Spyridon Louis

person · earth · Attica

The Greek water-carrier who won the first modern Olympic marathon on 10 April 1896, running from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens in 2 hours 58 minutes 50 seconds, more than seven minutes clear of the field. Seventeen athletes from five nations started. His victory was the only Greek win in athletics at those Games and it fixed the marathon in the public imagination as a national and popular event rather than a technical one — which is a large part of why the distance survived at all through the thirteen unstandardised years that followed.