According to many prominent newspapers, the first-ever women’s Olympic 800-meter race at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics was a troubling sight. Of the nine women who started, five or six reportedly collapsed before finishing, with several having to be carried off the track.
It was the first time women had been included in Athletics events at the Olympics after more than 30 years of exclusion. And it would be the last time women would be allowed to run any distance longer than 200 meters at the Olympics until 1960, as these reports were used to further the narrative that women weren’t physically capable of running longer distances.
Except, those reports were fabricated. Records and video from that race show that all of the nine athletes finished, with the first three running under the world record. And there was no mass collapse. (One tripped and fell while leaning at the line, then was quickly helped to her feet.)
Fifth-place finisher and American Florence MacDonald did not need to be “worked over” after “falling onto the grass unconscious,” as reported by William Shirer in the Chicago Tribune, nor did silver medalist Kinue Hitomi of Japan need a 15-minute “revival period” after experiencing “complete exhaustion.”
Six of the runners did not fall “headlong into the ground,” as reported by Wythe Williams of the New York Times, and no one had to be carried off.
Five of the so-called “wretched women” did not drop out, as John Tunis of the New York Evening Post claimed.
In reality, the race went down not dissimilarly to any other competitive 800. And yet, the fake story peddled by the media would reverberate for decades, with media sources recounting the events inaccurately as recently as 2016. Not only would this impact opportunities for elite women to compete at longer distances, but also narratives around whether everyday women could safely go for a jog without their uterus falling out.
The men concocting these imaginary events weren’t used to seeing women exert strength, get sweaty, or breathe heavily. Women using their bodies in ways that didn’t prioritize being pretty or pleasing men likely felt subversive and dangerous. Whether the grossly inaccurate events reported by these men were the result of hysterical delusion or intentional sabotage is unclear. But they did serve the purposes of an organization and a movement that was already set on keeping women out of the Olympics and out of sport in general.
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, believed that including women in the Games would be "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and improper."
“If some women want to play football or box, let them,” he said. “Provided that the event takes place without spectators, because the spectators who flock to such competitions are not there to watch a sport.”
During de Coubertin’s tenure, women were allowed to compete in events that were seen as less threatening to their femininity, like tennis, golf, archery, gymnastics, and skating. It was only thanks to the activism of women’s sports pioneer Alice Milliat, who organized an alternative Women’s Olympic Games, that the International Olympic Committee agreed to include ten Athletics events for women in 1928.
But by the start of the Games, those ten events had been reduced to just five: The 100 meters, 800 meters, 4x100-meter relay, high jump, and discus throw. By 1932, the 800 meters would be erased from that list, thanks to the delirium that followed the 1928 event.
Just days after that race, the International Amateur Athletic Federation held a “spirited debate” about whether to retain the women’s 800 meters in the Olympic Games, and voted by a 12-to-9 margin to reject it. This came against the advice of a Dr. Bergmann in attendance, who shared that “competitive athletics is not injurious to women,” a conclusion he based on his “ten years of experience which had indicated that women athletes got married and had children just as did non-athletes.”
Despite the sexism baked into his reasoning, Dr. Bergmann was ahead of his time. After all, the Montreal Daily Star had just days before declared that the 800 meters would make women age prematurely and was “obviously beyond women’s powers of endurance, and can only be injurious to them.” Other outlets called the race “dangerous,” “a disgrace,” “pathetic,” and “humiliating.” “Even this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength,” printed the New York Times.
In the 32 years that followed, not only would women be kept from racing the 800 at the Olympics. Women in the United States would also be banned from all distance races, thanks to a ruling by the Amateur Athletic Union that resulted from the media coverage of the 1928 race. After being reinstated in 1960, the 800 would remain the longest Olympic distance for women until the introduction of the women’s 1500 in 1972. The pseudoscientific ideas purported around the 1928 race about women's ability to run long distances would continue to hold back women’s running until well into the 1980s, and the long-awaited introduction of the Olympic women’s marathon in 1984.
In 2001, two historians went to visit Florence MacDonald, one of the athletes in the 1928 race. She was 92 years old. When questioned about the rumor that she and her competitors had collapsed, she responded, “That’s not true! They could have run another race. It seems to me that we were as fresh when we finished as we were when we started…This collapsing business? That was a lot of nonsense.”
Lauren Wingenroth is a freelance writer covering fitness, running, sports, the performing arts, and more. A former editor of Dance Magazine, her work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Outside, SELF, PS, ESPN, Well+ Good, Playbill, American Theater, and other outlets. She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, a marathoner, and a North Carolinian.
