Bobbi Gibb

Roberta Louise "Bobbi" Gibb (born November 2, 1942 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is the first woman to have run the entire Boston Marathon (1966). She is recognized by the Boston Athletic Association as the pre-sanctioned era women’s winner in 1966, 1967, and 1968. At the Boston Marathon, the pre-sanctioned era comprised the years from 1966 through 1971, when women ran and finished the race unofficially. In 1996 the B.A.A. retroactively recognized as champions the unofficial women's leaders of 1966–71.

Gibb’s run in 1966 challenged prevalent prejudices and misconceptions about women's athletic capabilities. In 1967, the second year of the later-to-be-recognized women's division at Boston, she finished nearly an hour ahead of the other female competitor, Kathrine Switzer. In 1968 Gibb finished first in a field of five women. It was not until late 1971, pursuant to a petition to the Amateur Athletic Union by Nina Kuscsik, that the AAU changed its rules and began to sanction women's division marathons. Kuscsik won the initial AAU-sanctioned women's division race at Boston in 1972.

Bobbi Gibb grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts during the 1940s and 1950s. She studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University School of Special Studies. Her father was a professor of chemistry at Tufts. She was already running through the woods with the neighborhood dogs when, in 1962, she met a distance runner at Tufts named William Bingay, who would later become a sailor and her first husband. They married on February 5, 1966, in California. Her running included daily commuting of the eight miles to school. She ran in white leather Red Cross nurses' shoes because there were no running shoes available for women at the time.

Before 1966, the longest Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)-sanctioned race for women was one and a half miles. Until 1972, when the first women's division marathon opened, the Boston Marathon was a men’s division race, so all the pioneer women who ran before 1972 were, under the AAU rules, unsanctioned runners, running in an as yet to be sanctioned women’s division race.

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