Joan Benoit Samuelson
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| Personal information | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Full name | Joan Benoit Samuelson | ||||||||||||||||||
| Nationality | American | ||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
May 16, 1957 Cape Elizabeth, Maine |
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| Residence | Freeport, Maine | ||||||||||||||||||
| Height | 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | 100 lb (45 kg) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Spouse(s) | Scott Samuelson (m. September 1984) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | |||||||||||||||||||
| Country | USA | ||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Track and field athletics | ||||||||||||||||||
| Event(s) | Marathon | ||||||||||||||||||
| Achievements and titles | |||||||||||||||||||
| Olympic finals | 1984 | ||||||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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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. Benoit Samuelson still holds the fastest times for an American woman at the Chicago Marathon and the Olympic Marathon. Her time at the Boston Marathon was the fastest time by an American woman at that race for 28 years. She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.
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. In 1977, after two years at Bowdoin, she accepted a running scholarship to North Carolina State, where she began concentrating solely on her running. She earned All-America honors at NC State in both 1977 and 1978, and in 1978 helped lead the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship. After returning to Bowdoin to complete her degree, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the race, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record. She repeated that success with a victory again in 1983, which 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 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.
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