Question: Who created the idea of a marathon race for the modern Olympic Games?
About the article "Marathon", section "Modern Olympics marathon".

Candidate passages:
When the modern Olympics began in 1896, the initiators and organizers were looking for a great popularizing event, recalling the ancient glory of Greece.
The idea of a marathon race came from Michel Bréal, who wanted the event to feature in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens.
This idea was heavily supported by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, as well as by the Greeks.
The Greeks staged a selection race for the Olympic marathon on 10 March 1896 that was won by Charilaos Vasilakos in 3 hours and 18 minutes (with the future winner of the introductory Olympic Games marathon coming in fifth).
The winner of the first Olympic Marathon, on 10 April 1896 (a male-only race), was Spyridon "Spyros" Louis, a Greek water-carrier, in 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds.
The women's marathon was introduced at the 1984 Summer Olympics (Los Angeles, USA) and was won by Joan Benoit of the United States with a time of 2 hours 24 minutes and 52 seconds.
Since the modern games were founded, it has become a tradition for the men's Olympic marathon to be the last event of the athletics calendar, with a finish inside the Olympic stadium, often within hours of, or even incorporated into, the closing ceremonies.
The marathon of the 2004 Summer Olympics revived the traditional route from Marathon to Athens, ending at Panathinaiko Stadium, the venue for the 1896 Summer Olympics.
The Olympic men's record is 2:06:32, set at the 2008 Summer Olympics by Samuel Kamau Wanjiru of Kenya (average speed about 20.01 km/hr).
The Olympic women's record is 2:23:07, set at the 2012 Summer Olympics by Tiki Gelana of Ethiopia.
The men's London 2012 Summer Olympic marathon winner was Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda (2:08:01).
Per capita, the Great Rift Valley, Kenya has produced a large number of elite marathon runners, helped by the high altitude.
In 2004, the Summer Games of the XXVIII Olympiad will be held in Athens, Greece, home of the first Olympiad revival of the modern games held in 1896, as well as the original ancient games, which are believed to have begun in the year 776 B.C.
The 16-stamp pane se-tenant domestic (49¢) issue features both a tribute to women's soccer and, with the marathon, a creative invocation of the games' history.
The stamps were designed by veteran stamp designer Pierre-Yves Pelletier, who has designed more than 100 stamps for Canada Post.
The second stamp pays homage to the marathon and the history of the games.
The marathon was first introduced in the Modern Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens, and was originally a 40-kilometre race from Marathon, northeast of Athens, to the Olympic Stadium. 
Early years.
The modern Olympic Games were founded in 1894 when Pierre de Coubertin sought to promote international understanding through sporting competition.
He based his Olympics on the Wenlock Olympian Society Annual Games, which had been contested in Much Wenlock since 1850.
The first edition of de Coubertin's games, held in Athens in 1896, attracted just 245 competitors, of whom more than 200 were Greek, and only 14 countries were represented.
Nevertheless, no international events of this magnitude had been organized before.
Female athletes were not allowed to compete, though one woman, Stamata Revithi, ran the marathon course on her own, saying "f the committee doesn’t let me compete I will go after them regardless".
The 1896 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the I Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event which was celebrated in Athens, Greece, from 6 to 15 April 1896.
It was the first Olympic Games held in the Modern era.
Ancient Greece was the birthplace of the Olympic Games, consequently Athens was perceived to be an appropriate choice to stage the inaugural modern Games.
It was unanimously chosen as the host city during a congress organized by Pierre de Coubertin, a French pedagogue and historian, in Paris, on 23 June 1894.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was also established during this congress.
Despite many obstacles and setbacks, the 1896 Olympics were regarded as a great success.
The Games had the largest international participation of any sporting event to that date.
Panathinaiko Stadium, the first big stadium in the modern world, overflowed with the largest crowd ever to watch a sporting event.
The highlight for the Greeks was the marathon victory by their compatriot Spiridon Louis, a water carrier.
He won at the Olympics in 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds, setting off wild celebrations at the stadium.
The most successful competitor was German wrestler and gymnast Carl Schuhmann, who won four gold medals.
After the Games, Coubertin and the IOC were petitioned by several prominent figures including Greece's King George and some of the American competitors in Athens, to hold all the following Games in Athens.
However, the 1900 Summer Olympics were already planned for Paris and, except for the 1906 Intercalated Games, the Olympics did not return to Greece until the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Four years later the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris attracted more than four times as many athletes, including 20 women, who were allowed to officially compete for the first time, in croquet, golf, sailing, and tennis.
