On the 50th anniversary of the first wheelchair race at the Boston Marathon, when Bob Hall took the tape, the desired fairytale among the home crowd may have been for another American man to bookend that half century of the push-rim division.
But that would have been to ignore another sort of symmetry that Marcel Hug had signposted earlier in the week.
The most dominant racer in the entire history of the sport, Hug cut his teeth in a chair designed and marketed by Hall himself, and posted a picture on his Instagram feed of that chair in the build-up to the race.
And the great man was there to witness him lay down another winning chapter, as the Swiss 39-year-old beat the USA’s Daniel Romanchuk for his eighth Boston win.
The pair were together until the 15km split, by which point Hug was 29 seconds in front. His lead by halfway was almost two minutes and when he crossed the finish line, it was beyond four, stopping the clock at 1:21:34.
The machine Hug powered his way to victory in is unrecognizable from that chair he began racing in and even further from the day chair Hall raced in all those years ago.
Quite how Hall made it through the Newton Hills in it all those years ago defies all logic. But he did, and in doing so, set in motion the growth of a sport that the likes of Hug and women’s winner Susannah Scaroni can now forge lucrative careers from.
Scaroni won here in 2022 on her comeback trail from a road accident that left her facing an incredibly uncertain future.
All eyes were on Catherine Debrunner who was seeking her Six Star medal and a sixth Major win on her Boston debut.
But debuts here are often not easy things to win. Boston has many lessons to teach the fastest to the slowest, and Scaroni has been at this school longer than her Swiss rival.
Scaroni collaborated with Manuela Schär and Debrunner to establish a lead of 27 seconds over last year’s champion Eden Rainbow-Cooper, but by 30km she had blown the field apart, with Debrunner losing 26 seconds to the American and Schar 1:16 behind.
When she eventually took the tape on Boylston St, Scaroni was more than two minutes ahead of Debrunner, with Schär a distant third.
Hostilities will resume in London, just six days after the showdown in New England.
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