Meet 1984's Olympic warriors and pioneers in women's marathon and cycling

Since the inception of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, men have competed in the marathon and cycling road race, but women wouldn’t get that opportunity for another 88 years.

“It was thought that if a woman ran more than 1,500 meters, she would do bodily harm and never bear children,” said Joan Samuelson (then Joan Benoit).

When Samuelson entered Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon champion in 1984 – running 26.2 miles at a blistering 5:32 per mile pace – she slammed the door on that conversation.

“She inspired me to start running,” said Deena Kastor, the 2004 Olympic women’s marathon bronze medalist. “But her performance inspired so many women to break ceilings and be better.”

Connie Carpenter-Phinney can relate as 1984 marked the first year women would participate in an Olympic cycling road race.

“(Cycling) wasn’t equal, but there were opportunities,” Carpenter-Phinney said of her introduction to the sport. “I raced in men’s packs more than women’s because there were no prizes to win in a women’s race.”

On July 29, 1984, Carpenter-Phinney won the biggest prize of all, navigating Mission Viejo, California’s twisting roads in 2:11:14 to take the inaugural gold medal in women’s cycling.

Samuelson barely made it to the starting line of that first Olympic marathon. She had knee surgery just 17 days before the trials but returned to running within a week of the procedure and won the trials by more than 30 seconds.

“I knew then that she was going to make it,” said Bob Sevene, Samuelson’s coach. “She was that tough.”

Buoyed by her win at the trials, the typically-reserved New Englander made a bold proclamation to Sevene the night before the Olympic marathon.

“What are you going to do when I win tomorrow?” she asked him.

The next day, she broke from the pack early in the race and was never seriously challenged.

After the race, Samuelson promised her family that she would not let her historic moment change who she was. But it certainly changed the sport of running. In 1984, just 838 women competed in the Boston Marathon. In 2022, that number was over 12,000.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Samuelson said. “And I have a lot of people to thank for the opportunity to run that marathon and continue to run today.”

Carpenter-Phinney became an Olympian at 14 when she represented the U.S. Speed Skating team at Sapporo in 1972. After that, her career took an unfortunate turn when a tendon injury put her out of contention for the 1976 Winter Games in Austria.

“I started training too hard,” Carpenter-Phinney said. “There wasn’t any information out there about young female athletes. I got anemic, I had stress fractures … We had very little in physical therapy.”

For many speed skaters, cycling was a common method of cross-training. So Carpenter-Phinney took up the sport, following the lead of her older brother Chuck.

“What it felt like in the ‘70s was that I was trying to break into car racing,” Carpenter-Phinney said. “It was such a European male-dominated sport, whereas the minute they decided to include it in the Olympics, they put it on the first day of competition because they wanted to showcase us.”

Carpenter-Phinney may have been a favorite to win gold, but it made her accomplishment even more meaningful to achieve it on the world’s biggest stage.

“I knew people were watching,” she said. “This was the first time women's cycling had ever been televised nationally … It was a huge relief. And it’s a huge honor.”