The Games were integrated with the Paris World's Fair and lasted over 5 months.
It is still disputed which events exactly were "Olympic", since few or maybe even none of the events were advertised as such at the time.
Numbers declined for the 1904 Games in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, due in part to the lengthy transatlantic boat trip required of the European competitors, and the integration with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World's Fair, which again spread the event out over an extended period.
In contrast with Paris 1900, the word "Olympic" was used for practically every contest, including those exclusively for school boys or for Irish-Americans.
A series of smaller games were held in Athens in 1906.
The IOC does not currently recognize these games as being official Olympic Games, although many historians do.
The 1906 Athens games were the first of an alternating series of games to be held in Athens, but the series failed to materialize.
The games were more successful than the 1900 and 1904 games, with over 900 athletes competing, and contributed positively to the success of future games.
The 1908 London Games saw numbers rise again, as well as the first running of the marathon over its now-standard distance of 42.195 km (26 miles 385 yards).
The first Olympic Marathon in 1896 (a male-only race) was raced at a distance of 40 km (24 miles 85 yards).
The new marathon distance was chosen to ensure that the race finished in front of the box occupied by the British royal family.
Thus the marathon had been for the first games in 1896, but was subsequently varied by up to due to local conditions such as street and stadium layout.
At the six Olympic games between 1900 and 1920, the marathon was raced over six different distances.
At the end of the 1908 marathon the Italian runner Dorando Pietri was first to enter the stadium, but he was clearly in distress, and collapsed of exhaustion before he could complete the event.
He was helped over the finish line by concerned race officials, but later he was disqualified and the gold medal was awarded to John Hayes, who had trailed him by around 30 seconds.
The Games continued to grow, attracting 2,504 competitors, to Stockholm in 1912, including the great all-rounder Jim Thorpe, who won both the decathlon and pentathlon.
Thorpe had previously played a few games of baseball for a fee, and saw his medals stripped for this breach of amateurism after complaints from Avery Brundage.
They were reinstated in 1983, 30 years after his death.
The Games at Stockholm were the first to fulfill Pierre de Coubertin's original idea.
For the first time since the Games started in 1896 were all five inhabited continents represented with athletes competing in the same stadium.
The scheduled 1916 Summer Olympics were cancelled following the onset of World War I. 
John Burra (born November 20, 1956) is a retired long-distance runner from Tanzania, who won the 1987 edition of Amsterdam Marathon, clocking 2:12:40 on May 10, 1987.
He twice represented his native country in the Olympic men's marathon, in 1988 and 1992.
At his last Olympic Games appearance in Barcelona, Spain he didn't finish the race.
He won the City-Pier-City Loop half marathon in the Hague in 1991 and also won the Madrid Marathon. 
Biographical elements.
Before the 1896 Olympics.
Stamata Revithi was born in Syros in 1866.
Records of her life from 1896 show that she was living in poverty in Piraeus in 1896.
At that point she had given birth to two children, a son who died in 1895, aged seven, and another child who was seventeen months old by the time of the 1896 Olympics.
According to Olympic historian Athanasios Tarasouleas, Revithi, who was blonde and thin with large eyes, looked much older than her age.
Revithi believed that she could gain employment in Athens, and so walked there from her home—a distance of .
Her journey took place several days prior to the Olympic marathon, a special race of invented as part of the athletics program, and based on Michel Bréal's idea of a race from the city of Marathon to the Pnyx.
Bréal took inspiration from Pheidippides, who, according to legend, ran the distance from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia at the Battle of Marathon, and died immediately after giving his message.
En route to Athens, Revithi encountered a male runner along the road.
He gave her money and advised her to run the marathon to become famous, and, consequently, earn money or more easily find a job.
After this discussion Revithi decided to run the race: she had enjoyed long-distance running as a child, and believed she could beat the male competitors.
The 1896 Olympic Games were the first held in the Modern era and the most important international multi-sport event Greece had ever hosted.
The rules of the Games generally excluded women from competition.
Influenced by both his times—in the Victorian era women were considered to be inferior to men—and his admiration for the ancient Olympic Games, when only men were allowed to participate in the events, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the visionary of the modern Olympic Games, was not in favour of women's participation in the Olympic Games or in sports generally.
He believed that a woman's greatest achievement would be to encourage her sons to be distinguished in sports and to applaud a man's effort.