“There wasn’t much of a road running scene in Ireland in the 1970s,” he says. It is, he also admits, a little odd to be back in Ireland after all these years, first visiting in 1965, as a 17-year-old fresh out of high school in Middleton, New York. Shorter had no idea where this marathon path was going in 1968 when he first ran the US Olympic marathon trial, and dropped out. This was long before the big city events such as New York and Chicago became the mass participation tests of today. He won the gold in Munich by two minutes and 12 seconds, and ran a marathon best of 2:10:30 in Fukuoka, Japan, just three months later. There are countless other stories caught up in the Shorter legend: those Munich Olympics being shattered by the Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli athletes getting half-cut on German beer the night before winning his marathon Olympic gold.Īt full flow Shorter was at once silken and light-footed and incredibly durable. Shorter runs for sheer pleasure these days, not because he needs to but because he likes to, and mostly gone is that competitive instinct which also won him silver in the 1976 Olympic marathon in Montreal, likely denied another gold by systematic doping in East Germany. Still, that gait and cadence was likely lost on most of the 4,000-plus runners lining up alongside him at Run Galway Bay last Saturday. That he's still running after all these years – at age 70, to be exact, 46 years after winning the 1972 Olympic marathon in Munich – is a good story in itself, only Shorter will forever be remembered as the man who, according to Outside magazine, "invented running in the United States", and began what Sports Illustrated described as the "social movement" which came with it. ![]() Or else because there can only ever be one Frank Shorter. At least to anyone properly educated in the history of modern marathon running. Even after all these years the low gait and smooth cadence is unmistakable.
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