Somewhere on a dust-choked road outside St Louis, a man swallowed rat poison stirred into egg white, washed it down with French brandy, and staggered on towards a gold medal.
His name was Thomas Hicks. He crossed the finish line second and won anyway, which was the least peculiar thing about the 1904 Olympic marathon.
A race nobody should have started
Thirty-two runners from seven nations lined up at three in the afternoon on 30 August, in heat of around 90 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 32 degrees Celsius).
The course was a dirt road through open country. Smithsonian magazine’s history of the day describes cracked stone underfoot, runners dodging delivery wagons, trolley cars, trains and pedestrians walking their dogs, while cars carrying coaches and physicians drove alongside and kicked the dust into their faces.
Nobody had closed the roads. Nobody had thought to.
One water stop, and that was deliberate
James Sullivan, the chief organiser, was curious about dehydration, a fashionable research subject at the time, per the same Smithsonian piece. Runners had exactly one official place to get fresh water, twelve miles in, because Sullivan wanted to see what minimal fluid intake did to the body under load.
It did quite a lot. William Garcia of California was found on the roadside coughing blood and rushed to hospital. He had taken in so much dust that it shredded his stomach lining, writes historian Nancy J. Parezo in The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games. He came close to being the first man to die in an Olympic marathon.
The bricklayer who caught a lift
Fred Lorz cramped up at nine miles and climbed into his manager’s car, waving cheerfully at the runners he passed. When the car broke down around the nineteenth mile, he got out and jogged the rest of the way into the stadium. He breasted the tape to cheers, and was already being hailed as champion.
A spectator recognised him from the car.
Lorz said it had been a joke. The Amateur Athletic Union banned him for life, then commuted the ban to six months after he apologised and it was accepted that he had not set out to defraud anyone. He won the Boston Marathon on his own legs the following year.
Egg white, brandy and strychnine
Hicks had asked his handlers for a drink at ten miles and been refused. They sponged his mouth out with warm distilled water instead. Seven miles from home, with his legs going, they fed him egg white spiked with strychnine sulphate, a stimulant in tiny quantities and a rat poison in larger ones. Two miles out he got a second dose, this time with the brandy.
By then he was hallucinating and believed he still had twenty miles to run. His trainers held him up over the line with his feet still shuffling, and four doctors went to work on him afterwards. Three hours, twenty-eight minutes, fifty-three seconds. He recovered, and two years later won a marathon in Chicago, according to the Olympic Museum’s archive.
Four years later, the 1908 Olympic marathon regulations contained an extraordinary new rule: competitors could not take or receive any drug during the race, on pain of disqualification. Strychnine sits on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s in-competition list to this day.
Peaches, apples and a nap
Félix Carvajal, a Cuban postman, raised his fare by running the length of Cuba and asking strangers for money, lost the lot in a dice game, and hitchhiked from New Orleans to St Louis. He arrived to race wearing long trousers, a dress shirt, street shoes and a beret, and a rival took a pair of scissors to the trousers at the knee, per the IOC’s record of the race.
He ran cheerfully, chatting to the crowd in patchy English. Somewhere along the way, he asked a passing carful of spectators for a peach, got turned down, and helped himself to two anyway. Later he raided an orchard for apples, got cramps, lay down beside the road for a nap, then rose and finished fourth.
Two years later he vanished on his way to the marathon in Athens, was presumed dead, and turned up months afterwards on a steamer bound for Havana, offering no explanation to anyone.
Dogs
Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani were Tswana men in St Louis for the World’s Fair, and the first Black Africans to compete at the modern Olympics. Both were reported to have run barefoot, finishing ninth and twelfth. Taunyane was holding a strong position until a pack of wild dogs chased him about a mile off the course, as reported by Populous.
The medal might be in the wrong name
Sullivan got his dehydration data and then disowned it. Within two days, the St Louis Post-Dispatch had branded the race a man-killing event, and Sullivan, who had rationed the water in the name of research, admitted the marathon was “indefensible on any ground but historic.”
Hicks kept his gold, though whether he should have is still argued. French historian Clément Genty, reading the two official 1905 reports by race director Charles Lucas and by Sullivan himself, contends that Hicks was given a car escort and physically carried by officials over a substantial part of the closing stretch, and that the finishing order deserves revision. Organisers had announced before the gun that assistance was not permitted.
Which is the offence that cost Lorz his win, minus the ride and plus the poison.