How Jornal do Brasil threw away the Rio de Janeiro Marathon

In 1979, I ran a marathon in Rio de Janeiro. It was organized by Printer, a road race company, and in taking part I met several other participants, such as Pedro Stock and Ivanise Lins e Barros. I hadn’t prepared very well, but I finished the race in about 4 hours and 15 minutes. Exhausted, but I finished.

What’s important is what came next. I talked to several other participants, and we were all frustrated to learn that the course distance had been measured using a car’s odometer.

At the time, I was writing the Campo Neutro column for Jornal do Brasil. I began to take more interest in what already struck me as a phenomenon — the phenomenon of road racing that was emerging in many other countries, a phenomenon whose main event was, of course, the Marathon, with its iconic 42.195 meters and all the tradition dating back to Ancient Greece and the hero Pheidippides.

As conversations went on with Pedro Stock, his wife Terezinha, Ivanise, and her husband Ricardo, we gradually developed the idea that Rio de Janeiro should have a marathon with a rigorously measured course, like it was done in other countries.

The result was that I ended up being invited by Pan Am Airlines to attend the Honolulu Marathon in Hawaii — which I did, but only as an observer. The idea, however, stayed in my mind: the Rio de Janeiro Marathon should be something big, with an accurately measured route and include major international athletes.

I brought the idea to the management of Jornal do Brasil, which they readily accepted.. I also presented it to Antônio Carlos de Almeida Braga, an old acquaintance of mine from soccer pitches and Olympic stadiums. He immediately agreed to be the sponsor.

Today I realize there was an important piece missing in the equation: the power of a television network. Jornal do Brasil had been trying for years to start a TV channel, without success. O Globo had a TV channel — but I didn’t work for O Globo…

Despite everything, the Maratona Atlântica-Boavista, better known as The Rio de Janeiro Marathon, was a success and continued being so for several years.

But strange things were happening. Within Jornal do Brasil itself, there was resistance to the event, even from one of the company’s executives, Maria Regina, who happened to be the daughter of the newspaper’s owner, Manoel Francisco do Nascimento Brito.

The Editor-in-Chief of JB at the time, whose name I don’t recall but who has since passed away, once told me that the fastest-growing sport in Brazil was volleyball. I was astonished, because anyone could see that volleyball — at the time indeed very popular in Brazil — was, like soccer and basketball, mainly a spectator sport. Yes, there would always be people willing to play an informal soccer, basketball, or volleyball match, known in Brazil as “peladas”. But the real interest lay in going to stadiums and arenas to watch games.

Road running was a completely different phenomenon. Its appeal lay in motivating people to leave their homes and do exactly that — run, take part, have fun in a huge celebration.

That’s why today we have marathons such as New York, London, Berlin, Chicago and Tokyo bringing tens of thousands of runners to the streets — and the only reason they don’t bring more is that there simply isn’t enough physical space in the cities to accommodate more participants.

Even with expensive entry fees, around $300, demand is so great that many people can only get in through a lottery. The New York Marathon injects a billion dollars into the city’s economy, where the people take to the streets for a gigantic celebration.

This makes me think that if Jornal do Brasil had given up being a newspaper and decided instead to become a road-race company, it would be prosperous and thriving today — instead of having closed down and disappeared.

But the blindness — and even dishonesty — of a little clique within JB’s marketing department, known as the “pronobis” (because its members always wanted a little something “on the side”), led to my departure from JB and, inevitably, to the death of its Marathon.

I went to Jornal dos Sports, and one day, while I was there, I received a phone call from the secretary of Nascimento Brito’s son, José Antônio — known as Josa — Jornal do Brasil’s main executive. It was a Friday. He was in Portugal but would be arriving in Rio over the weekend and wanted to schedule a meeting with me for Monday.

On Monday, another call from the same secretary: unfortunately, the meeting had been canceled.

Apparently, there had been a family dispute, and Josa had lost out. The Jornal do Brasil Marathon lost too, as, left in the hands of the “pronobis” crowd, it simply went down the drain. It withered and vanished.

By then, I had already decided to emigrate to the United States. That’s what I did, after covering the 1990 World Cup in Italy for Jornal dos Sports and organizing yet another Rio de Janeiro Marathon — this time for the newspaper O Dia.