Social responsibility Marathoneum
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The “Marathoneum” AIMS Marathon-Museum of Running in Berlin AIMS Marathon
– Museum of Running in Berlin
For the record By Gerd Steins and Horst Milde When the sport of distance running broke loose on the streets of New York in 1975 and then spread rapidly throughout North America and Europe few people stopped to think about what was happening – they were too busy living the moment or, as it turned out, living the era. It took time for that to change but in 1994 Berlin Marathon race director Horst Milde proposed the establishment of a ”Museum of Running” in Berlin under the supervision of AIMS. Berlin was fertile ground for such an initiative and had already hosted several exhibitions about running over the previous decade. The third AIMS World Congress had taken place in Berlin in September 1985 in parallel with the Berlin Marathon. An exhibition on running was to be on display in the shop windows of a well-known Kurfürstendamm department store in the finish area of the Berlin Marathon. Requests for items to be loaned were sent out all over the world from April 1985 and Gerd Steins penned a concept for the exhibition. In the end the exhibition could not be held but the donations received were used for the 1987 exhibition “From the Knights’ Tournament to the City Marathon”. There was not yet a significant pool of running artifacts so about 95% of the exhibited objects were borrowed. Two days before the official reunification of Germany (on 3 October 1990) the East German sports collection was transferred to the Berlin Sports Museum. It had a library stock that filled 110 linear metres and included 72,772 sports photographs and negatives, 6000 documents and 8800 other artifacts.
Right: T-shirt with race number (both signed) worn by Eliud Kipchoge at the 2015 Berlin Marathon which he won in a time of 2:04:00 (above, picture Tilo Wiedensohler). From Eliud Kipchoge (Kapsisiywa/Kenya).
Distance Running | 2020 Edition 4
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