The 1972 New York City Marathon was a modest, 278-runner event held entirely in Central Park. Just six women had entered. Under a rule introduced by the Amateur Athletic Union after the previous year’s race, women had to start 10 minutes before or after the men, or from a separate line—a requirement many runners regarded as discriminatory.
Shortly before 11 a.m., the six women gathered near 64th Street and Central Park Drive. As 272 men waited for them to take their mandated head start, the starting gun sounded. The women sat down instead of running. Five held signs criticizing the AAU; the sixth, a 17-year-old from the Jersey Shore, did not join the sign-holding protest.
New York Times reporter Gerald Eskenazi covered the scene, and photographer Patrick Burns captured it. The photograph appeared prominently in the next day’s paper and was picked up by newspapers around the country, provoking a strong reaction from AAU officials and helping bring attention to the rules that kept women apart from men in marathons.
The protest came amid a broader struggle over women’s access to distance running. The AAU had previously barred women from marathon courses and promoted claims that running long distances could harm their health. Nina Kuscsik, one of the six starters, had experienced those barriers firsthand: she ran the Boston Marathon unofficially in 1969, then became its first official female winner in 1972.
Kuscsik had taken up running in 1967 and later became a key advocate for equality in the sport. The article describes how she and other runners challenged restrictions that treated women’s participation as a risk or as improper. At the time, women could also face rules such as having to travel to AAU-sanctioned meets with a female chaperone.
The Central Park sit-down made the separation rule visible to a national audience. Its significance lay not in the distance covered that day, but in the message the runners sent before the race had begun: women were demanding the right to compete on equal terms.
Sources: Runner's World.