Boston Athletic Association

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The club founded in 1887 that has organised the Boston Marathon since 1897 and still does. Its member John Graham managed the American team at the 1896 Athens Olympic Games, saw the marathon there and brought the idea home; the Boston race is therefore a direct and immediate descendant of the first modern Olympic marathon rather than an independent invention. The association is also the body that decides Boston's qualifying standards, the mechanism that makes Boston the only Major most of whose field must earn entry by time rather than by ballot, and the body that had to decide how to run the race in the years after 2013.