Boston’s course is no stranger to landmark moments in the history of women’s marathon running.
The stories of Bobbi Gibb and Katherine Switzer, the trailblazers of the 1960s, have been followed by Joan Benoit Samuelson’s record-setting runs of the late 1970s and early 80s and Jean Driscoll’s eight victories in the wheelchair division that spanned the 20th and 21st centuries.
It’s the division that Driscoll dominated in that period that takes center stage at this year’s 129th edition of this famous old race.
2025 marks 50 years since the introduction of the wheelchair field. One glance at the list of champions during that half century underlines that this is a test that only the very best can win over and over again.
Since Driscoll there has been a hat-trick for the Australian Louise Sauvage (who now assembles the field for the TCS Sydney Marathon, the newest member of the Abbott World Marathon Majors); five in a row for the great Japanese racer Wakako Tsuchida; five in six years for the incomparable Tatyana McFadden and four in five years for Swiss star Manuela Schär, who went on a streak of ten wins in a row between 2018 and 2019.
Missing from that list is Schär’s compatriot, and current AbbottWMM Series champion, Catherine Debrunner.
Debrunner makes her debut in Boston on Monday, with all eyes on her bid to not only win her first Boston crown, but to claim another slice of women’s marathoning history.
Debrunner has just turned 30, and currently holds five of the original six course records, all of which she has snatched since her marathon debut in Berlin in 2022.
She burst onto the marathon scene that year by adding London swiftly after Berlin, and has found a speed that no one has been able to live with.
She was sparing in her appearances in 2024 with such a heavy Paralympic program to contend with, but this year will compete in all three spring races, having already won Tokyo in devastating style in March.
Now, on the wheelchair race’s big birthday in Boston, she can complete the set of wins and course records on the same day as earning her Six Star Medal.
It will not be an easy task.
Schär blazed her way to an event record 1:28:17 in the sun-drenched conditions of 2017, and no winner has come anywhere close in the six renewals of the race since then.
It may be too much to ask of Debrunner, who plundered four gold medals in Paris last summer to burnish her dominant position in the sport, to win and win in such a fast time on her first appearance in Boston.
But the Netherlands-based athlete has been in the history-making habit since she took to the roads.
In a landmark moment for the division, it would be fitting if she was to honor it with another record-setting performance.
More Boston content
- Listen to our pre-Boston Marathon Talk show here.
- Who can stop Marcel Hug?
- The woman on the brink of Boston immortality
- Is this the moment a new King emerges?
