New York
Marathon

From a One-Dollar Park Race to the Five Boroughs

The New York City Marathon began about as small as a marathon can begin. On 13 September 1970, 127 runners paid one dollar each to run laps of Central Park on a total race budget of a thousand dollars. Fifty-five of them finished. The winner, Gary Muhrcke, was a New York firefighter who had spent the night before the race putting out fires.

The race that exists today was born six years later. For the United States bicentennial in 1976, the organisers took the marathon out of the park and ran it through all five boroughs of the city — Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan. 2,090 runners entered, 1,549 finished, and Bill Rodgers won in 2:10:10, the fastest marathon anyone ran anywhere that year. Rodgers won the next three editions too, and the five-borough course became the template every big-city marathon has copied since. The 2026 race, on 1 November, is the 50th anniversary of that first crossing.

It is now the biggest sporting event in New York and, for one November in 2025, the biggest marathon ever run anywhere: 59,226 finishers, a world record for the distance, until London edged past it with 59,830 the following April. The two races have been trading that title back and forth — scale is the one contest New York never loses for long.

Five Boroughs, Five Bridges

The course is a tour of the city stitched together by five bridges, and the bridges are the story. The start line is on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge itself, closed to traffic for the morning, climbing from Staten Island into Brooklyn across the first two miles. Brooklyn takes the race to halfway; the Pulaski Bridge at mile 13 hands it to Queens.

Then comes the one everybody talks about. The Queensboro Bridge, around mile 15, is the quietest place on the course — no spectators allowed, just footsteps and breathing on the lower deck — and it empties onto First Avenue, where the crowd stands fifteen deep and the noise arrives like a slap. The Willis Avenue Bridge at mile 20 sends the race into the Bronx exactly where marathons start to hurt; the Madison Avenue Bridge at mile 21 brings it back into Harlem for the long run down Fifth Avenue and into Central Park. The finish is inside the park, near West 67th Street, a few hundred metres from where the whole thing began in 1970.

The Course That Stopped Giving Records

For a few years at the start, this course did give records. Grete Waitz — invited in 1978 as a track runner who had never raced the distance — won her first New York in a world best 2:32:30, came back in 1979 to run 2:27:33, the first woman ever under two and a half hours, and lowered it again to 2:25:41 in 1980. Three Novembers, three world bests, all on the five boroughs.

1981 is where the vein closed, and it closed with a tape measure. Alberto Salazar ran 2:08:13 and Allison Roe 2:25:29, and both were celebrated as world records — until the course was re-measured and found to be 151 metres short. Both marks were struck from the books. No world record has been set in New York since, and Salazar's later story belongs to another page of this journal.

The modern race does not even pretend to chase the clock. Since 2007 New York has run without pacemakers — the organisers pulled them deliberately, in favour of what they called championship-style racing — and the course records show what that costs: Tamirat Tola's 2:04:58 from 2023 sits five and a half minutes off the world record that fell at London in April 2026, and Hellen Obiri's 2:19:51 from 2025 is more than four minutes off the women-only world mark. If Berlin is the course that makes records, New York is the course that makes champions — the two poles of the Majors.

The Names of New York

No one owns this race like Grete Waitz owned it. Nine victories between 1978 and 1988 — a total no runner, man or woman, has approached at any major marathon. She died in 2011, and the race has been honouring her ever since; her nine wins are the deepest line in its book. Bill Rodgers won the first four five-borough editions outright, 1976 through 1979. Mary Keitany, who retired in 2021, won four — 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018 — the only woman beside Waitz to reach that many, and her 2017 defeat came at the hands of Shalane Flanagan, the first American woman to win New York in forty years, since Miki Gorman in 1977.

Geoffrey Kamworor took two titles, in 2017 and 2019, racing in the colours of the NN Running Team. And the 2025 edition compressed the whole character of the race into one morning: Benson Kipruto beat Alexander Mutiso by 0.03 seconds, the closest men's finish in New York's history; Hellen Obiri of the On Athletics Club took her second title in a course record 2:19:51 that finally retired Margaret Okayo's 2003 mark; and Eliud Kipchoge, running New York for the first time at the end of his championship years, finished 17th in 2:14:36 — completing, with his sixth of the six original Majors, the Six Star set he had chased across two decades.

One more New York thread belongs here. Since February 2026, New York Road Runners has been working with the foundation built in memory of Agnes Tirop by her training partners — its first visit to Kenya, helping the charity take shape in the United States. That story, and the kit that carries her name, is told in full in our page on Tirop's Angels.

Sponsor Kit, Not Federation Kit

The house rule for reading any race: championships mean federation kit, and the Majors mean sponsor kit. Nobody wears national colours down First Avenue. Kamworor won New York in NN Running white and orange; Obiri set her course record in the gear of the On Athletics Club; the pelotons behind them raced in the uniforms of their trade teams and shoe contracts. New York belongs to the brand universe, and its archive lives on the brand shelves of this journal.

Sponsor kit · in the archiveNike NN Running Team Pro Elite Training Women PoloAthlete-issued kit from the NN Running line — the team colours Geoffrey Kamworor wore through both of his New York wins.80,00 €View piece →

The lines behind the Majors each have their own page here — Nike Pro Elite, adidas Pro Elite, NN Running and On — and the rail below holds one athlete-issued piece from each of the four, the same universe that fills the professional field every November.