Well, if it’s 30 August, it’s the 119th anniversary of the marathon at the St Louis Olympics, which saw 32 people start, 14 finish, the first man over the line disqualified for getting a lift, and the gold medallist reaching the end only with the aid of strychnine and brandy.
This was the third modern Olympics, and America’s first, and was unconventional, anyway, having been tacked on to the World’s Fair, which rather overshadowed it — and that event’s head of Physical Culture, James E. Sullivan, wanted to test his theory of “purposeful dehydration”.
So, an event run in 90-degree (32 C) heat, on the city’s hilly dirt roads — accompanied by a fleet of vehicles which churned up clouds of dust and made the athletes choke — also featured only two spots where they could drink: a water tower at six miles and a roadside well at 12.
Fred Lorz pulled ahead at the start, but was soon overtaken by experienced marathon runner Thomas Hicks. Whether this was because Lorz was a bricklayer who had to train at night is difficult to say at this distance of time. Mind you…
In fact it’s difficult to say which was the least likely competitor. Félix Carvajal, a postman from Cuba, perhaps, who had raised money for his trip by running the length of his island home, and then gambled the lot away?
Thankfully, “one fellow Olympian took pity, found a pair of scissors and cut Carbajal’s trousers at the knee”, so he ran the race looking like this:
Or perhaps Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani cut the most unlikely figures? The two Black South Africans had never raced before, and were at the World’s Fair to reenact battles from the Second Boer War.
Still, they had a more dignified time than some of the Fair’s participants, because James E Sullivan, as well as being an enthusiast for dubious-even-for-its-time science, was a massive racist. (Not that he was alone in that in those days.)
Sullivan intended to use the Games to showcase white American excellence through a series of events that ranged from the poorly executed, like the marathon, to the cartoonishly racist, like the fair’s Anthropology Days — a two-day Olympic-style competition during which nonwhite performers from the fair’s living anthropology displays competed in sports they’d never played before. The idea was to flaunt their athletic inferiority to the world. A headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Barbarians meet in Athletic Games,” made no bones about that intention.
Anyway, about half a mile out of the stadium, the marathon saw its first casualty, in the form of John Lordon (winner of the Boston marathon the previous year, and whose name may have been spelt Lordan, or Lorden. No fucker seems to know) having a vomiting bout and bowing out.
Still, he came off better than William Garcia, in fourth place at mile 19, who collapsed and started haemorrhaging. The dust had coated his oesophagus, and something (possibly also the dust) had torn his stomach lining. In the words of 2005 book America’s First Olympics
Bricklayer Fred Lorz was one of many who succumbed to cramps. At about the nine-mile mark, he was helped into a car to get him back to the stadium. Around the time Garcia was nearly dying, though, Fred felt better, got out of the car and started running again.
Thomas Hicks was now in the lead, but struggling. He begged for water, but wasn’t allowed it, although his helpers did moisten his mouth with a sponge. They also bathed him with it, and — as you can see in the photo at the top — held him up a fair amount of the way.
That wasn’t the only way they helped. Seven miles from the finish, utterly exhausted, he was given a sixtieth of a grain of strychnine and an egg white as stimulants. Three miles after that, he asked for a lie down, which was refused, but he was allowed to walk for a bit.
It was, apparently, at this point that Lorz, refreshed from his trip in an automobile, charged past. Hicks nearly gave up, but — told that Lorz had been disqualified — started jogging again. His manner was described by one of his helpers, Charles P Lucas. (Yes, the same one who was also a race official, assuming that description of him is accurate…)
When he went grey, he was allowed two more egg whites, some brandy and more strychnine. In the meantime, Lorz had jogged cheerfully into the stadium and been hailed by the oblivious crowd as the winner.
It took hours for all the finishers to straggle in. Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani were among the earliest, coming in 9th and 12th — and Taunyane would have done better if he hadn’t been chased a mile off course by a dog.
Félix Carbajal, meanwhile, had stopped to chat to spectators, stolen peaches from some people in a car who had refused to share them, apparently eaten rotten apples out of an orchard he’d passed, got stomach cramps, and — with no team to stop him — had taken a roadside nap.
He finished the race, came third in another St Louis marathon the following year, and then — in 1906 — vanished
After being attended by four doctors for an hour, Hicks felt well enough to leave the stadium. He had lost eight pounds, and decided to retire — although one source reckons he ran the Boston marathon the following year. And lost to Lorz.
The Post-Dispatch reported that Olympic committee members were calling for the “man-killing event” to be dropped from future games, so Sullivan told the paper he agreed that it was “asking too much of human endurance”. It continued anyway.
For his part, Charles P Lucas, who had so vividly described Hicks’ deathly appearance, wrote a book about the 1904 Olympics which made no mention of the black athletes — or that their white South African teammate hadn’t finished.
