New York Road Runners

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The running club that has organised the New York City Marathon since its first running in 1970 and that, under Fred Lebow, turned it from a Central Park club race into a five-borough municipal event in 1976. NYRR is the institution through which the mass-participation model was worked out in practice — lotteries, charity entries, closed streets, a field measured in tens of thousands — and the model other cities copied. It is also the body that had to accept, in the mid-1980s, that its own course had been measured short and that two world bests set on it were void.