NYC Marathon award going to LI running icon Nina Kuscsik

There she sits, in an often-
reproduced photograph that has come to symbolize the battle women fought for an even playing field in sports — in this case, distance running.

Despite the gravity of all that, Nina Kuscsik, 33 at the time, is seen in the photo, smiling — and sitting.

Yes, the black-and-white image depicts six women not running, not standing, but sitting, at the starting line of the 1972 New York City Marathon. These six — Lynn Blackstone, Jane Muhrcke, Liz Franceschini, Pat Barrett, Cathy Miller and Kuscsik — were refusing to abide by the rules of competitive distance running that required them to start separately from the male competitors: 10 minutes before, in this case. Still, it was the first time women’s results would count in the marathon.

The six women sat for 10 minutes, then got up and joined the 272 men for the race start — running together, as equals. The female runners were making a serious statement that day, and the male runners seemed to support them. But in the picture, which was published in The New York Times, Kuscsik appears to be chuckling, enjoying the moment of 1970s street theater.

The sign she is holding proclaims, in handwritten letters, “The AAU is Unfair.” That would be the Amateur Athletic Union, then the governing body of track and field in the United States.

A sign held by another woman says, “Hey Wake Up AAU! It’s 1972!”

Top woman finisher

A half-century later, sitting in the living room of her Huntington Station home, the good-natured Kuscsik (whose last name is pronounced “Q-sik”) giggles and smiles again when asked about the photo and the protest. Since she’s 83, Kuscsik’s memory of these events can be fuzzy. Thus, her daughter, Chris Wiese, has joined the interview by FaceTime from her home in Alberta, Canada, to help keep facts and dates straight. But Kuscsik has no problem remembering the famous “sit down strike” 50 years ago.

“That was Fred,” she says with a laugh. “He orchestrated it.”

That would be Fred Lebow, the charismatic founder of the New York City Marathon, president of the New York Road Runners and publicity impresario who died in 1994. The six women had been handed the signs when they sat down. “I don’t remember who made the signs,” says Kuscsik. “We just sat down, and then we ran with the men.”

Kuscsik went on to finish as the first woman in the race that day. Back then the marathon was held in October and run entirely in Central Park, consisting of a brutal, four-lap, 26.2-mile circuit of the park’s hills. (The 2022 edition of what is now a five-borough race will take place next Sunday.)

Lebow’s and the women’s publicity gambit worked: The photo was splashed across four columns of the following day’s edition of The New York Times. Not long afterward the AAU changed its rules.

Behind the scenes

Although a talented runner, Kuscsik went on to achieve her most lasting impact on the sport as a behind-the-scenes leader. But instead of holding up more signs, she attended meetings, sat on committees and quietly argued the case for women’s running with far-reaching results: Kuscsik’s work with the AAU and other governing bodies was an important part of a process that resulted in the first women’s Olympic marathon — held at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles — which, in turn, helped spark a boom in women’s participation in running that continues today.

“Nina represented all that was great about the women’s marathon pioneers,” said 1968 Boston Marathon winner Amby Burfoot, former editor-in-chief of Runner’s World magazine and the author of “First Ladies of Running” (Rodale Books), a 2016 book about women who led the running boom of the 1960s and 1970s. “She had spirit, courage and a desire to help all other women runners.”

For those efforts, Kuscsik is being honored Friday by the New York Road Runners — organizers of the marathon — with its Abebe Bikila Award. Named for the two-time Olympic marathon champion who in 1960 became the first African to win the event, which is now dominated by Kenyans and runners from Bikila’s native Ethiopia, it is presented each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the sport of distance running.

The protest at the start of the 1972 New York City Marathon and Kuscsik’s subsequent first-place finish were the culmination of a big year for her: In April 1972, she had been the first official women’s winner of the Boston Marathon. But Kuscsik had been running for many years. While she has lived in Huntington Station since 1965, Nina Marmorino grew up in Brooklyn, attending Midwood High School — and she was athletic. “I was a bike racer and a speed skater,” she says. “Roller skates and ice skates.”

She also ran, although there was no track team for her to join. In May 1954, when she was 15, an English runner named Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile — a milestone that many had said was impossible to achieve. Young Nina was enthralled by the news of this feat. She hopped on her bike and rode from her home near Brooklyn College to the local track, which was closed that day, surrounded by a fence.

“It was locked,” recalls Nina. “So, I climbed over the fence.”

