordination and intellectual impairment.

“Not because it’s a nice thing to do, but because these are elite athletes,” said Cheri Blauwet, a paralympic gold medalist and two-time Boston winner who is now the chair of the Boston Athletic Association Board of Governors.

“And it’s important in terms of offering equitable elite sport opportunities to people of all types of mobility,” she said. “But also, because it all comes back to our mission, which is to promote health through the sport of running and other sports opportunities.”

And it all started with Hall.

“We were leading edge at that time. And we’ve essentially maintained that philosophy for the for the subsequent decades,” Blauwet said. “We’re always thinking about it. And, you know, we’re very competitive here — for obvious reasons. And we like to be competitive even in our progress towards inclusion.”

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AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports

Jimmy Golen, The Associated Press

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