Where Your Dreams Become Reality
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Where Your Dreams Become Reality |
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Julia Emmons Says Farewell AFter 22 Years at Peachtree Road Race and Atlanta Track Club By David Monti (c) 2006 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. (14-Oct-2006) -- Julia Emmons, the former librarian and history professor who took charge of the Peachtree Road Race and the Atlanta Track Club in the spring of 1985, said her official goodbye to the running industry here today as the Road Race Mangement Race Directors' Meeting came to a close. "I am indeed retiring," Emmons told the race directors, elite athlete coordinators, and other running industry representatives who had gathered to hear her keynote speech. Emmons, who became the only woman to direct an Olympic Games Marathon when it was held in Atlanta in 1996, shared several of her more memorable experiences with the audience, including what happens when a race director orders too many T-shirts of the wrong size. After the 1985 Peachtree Road Race, the world's largest 10-K with over 60,000 runners, Emmons was confronted by a group of men who had been given T-shirts which were too small. "I found myself facing 6000 men holding up doily-sized T-shirts," Emmons recalled. She also recounted how she offered to assist the Boston Marathon in implementing Championchip timing at the 100th running of the race in 1996, and the potential dangers of offering to "help out" another race. "I'm given the keys to a pace car," recalled Emmons who remembered that it was a Buick. The car was loaded with the Championchip timing mats and "ears" (the familiar yellow boxes) which were to be driven from Boston to Hopkinton to the start. Upon arriving at the start, Emmons closed the driver's door, and went around the back to begin to unload the equipment with a Dutchman from Championchip. "The door won't open," Emmons recounted. "I looked inside the window and there were the keys." She and the Dutchman got the chief of the Hopkinton police to assist them, and he was trying to open the door with a special tool, but to no avail. Idling members of the media, including several television crews, realized that something was going on near the starting line and began to train their cameras on the frustrated officer. Unable to open the door with the tool, he took the billy club from his belt and smashed the driver's window, all on live television. After driving back to the start, an official said to Emmons with a smirk: "Saw you on TV." Emmons's tome turned serious when she reminded her listeners that as race organizers they needed to be true to the sport and resist inappropriate pressures from sponsors to commercialize their events. "We can never confuse serving sponsors for the integrity of our sport," Emmons intoned, adding, "We're not in it for the marketing only." Admitting that she had never managed anything of significance prior to taking over at Peachtree, Emmons said that she had been given the job because so many others had turned it down. But for her, it was the perfect assignment. "This has been the most wonderful, wonderful 22 years," said Emmons who will turn her attention to other pursuits outside of the running industry, including heading up the volunteers for the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament next March. Then she quipped, "I'm not leaving the Earth, but I am leaving the sport."
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