ABSTRACT
Tom Longboat, an Onondaga from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, Canada was an outstanding runner during the decade before World War I. He won virtually every amateur race he entered in record time, and when a North American professional marathon circuit was created after the controversial 1908 Olympic Marathon, he became its first ‘world champion’. Longboat was exciting to watch – he could win from the front and win from behind and many of his races had heart-stopping finishes. The crowds loved him. When he won the Boston Marathon, Toronto city controller William Hubbard said that ‘I don’t know anyone who has done more to help the Commissioner of Industries than this man Longboat’. City Council promised to pay him $500 when he retired from amateur racing. But he was a subject of controversy, too, and rumours abounded that he never trained and was rarely sober. After he retired and became a garbage collector, his story became ‘Rags to Riches to Rags’.
In the late 1970s, I was commissioned to write a popular biography of Longboat. As a marathon runner myself, I could never accept that anyone could run so well untrained and hung over. The more I dug into his career, the more I realized that there was another side of the story – that Longboat had a strong sense of his own body, a sophisticated approach to training drawn from the Iroquois tradition of which he was just the most recent exemplar, and that he was determined to control his own life, even if it meant standing up to and then breaking away from the white sports promoters who tried to manage his career. This article, which sets out those findings, led to the rehabilitation of his legend. In 1985, the City of Toronto paid his children $10,000 in recognition of the $500 that was never paid.
