This Is Our City: Four Teams, Twelve Championships, and How Boston Became the Most Dominant Sports City in the World by Tony Massarotti

Author:Tony Massarotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

MARATHON MONDAY

Settle down, it’ll all be clear

Don’t pay no mind to the demons

They fill you with fear

—“Home” by Phillip Phillips

The Boston Marathon is the oldest annual marathon in the world, but to call it a road race is an enormous understatement and disservice to what it truly represents. On a macro level, the Marathon, as Bostonians simply and most frequently refer to it, is the city’s most prestigious event, an international festival for which Boston opens its doors to the rest of the world. Anyone and everyone is welcome to what has the feel of a massive block party, a one-day event that is, loosely, Boston’s version of Mardi Gras.

And on April 15, 2013, it was the backdrop for one of the most tragic events in the city’s history.

Years later, the details of the attacks perpetrated by Chechen/Kyrgyzstani brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are well-known, the memory no less painful. Routinely held on a Monday holiday exclusive to Massachusetts—Patriots Day—the marathon concludes on Boylston Street, at the foot of the Prudential Center, a signature building of the Boston skyline. Onlookers congregate there to celebrate the winners and cheer on family and friends, many of whom run to raise money for charitable endeavors. Every year on Marathon Monday, the finish line is a place to celebrate achievement, to acknowledge the giving to both oneself and others.

According to accounts, the first bomb exploded at 2:49 P.M., the second just fourteen seconds later. The explosions took place slightly more than two hundred yards apart, an attempt to bookend the victims, some of whom darted away from the first explosion and toward the second. Hundreds were injured. Many lost limbs. Three were killed, including eight-year-old Martin Richard, who was at the finish line with his father, mother, older brother, and younger sister. Richard’s mother and sister were injured in the first explosion—suffering brain injury and a lost leg, respectively—but survived.

In the ensuing chaos, as first responders tended to victims on the blood-stained pavement, there was confusion, panic, fear. The Tsarnaevs had left behind backpacks containing the bombs, made of pressure cookers, as if they were leaving packages on a stoop. The brothers then walked by storefronts and bystanders and were caught on security cameras—the images soon part of public pleas for any and all information that could explain the events that were, at once, both gruesome and surreal.

The attack struck the city on its most open and inviting day. There were large crowds scattered all across the city and the marathon course. The Red Sox similarly played on that day, more than 30,000 spectators spilling into the city from Fenway Park at the conclusion of the game, which had come within an hour of the explosions. Police were scattered about the marathon route, but there were no metal detectors, and they were there to perform crowd control: The sheer volume of people, over an expanded area, made it virtually impossible to know who was doing what, where, when, and with whom, often college students toting backpacks.

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