The Boston Marathon is today, and hopefully as it has been every year but one, it will be a wonderful day for all who participate, from runners to spectators to volunteers.
Frank Shorter will be on hand to be an analyst for the race with the Universal Sports Network. In a Q/A with Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News, he describes his feeling about what happened last year.
Q: You’ve compared the experience of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings to what you heard and saw during the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, days before you were to go out and win your gold. How do you make that connection?
A: When the second bomb went off across the street behind me in Boston, I was trying to get to the TV truck for our afternoon show and ended up cutting through Lord & Taylor (dress shop on Boylston Street) because there was a people jam. I just went through the first door when I heard the first bomb. I knew what that was — I also heard the shots in the early morning in Munich. I happened to be sleeping outside on the balcony in the Olympic Village while my roommate, Dave Wottle, was inside our room with his new wife, Nan.
So I heard the shots go off at 4 a.m. and I knew. That morning there wasn’t a sound in the Olympic Village. We spent the day with a little black-and-white TV and we could see the terrorist across the courtyard — that classic picture of the man with the sub-machine gun. We went through that whole day, and the next day and the memorial service in that psychosocial process that they now have labels for — shock, depression, the resolution stage.
It’s the same kind of way they’ve been doing things in Boston over the last year, except we did it all in a short time.
Coming back from the memorial service, I turned to my marathon teammate Kenny Moore and said, “The only other place the terrorists could do anything is out on the marathon course. But I’m not going to think about it, because if I do, then they win.” I ran the entire race and never thought about it.
So if you fast-forward 42 years, all of the sudden I’m kind of back, in a way, in that same situation. I’ve already seen such a transformation in how it has been handled by the people around me, but it’s hard to describe. Munich was just confusion.
On why this year’s race will be so important.
A: It’s completing a cycle. Even the elite athletes want to get back here. I think the men’s and women’s winners from the past three years are here, and that doesn’t happen unless they’re making it a point to be here. It’s going to be an incredible athletic event from that standpoint.
There will be 35,000 people out there running, I think like what I experienced in Munich — they’re not going to let any acts of terrorism affect them. That’s sort of their collective statement. It’s kind of like closure, but it’s more like closure of an initial chapter. Then everything will go forward from there.