Every year for 117 years, the city of Boston and thousands of visitors mark the Massachusetts state holiday – Patriots’ Day – by running or watching the city’s prestigious marathon.
But when the 118th race comes around next year, it won’t just be the previous year’s records and victories that Boston Marathon runners will be trying to overcome.
They’ll be trying to regain a runner’s high destroyed a matter of strides from the finish line, destroying all that was glorious about the day and leaving three people dead and more than 170 others injured.
“It is a sad day for the City of Boston, for the running community and for all those who were here to enjoy the 117th running of the Boston Marathon,” The Boston Athletic Association, which puts on the world-class event, said in a statement. “What was intended to be a day of joy and celebration quickly became a day in which running a marathon was of little importance.”
As the front pages and home pages of news outlets around the globe were splashed with images of grief and destruction, it was in the commentary and sports sections where one could get a sense of how the running world was coping with the tragedy.
The thrill a marathon participant feels when finishing the 42.2-kilometre race is a moment full of emotion, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Nick Galvin wrote. “It’s a special moment, a pure moment and one that keeps many of us coming back for more.”
He sees Monday’s twin bombing as an attack not only on a country, but on a global community of runners. He called the timing of the attack, so late in the race, “hateful.”
“Someone, somewhere has calculated that that is the point at which keen amateurs in their thousands would be experiencing the thrill of seeing the finish line up ahead…”
Along with chowder and accents, the marathon is synonymous with Boston – “an amazing symbol of human kindness and community,” Daniel Arrigg Koh wrote in the Huffington Post.
Runners and race organizers hope this won’t scare people away from the sport – that they’ll continue to race and that next year’s marathon will be an even bigger event because of the bombings, as Boston Athletics Association volunteer Eddie O’Connor told Runner’s World.
Runners, he said, are going to be united in the wake of the tragedy.
“I’ve heard people who aren’t in marathon shape say, ‘I’m going to start training right now,’” he said.
It was only a matter of hours before pundits began weighing in on who was responsible or how quickly the U.S. would revert back to post 9-11 security measures following Monday’s blasts. A column on Russia Today’s website used the Boston Marathon as an analogy for a pending crackdown on civil liberties.
“The irony that lurks behind the attack on the Boston Marathon is a cruel one: no other sport better represents the spirit of individual freedom than that of running: The competitor is locked into a contest against himself and time, while the distant finish line exists as an impartial arbiter of victory. The clock does not lie.”
The column also called into question “lax” security near the finish line, in Copley Square, where the bombs were detonated and where the most spectators were gathered.
Fox News digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt said “Americans had again grown complacent,” having not seen a terror threat come to fruition in so long.
Stirewalt wrote that no one in the U.S. would have been shocked had there been such an attack in 2003, when the images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers were still fresh in everyone’s minds. But a decade later, he said, it was practically unthinkable.
More attention had been paid to mass shootings, particularly in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. and Aurora, Colo. massacres, that Americans forgot about terrorism – homegrown or not.
But, the ideology and motive of whoever is responsible for the attack and its three victims are not as strong as the spirit of the runners and spectators lining Copley square, wrote Independent executive editor Richard Askwith.
“Terrorism is about emptiness, of heart and imagination. Big city marathon-running is about embracing humanity,” Askwith wrote.
A marathon, he said, celebrates diversity, perseverance and love – “the life-affirming instincts of the normal human being.” Terrorists on the other hand, “have nothing to look forward to but more of the life they hate.”
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