Fifty years after his historic Boston Marathon finish, Bob Hall still remembered the cheers near the Newton firehouse. Turning onto Commonwealth Avenue, heading east toward the city and one of the race’s most punishing stretches, he was greeted by a roaring crowd and the smell of sausages and cigars. Mr. Hall, the only wheelchair athlete in the race’s 2,365-person field, couldn’t help but crack a smile, even as he sweated his way uphill near Mile 18.
“I said to myself, other people have got to do this, too,” he told the Boston Globe last year. “This is not my race, this is all of ours.”
Mr. Hall, who died April 12 at 74, was the Boston Marathon’s first official wheelchair champion, crossing the finish line in 1975 in a lightly modified hospital-style chair. Hailed in later years as the father of wheelchair racing, he helped inaugurate a more inclusive era for the sport, pushing marathon organizers in Boston and other cities to establish wheelchair divisions for the first time.
With help from an oceanographic engineer, he also began designing and manufacturing racing chairs through his own company, Hall’s Wheels, spearheading design advances that contributed to the development of the ultralight, three-wheeled chairs used by pro athletes today. One of his sleek 1986 models was featured in a design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Several of his chairs were used by future Boston Marathon champions, including Marcel Hug, Tatyana McFadden and Daniel Romanchuk.
Mr. Hall “changed the game” through his racing, chair designs and advocacy for wheelchair athletes, said Jack Fleming, the president and chief executive of the Boston Athletic Association, which hosts the annual marathon. Thanks in part to Mr. Hall, he said, 51 wheelchair racers will take to the starting line at Monday’s Boston Marathon, almost 51 years to the day after Mr. Hall first raced there.
“I don’t think that Bob would have ever envisioned a professional wheelchair division of 50 athletes with hundreds of thousands of dollars of prize money,” Fleming said. But “where there is no momentum at all, someone has to do it before others can see it.”
Mr. Hall was part of a wave of pioneering marathoners who broke down barriers in the sport, defying critics who questioned whether they belonged in a 26.2-mile race. The Boston Marathon had been an exclusively male event until 1966, when 23-year-old Bobbi Gibb ran without official recognition. Four years later, Vietnam veteran Eugene Roberts — who had lost both his legs in the war — became the first person to complete the race in a wheelchair, finishing in about seven hours.
Like Gibb, Roberts raced without official sanction. Mr. Hall managed to gain recognition by striking a deal beforehand with race director Will Cloney, who offered him a finisher’s certificate (the same honor available to runners) so long as he completed the race in less than three hours.
He finished with two minutes to spare.
“I did it for the challenge,” said Mr. Hall, who sometimes clocked 100 miles a week in his training. As he later explained in a Boston Marathon documentary, his racing motivation came from within, out of a desire to push himself to the limit. “All of us face limitations of one sort or another,” he said. “The real gauge of a man is whether or not he approaches his full potential.”
Mr. Hall won his second Boston Marathon in 1977, when the race was designated as the site of the national wheelchair championships. Competing in a field of seven that started 15 minutes ahead of the runners, he set a new world record, finishing with a time of 2 hours 40 minutes 18 seconds.
He later had three more top-three finishes at Boston, and celebrated the 20th anniversary of his first victory by finishing with a time that was more than an hour faster than his 1975 mark. (The sport had come a long way: He only came in 23rd. Today’s athletes are even faster, with Hug setting a course record of 1:15:33 in 2024.)
Mr. Hall’s exploits received national attention, including in 1980, when at age 28 — having apparently decided that 26.2 miles was child’s play — he joined runner Dave McGillivray in trekking some 1,520 miles up the East Coast. Traveling on foot and by wheelchair, in the sun and in the rain, they spent 38 days on the road from Florida to Boston, raising money for cancer research and patient care, with a stop at the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter along the way.
Still, Mr. Hall encountered lingering resistance from some race organizers who argued that wheelchair athletes were hardly different from roller skaters and skateboarders — none of whom belonged in a marathon. In 1977, he was denied a spot in the New York City Marathon after race director Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Road Runners, argued that wheelchairs posed a safety hazard.
Interviewed by the New York Times, Lebow cited concerns with bridge and road crossings. He also took a shot at rival marathons, saying that other races had accepted Mr. Hall as an entrant for promotional reasons, “because he’s good copy.”
“Fred’s just being narrow‐minded,” Mr. Hall told the Times. “He cannot see the capability of people who are disabled.”
Mr. Hall sued to have wheelchair racers admitted to the New York marathon, and was publicly supported by elite runners including Bill Rodgers, with whom he had raced in Boston. He was allowed to compete in 1978 and 1979, as his case continued through the legal system, but in 1982 New York’s highest court ruled that wheelchairs, like vehicles, could be banned from a footrace.
Under pressure from Mayor Edward I. Koch, the marathon’s organizers agreed to allow wheelchair racers anyway. Not until 2000, following a separate lawsuit, was an official wheelchair division created for the race.
Mr. Hall was by then working as a consultant for the Boston Marathon, advising race organizers on its own wheelchair division. His impact was not lost on younger athletes like McFadden, a five-time Boston Marathon champion. She told the Associated Press last year, “Because of him crossing that finish line, we’re able to race today.”
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 31, 1951, Mr. Hall was stricken with polio before he turned 1. He underwent multiple surgeries and grew up in the nearby town of Belmont, where he used leg braces and crutches as a child, played Little League baseball for a year and managed the football and basketball teams at his high school.
At Boston State College (now the University of Massachusetts Boston), he competed on the wrestling team and trained under renowned track coach Bill Squires, who introduced him to pacing strategies and techniques that helped Mr. Hall win the 1974 national wheelchair marathon in Toledo — a stepping stone to Boston.
Late in life, Mr. Hall helped promote a Massachusetts program called REquipment, which distributes free mobility equipment and other devices to people in need. He died at a hospital in Cambridge, according to Fleming, the BAA director. Survivors include his wife of 38 years, Jane Raymond Hall; three sisters; and a brother.
Last year, Mr. Hall was welcomed back to the Boston Marathon as one of the race’s grand marshals, symbolically leading participants from start to finish. “It warms me up quite a bit and puts a smile on my face,” he told the Globe. “It’s kind of like closing the circle of my life.”
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