Outside Magazine

In 1975, a 27-year-old Bill Rodgers won the Boston Marathon while wearing a white mesh T-shirt that he found in a trash can. His wife had scrawled the initials of his team, the Greater Boston Track Club, across the front with a black marker, as well as “BOSTON” in all caps. Despite setting a new American record of 2:09:55, Rodgers did not receive any prize money for his efforts that day. Such were the trials of the elite distance runner in the amateur era: I won the world’s most prestigious marathon, and all I have to show for it is this lousy T-shirt.

This sartorial footnote to Rodgers’s first Boston win is the sort of whimsical detail you might expect to be memorialized by Tracksmith, a company that makes upmarket, classically styled running apparel and presents itself as a cultural ambassador for the sport. It was founded in Massachusetts in 2014, and one would be hard-pressed to think of another sportswear label that has so deftly invented itself as a heritage brand. On Tracksmith’s website, you can read an article about the punishing training regimen of Emil Zátopek, the undisputed king of distance running during the mid-20th century, and then purchase a merino-wool sweater—affectionately named the Emil shawl—“inspired” by the Czechoslovakian legend. Aesthetically and emotionally, Tracksmith often harks back to a time when the best runners in the world were not professional athletes. One of the more enduring items in the company’s collection is a cotton T-shirt with the word “AMATEUR” confidently emblazoned across the chest—a salute to runners who are doing it “for the love.” It is manufactured by a 165-year-old textile company in New England and costs $55.

There’s a mild irony in putting a price tag on the spirit of amateurism, especially in the context of a sport in which some of the most vaunted athletes of the amateur era weren’t particularly happy about not being able to earn a living from their craft. They were doing it for the love, but they would also have liked to be doing it for the cash. Steve Prefontaine famously told The New York Times in March 1975 that if he decided to represent the United States at the 1976 Olympics, he would be doing so as “a poor man.” Two months later, Pre died in a car crash, tragically denying him the opportunity to witness the phasing out of the amateur system he so despised. Rodgers was more fortunate. In the mid-seventies, he signed a multiyear deal with Asics, starting at $3,000 annually—not a princely sum by any means but better than what other companies were proposing; Nike and New Balance, Rodgers told me, offered him the “stunning fee” of $500. (Rodgers couldn’t recall precisely what he was making at the end of his time with Asics, though he thinks it was around $40,000.)