A World Record in Buenos Aires in 1918? Sporting Time and History in the Marathon

Objective: In 1918 the Chilean athlete Juan de Dios Jorquera Bascuñán won the Buenos Aires Marathon in a time of 2 hours 23 minutes and 5.6 seconds. No one had ever run a marathon as fast as this. Across South America it was reported as being a new world record for this event. However, Jorquera’s achievement was not recognised elsewhere and does not appear in the history of the sport. In this article I examine the factors that combined to invisibilise this achievement–which was the first world record set by any Chilean athlete. Methodology: The article is based on revision of newspaper reports of the race in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and the institutional archive of the Polytechnic Harriers in London. The race route was reconstructed and estimated using GPS technology. Originality: The article is the first to study the 1918 Buenos Aires marathon and contextualises it within contemporary ambiguity over the distance of a Marathon between 1908 and 1921. Conclusions: Jorquera’s record has disappeared from history under the imperial weight of disputes about measurement, governance and record-keeping in a new post First World War era of globalization and standardisation that further marginalised the achievements of athletes from outside of Europe and North America. Building on the pioneering work of scholars such as Mandell (1976), Guttmann (1978), Parry (2006), Woodward (2013), Hijós (2021), and Sikes (2023), it explores the social construction of sporting times and how place, as well as time, has shaped the histories and legends of sports and societies.