RACE HISTORY

"VISITING RUNNER WINS AT FALMOUTH"

Frank Shorter, left, and Bill Rodgers
helped build the worldwide reputation
of the race in the '70s.

The story began, "A 21-year-old casual visitor to Falmouth, who learned of the first annual Woods Hole-Falmouth 'Marathon' on Tuesday afternoon, turned in a 39-minute 16-second performance to win the grueling 7.3 mile run Wednesday in driving rain and adverse winds of almost gale force."

His name was David Duba, a college student from Central Michigan University on summer vacation, and no knew then that he would become etched into the history of a race that was to be one of the springboards to the country's running boom.

A photograph accompanying the story showed "venerable" 65-year-old Johnny Kelley of East Dennis with some of the other 92 runners who completed the course from the Captain Kidd in Woods Hole to the Brothers Four in Falmouth Heights. Kelley finished 17th in the race. The tag line to that story 28 years ago was that "This affair is scheduled to be held on an annual basis." And so it has.

The CIGNA Falmouth Road Race celebrates its 35th running this year and the spirit which made the first Falmouth so special is still present today. More than 10,000 runners will gather in Woods Hole for the 2007 renewal, including many of the world's elite, though the essence of the event remains a fun run. Back-of-the-pack joggers share the road with the best, forming a tapestry of colors from the start on Water Street to the finish at the beach in Falmouth Heights.

Sponsored for the second time this year by CIGNA, the race is one of the showcase events in distance running and woven into the fabric of summer on Cape Cod, like Fourth of July fireworks and Labor Day weekend cookouts. The little race that could belongs to Falmouth. It was first held on a Thursday afternoon because that was founder Tommy Leonard's birthday. It is seven miles because that was the distance from the Captain Kidd in Woods Hole to Tommy's workplace—the Brothers Four in Falmouth Heights.

Tommy the bartender concocted a recipe that included one part sporting spectacle, one part festive family outing and a dash of sun, sea, and splash. Shake rattle and roll and presto! You have the Falmouth Road Race, a star-spangled celebration of red-hot competition and fun-in-the-sun holiday atmosphere in one of the most picturesque towns on the Cape.

Road races are commonplace on the sporting calendar these days, but it wasn't always that way. The first Falmouth could be called a "marathon"and probably only those who ran the seven-plus miles knew it wasn't.

The genesis for a summer road race in Falmouth began in 1972. Tommy Leonard was a bartender form Boston who was working at the Brothers Four. He was into running before running was in, and so when the 1972 Olympic Marathon in Munich appeared on a TV set in the lounge, the irrepressible "T.L." began offering analysis of the race.

Leonard became so engrossed in the performance of a kid named Frank Shorter that he shut down the bar to watch the first American since 1908 win the Olympic Marathon.

"Wouldn't it be fantastic," said Leonard that day in 1972, "if we could get Frank Shorter to run in a race on Cape Cod?"

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. And oh, what a history Falmouth has. Leonard, with the considerable help of Falmouth High track coach John Carroll, his wife Lucia, then-town recreation director Rich Sherman and his wife Kathy, pulled together the first race in 1973. About 100 people entered.

The next year the field swelled to 445 entrants as an unknown who was called "Will Rodgers" —the world would later come to know him as "Boston Billy Rodgers" — upstaged renowned miler Marty Liquori to win the 1974 race.

And then, Tommy Leonard's summer-of-'72 dream came true. The Olympic gold medallist, Frank Shorter, came to town to win the 1975 Falmouth Road race in a shootout over Rodgers, who was fresh off his first victory in the Boston Marathon. There were 850 runners in the race —that was a lot in those years —and Falmouth was established as one of the best non-marathon races in the country, if not the world.