BAA opens Marathon events with press conference

BOSTON – Perhaps the most poignant moment of the Boston Athletic Association’s opening press conference for the Boston Marathon on Thursday came near the end, when members of the media watched the unveiling of the 26th mile marker banner.The banner honors the town of Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six educators were killed in a school shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14 of last year. The gunman, Adam Lanza, also fatally shot his mother and killed himself.On the banner are the words “Mile 26,” as well as the Newtown seal, encircled by 26 gold stars, honoring the lives lost.Among those helping to pull down the blue cloth covering the banner at the Fairmont Copley Plaza were members of Team NewtownStrong, a group of seven people running the Marathon to raise scholarship money for siblings of the children who died at Sandy Hook. Laura Nowacki of Team NewtownStrong spoke at the press conference.”We’re here to run 26 miles for 26 lives,” said Nowacki, a pediatrician and first-time Boston Marathoner whose fourth-grade daughter survived the shootings.Nowacki added that Team NewtownStrong will run the first 20 miles of the Marathon “to honor 20 Sandy Hook first-graders full of love, promise and hope,” and the last six miles for the six educators who died.BAA executive director Tom Grilk also said that Marathon race director Dave McGillivray “devised a period of 26 seconds of silence at the start,” at around 9 a.m.”(We wanted to) find a way to recognize the tragedy and suffering expressed by a great many people and do so in a way as dignified and restrained as we could do,” Grilk said.Others who spoke at the press conference included Helen Garity, the director of division campaigns of the New England Division of the American Liver Foundation; and author John Hanc, whose book The BAA at 125 examines the history of the BAA from its founding in the 1880s (it was incorporated in 1887) into the 21st century. Among the tidbits Hanc mentioned was the 1896 Olympics, in which nine of the 14 US Olympians were BAA members.”They believed in the Olympic dream before it really caught on,” Hanc said. “They brought back this long-distance race called the marathon.”Rich Tenorio can be reached at [email protected].