The 1904 Olympic Marathon Was the Most Unhinged Race in History

The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis, Missouri, was not a race. It was a series of increasingly unbelievable disasters strung together over 25 miles of dusty roads in 90-degree August heat.

The course organizer, James Sullivan, had a theory: athletes performed better when dehydrated. To test it, he set up a single water station for the entire course. Thirty-two runners lined up at the start. What followed was chaos.

The Cheater

The first man across the finish line was Frederick Lorz of New York. The crowd erupted. Alice Roosevelt, the president's daughter, was about to place the gold medal around his neck when someone noticed a problem: Lorz had hitched a ride in his manager's car for roughly 11 miles in the middle of the race. When the car broke down, he simply got out and ran the rest.

Lorz claimed it was a joke. He was disqualified and initially banned from competition for life, though the ban was lifted the following year.

The Winner

The actual gold medalist was Thomas Hicks, a British-born American brass worker. Hicks did run the entire course. His trainers, however, had their own approach to sports medicine: they fed him doses of strychnine mixed with raw egg whites, washed down with brandy.

Strychnine, better known as rat poison, was believed in small doses to act as a stimulant. By the final miles, Hicks was hallucinating. He believed the finish line was still 20 miles away. His support team had to physically hold him upright as he shuffled his feet across the line. He lost eight pounds during the race and nearly died afterward.

The Wild Dogs

Len Taunyane, one of two Tswana runners from South Africa and among the first Black Africans to compete in the Olympics, was chased approximately one mile off course by a pack of wild dogs. Despite the detour, he still finished ninth.

The Rest

Of the 32 starters, only 14 finished. One runner nearly died from hemorrhaging. The dust kicked up by race officials' automobiles choked runners for the entire course. The single water station ran out of water. The temperature hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Somehow, this was an official Olympic event.