The marathon at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis started at three in the afternoon on 30 August, in roughly 90-degree heat, over unpaved roads churned into dust clouds by the motor cars of officials driving ahead of the runners. Thirty-two men started. Fourteen finished. The winner crossed the line supported by his handlers, grey-faced and hallucinating, having been dosed twice with strychnine. He wasn't even the first man home. By common consent it is the worst race in Olympic history, and it very nearly killed the marathon as an event.
Blame begins with James E. Sullivan, the chief organiser of these strange Games — an Olympics bolted onto the St Louis World's Fair, stretched over four and a half months, and so poorly attended by overseas athletes that Americans won the overwhelming majority of the medals. It was the same Sullivan who staged the Fair's notorious "Anthropology Days", a pseudo-scientific sideshow pitting indigenous peoples from the Fair's exhibits against each other in athletic events, to the lasting disgust of Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin. Sullivan held the then-fashionable theory of "purposeful dehydration" and arranged only minimal water for the course: effectively a single well around the halfway point of the roughly 24.85-mile route. Between the heat, the dust, the seven hills and the absence of water, the field was doomed to melodrama before the gun fired.
The impostor and the winner
Fred Lorz, a New York bricklayer, seized up with cramp after about nine miles and hitched a lift in a passing car. When the car itself broke down eleven miles later, the nicely rested Lorz simply resumed running, entered the stadium first, breasted the tape and was photographed beside Alice Roosevelt, the President's daughter, who was on hand to present the prizes. The cheering had barely faded when spectators who had seen him waving from the car cried fraud. Lorz claimed it was all a practical joke; the AAU banned him for life, then relented within the year — and in 1905 he won the Boston Marathon entirely on foot.
The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, an English-born brass worker running for the United States, was a walking pharmacology experiment. Ten miles from home, fading badly, he was given a milligram of strychnine sulphate — a stimulant in tiny doses, rat poison in larger ones — beaten into raw egg white. Later came a second dose, this time washed down with brandy, plus warm-water sponging from the officials' car radiator. Denied plain drinking water, Hicks hallucinated that the finish lay twenty miles further off; over the final stretch his handlers half-carried him while his legs pantomimed running. His time of 3 hours 28 minutes 53 seconds remains the slowest winning Olympic marathon ever, and doctors reckoned another dose might have finished him rather than the race.
The rest of the field
The supporting cast was even stranger. Félix Carvajal, a five-foot Cuban postman, had raised his travel money by running exhibitions in Havana, lost most of it in a dice game in New Orleans, and hitch-hiked to St Louis, arriving in street shoes, a beret and long trousers — which the discus thrower Martin Sheridan obligingly cut down with scissors at the start line. Carvajal chatted to spectators in broken English, reportedly pinched peaches from an official's car, detoured into an orchard to eat apples that turned out to be green, lay down to sleep off the resulting cramps — and still finished fourth. Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, Tswana men present at the World's Fair as part of a South African exhibit, became the first Black Africans to compete at any Olympics; Taunyane finished ninth despite being chased nearly a mile off course by aggressive dogs. William Garcia of California was found unconscious beside the road, his stomach and oesophagus shredded by the dust kicked up from the road, and came close to being the Games' first fatality.
Sullivan concluded from all this that distance racing should perhaps be abolished; the world concluded that St Louis should not be left in charge of it. Four years later London staged the 1908 marathon over a new distance of 26 miles 385 yards, Dorando Pietri collapsed unforgettably in the stadium, and the event became the Games' crown jewel. Every marathon since has carried a faint echo of 1904 — the reminder that the distance is, at bottom, a controlled catastrophe.
Quiz nuggets
- Winner Thomas Hicks clocked 3:28:53 — still the slowest winning Olympic marathon time — after two doses of strychnine with egg white and brandy.
- Fred Lorz reached the stadium first after riding 11 miles in a car; banned, forgiven, he won the 1905 Boston Marathon legitimately.
- Cuban postman Félix Carvajal finished fourth despite running in cut-down trousers and stopping to eat orchard apples.
- Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani were the first Black Africans to compete at an Olympics; Taunyane came ninth after a dog chase.
- Only 14 of 32 starters finished; organiser James E. Sullivan allowed essentially one water stop to test "purposeful dehydration".