100km of Bienne: the forgotten path of women in ultrarunning

At a time when women were still excluded from most running competitions, the Biel 100 km opens up a fascinating trail regarding the forgotten history of women’s ultradistance running.

A results line that changes the narrative

While digging through the Spiridon archives, one sometimes discovers lines in the rankings that shift an entire history. This one comes down to a single name: Käthi Knuchel. In 1962, in Biel, Switzerland, she officially finished the 100-kilometer race in 20 hours and 13 minutes. That year, two women appeared in the race results. The official record of the Biel Runs lists Käthi Knuchel as the female winner of the 1962 edition, and the database of the Deutsche Ultramarathon-Vereinigung indicates that for that same year, 197 men and 2 women were classified in the 100 km event.

Two women.
One hundred kilometers.
In 1962.

The major dates usually remembered

When recounting the beginnings of women’s long-distance running, the same benchmarks often return.

There is Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run Boston without an official bib in 1966. There is Kathrine Switzer, who registered with a bib in 1967 despite the ban. Then come the major official openings of the 1970s. The Boston Athletic Association notes that the official women’s division of the Boston Marathon was not created until 1972.

Those who dig a little deeper also know the stories of Odette Vetter, Lucie Bréard, and all those women who forced their way into men’s pelotons. In Switzerland, the Morat-Fribourg race did not officially authorize women until 1977, the year Marijke Moser became the event's first female winner.

And at the Olympic Games, the women's marathon did not arrive until 1984 in Los Angeles, with the victory of Joan Benoit.

Faced with these dates, Biel raises questions.

How were women able to be officially classified in a 100-kilometer race as early as 1962, while other shorter, more visible, or more institutional events were still closing their doors to them?

Biel, a race apart

This is where the Biel 100 km becomes fascinating.

Because this race was not just a race in the strict sense. Originally, you could run, but you could also walk. This nuance seems almost absurd today to anyone who practices trail running—where you run and walk—but it apparently could change everything in the 1960s.

This peculiarity may have opened a path. Where some races still forbade women from running, an event blending running, walking, and endurance could create a more flexible zone, less locked down by the sports federations of the time.

The archives do not explicitly state that this was an organizers' strategy. They do not tell of the conversations, the resistance, or the compromises. But they provide an essential fact: in 1962, in Biel, two women were classified.

Ultra before the ultra

The Biel 100 km is one of those legendary events we talk too little about today.

Long before the ultra boom, long before the word became familiar to Sunday joggers and mountain enthusiasts alike, men and women were already setting out for one hundred kilometers. At night—a nod to the SaintéLyon. On the road. With their willpower, their madness, and that strange brotherhood created by long distances.

To younger people discovering the ultra today, it must perhaps be remembered: running for a very long time is not a recent invention. Those who came before us did it, too. On the road, in the mountains, on trails sometimes much less marked, much less supervised, with gear that would make us smile today.

The ultra was not born with social media, GPS watches, and precision-timed aid stations.

1971, a photo and a Welsh winner

Biel has existed since 1959. The first editions were still modest, almost confidential, but the race quickly established itself in the imagination of European endurance.

In 1971, the year of this exceptional photograph we found in our Spiridon archives, the Welshman Lynn Hughes, from Glamorgan, won the event in 7 hours and 42 minutes. For the women, Eva Westphal, from Hamburg, took the win in 12 hours and 48 minutes.

These times say a lot. In 1971, we did not talk about "ultras" like we do today. We didn't talk about being a “finisher” with modern vocabulary. We didn't tell the story of every effort in stories. But we were already running very far.

And women, in Biel, had already been there for almost ten years.

Two women, then others

The female presence does not end with this first trace from 1962.

From there on, the numbers increased. The DUV database lists 2 women classified in 1963, then 10 in 1964, 11 in 1966, 16 in 1967, 30 in 1968, 49 in 1970, and another 49 in

One can imagine these women moving through the night on a hundred-kilometer-long road, in a sporting world that was not yet ready to fully grant them that place. They undoubtedly walked. Perhaps a lot. Perhaps officially. But how can we not think that once they were on the road, far from the strictest gazes, they also started to run?

Käthi Knuchel, a fragile trace

She reminds us that the history of women’s running was not written only in major marathons, nor only in the now-famous images from Boston. It was also written in more discreet races, in cities less publicized, on night roads, amidst rankings that almost no one reads today.

Biel tells us this: a Swiss 100-kilometer race which, perhaps without knowing it, already carried something very modern. The idea that endurance belongs to those who accept the challenge of going to the very end.

A path to document

And that is the whole point of archival work: accepting that history is never entirely fixed. The more we search, the more we cross-reference, the more we find forgotten traces, the more precise, nuanced, and alive the history becomes.

This discovery regarding the Biel 100 km deserves to be explored further. There is still much to document: finding potential photos, consulting local newspapers from the time, contacting archives, identifying families or descendants, and understanding how the organizers presented this event at the time where one could run, walk, or alternate between the two.

We will continue this work seriously, with the support of a journalist. Because this subject goes far beyond a simple anecdote in a results table. It perhaps opens an important path into the role of women in the first great endurance events, in Switzerland, in France, and elsewhere.

There will be a follow-up.

Photo: The winner of the 100 kilometers of Biel in 1971, the Welshman Hughes, 2 km from the finish. Photo Spiridon April 1972 - Yves Jeannotat