Gabriela Andersen-Schiess

Gabriela Andersen-Schiess (born 1945) was a Swiss marathoner at the 1984 Summer Olympics. Though living in Idaho and working as a ski instructor at the time, Andersen-Schiess represented Switzerland in the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Fourteen minutes into the 1984 Olympic marathon, Joan Benoit began to pull away from the rest of the pack. She went on to win in a time of 2 hours, 24 minutes, and 52 seconds. Twenty minutes after Benoit finished, then 39-year-old Andersen-Schiess entered the stadium. The crowd gasped in horror as she staggered onto the track, her torso twisted, her left arm limp, her right leg mostly seized. She waved away medical personnel who rushed to help her, knowing that, if they touched her, she would be disqualified. The L.A. Coliseum crowd looked on as she limped around the track in the race’s final 400 meters, occasionally stopping and holding her head. While the effects of her heat exhaustion were plainly evident, trackside medics saw that she was perspiring, which meant that her body still had some disposable fluids, and let her continue her march to the finish line. At the completion of this final lap—which took Andersen-Schiess five minutes and 44 seconds—she fell across the finish line. Medical personnel tended to her immediately and, miraculously, she was released two hours later. Her time of 2:48:45 would have won the gold medal in the first five Olympic marathons. [cite web | title=The Games of the XXIII Olympaid: Los Angeles, 1984 | url=http://www.marathonguide.com/history/olympicmarathons/chapter26.cfm | accessdate=10 April | accessyear=2009]

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Sources

http://www.olympic.org/uk/athletes/profiles/bio_uk.asp?PAR_I_ID=30369