I have met just a handful of famous athletes. At Henninger High School in Syracuse of all places, I met the great skier Jean-Claude Killy. At the now-extinct Memorial Stadium in Cleveland, Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski signed my baseball glove. At O’Hare Airport in Chicago, I noticed this woman’s crazy fingernails and knew right away those hands belonged to “Flo Jo” — Olympic sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner.
The last is Kathrine Switzer. The picture you see was taken in 2011, the year Switzer was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. How she got to Seneca Falls is a story worth telling.
Had race officials known Switzer was a woman when she signed up for the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer 47 years ago, they would have rejected her.