Here, Wiese, who has heard the story in detail a number of times, interjects. “Mom,” she says, through FaceTime. “It wasn’t just a fence. It was a barbed-wire fence.”

“Oh, right,” says her mom.

Yet, showing a determination that would hold her in good stead as a distance runner, activist and committeewoman in the decades to come, the teenage Nina managed to clamber over, step onto the track and take off, running as fast as she could. “I ran one lap . . . a quarter mile . . . in 85 seconds,” she recalls. “I stopped, and I thought to myself, ‘He [Bannister] did four of these in less than 60 seconds?’ I was amazed.”

Kuscsik eventually gravitated toward the 26.2-mile marathon, an unusual pursuit for women at the time. Until 1960, the longest women’s race in the Olympics was 220 yards — half a lap. Anything longer was considered (at least by the men in charge of the sport) to be unladylike, even dangerous. “They told us our uteruses would fall out,” Kuscsik says, then pauses a beat before adding dryly: “I don’t know anyone whose uterus fell out.”

As someone who was, at that point, embarking on a nursing career, Kuscsik was well aware of the medical view toward women in long-distance races. But she also understood the health benefits. Plus, as she says of her years as a competitive runner, “it was fun.” A graduate of Brooklyn College School of Nursing, Kuscsik worked as a patient representative at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan until retiring 11 years ago. Her progressive views on running and women were soon validated by medical research.

Meanwhile, she was working with the same AAU that had been criticized in 1972 to make even bigger changes in the sport.

“Nina contributed more to the first Women’s Olympic Marathon in 1984 than she is given credit for,” said Burfoot. “Others worked outside the system. Nina worked inside, with the AAU. Yes, it was hidebound and male-dominated, but it also had power and authority, and someone had to push it to change. Nina was one of those someones.”

‘A true trailblazer’

And yet, a someone who didn’t really care if anyone knew about her role. “Somehow it would have happened without me,” Kuscsik says. “I just loved to run. For me, it meant freedom.”

That spirit of independence, as well as Kuscsik’s courage to challenge the status quo (even in her own self-effacing way), reverberated beyond the Olympics. It affected girls like Eileen Barnes who, growing up in Bayside, Queens, in the 1970s, loved to run. When she was a freshman at Fordham University in 1977, she wanted to join the university’s cross-country team, but she was told that women were ineligible. Barnes knew about Kuscsik and the other women who were fighting for women’s right to run. While she didn’t carry a sign saying, “Fordham Is Unfair,” she argued her case with Fordham’s athletic department — and became the first female member of the university’s cross-country team.

Now Eileen Barnes-Corley and living in Syosset, she said, “It was Nina who inspired me. I would never have done that without the example she set for us. I think my story is true for many women across the country who wanted to run. She didn’t just affect one teenage girl in New York.”

“Nina is a true trailblazer who fundamentally transformed the sport of running, changed perceptions and pushed the women’s running movement forward,” New York Road Runners Club CEO Kerin Hempel said in a statement.

The NYRR will present the Abebe Bikila Award to Kuscsik at a pre-marathon ceremony Friday in Manhattan.

But it is certainly not the only accolade Kuscsik has earned over the years. Trophies and plaques fill the mantel in her living room.

“What’s that tall one?” she asks about one trophy that towers above the rest. When reminded it is her first-place award for the 1972 New York City Marathon — the one in which she and the others staged the start-line protest — Nina smiles again and shrugs. “I can’t keep track of them.”

One of the most unusual awards is in the basement: The gorilla she won at the Empire State Building Run-Up, an event that involves racing up 86 flights (1,576 steps) and in which Kuscsik was the first female finisher from 1979 to 1981. The year she won it, Kuscsik put the 4-foot-tall stuffed animal in the front seat of her car and headed back to Huntington Station on the Long Island Expressway.

“At the time my mom told me about the gorilla in her car, I thought ‘wow . . . that’s really weird that you did that,’  ” laughs Wiese, 59 (she’s Kuscsik’s eldest; she also has two sons and two grandchildren).

Kuscsik, who had a knee replaced about 15 years ago, no longer runs; she stays active through aerobics classes at a nearby gym, and with walking and biking around the neighborhood.

When reminded that the number of women running in the New York City Marathon has grown from six in 1972 to nearly half the field of about 50,000 this year, Kuscsik smiles again. “It’s so different now,” she says. “When a woman wants to run a marathon today, nobody thinks she’s crazy.”