However, she recovered from the surgery much more quickly than expected, and was the favorite in the trials, at Olympia, Washington. In March 1984, Benoit injured her knee severely during a 20-mile training run, forcing her to undergo arthroscopic knee surgery just 17 days before the United States Olympic Women's Marathon Trials were scheduled. Her Boston record was not broken for another 11 years. That took more than two minutes off the world's best time, set by Norway's Grete Waitz in the London Marathon only a day earlier. Despite having surgery on her Achilles tendons two years earlier, she repeated her marathon success with a victory in 1983, setting a course record of 2:22:43. 10,000 meter championship, posting a time of 33:37.50. She won the race, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record. Īfter returning to Bowdoin to complete her degree, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the Broderick Award (now the Honda Sports Award) as the nation's best female collegiate cross country runner for 1979–80.

She earned All-America honors at NC State in both 19, and in 1978 helped lead the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship. In 1977, after two years at Bowdoin, she accepted a running scholarship to North Carolina State, where she began concentrating solely on her running.

At Bowdoin College she excelled in athletics. She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.Ĭompetitive life and Boston Marathon victories īorn in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Benoit took to long-distance running to help recover from a broken leg suffered while slalom skiing. Her time at the Boston Marathon was the fastest time by an American woman at that race for 28 years. She held the fastest time for an American woman at the Chicago Marathon for 32 years after winning the race in 1985.

Joan Benoit Samuelson (born May 16, 1957) is an American marathon runner who was the first women's Olympic Games marathon champion, winning the gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

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