Dehydration, Exploitation and Rat Poison: The Story of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Marathon

        August 30, 1904.

At the rather odd time of 3:03 pm, the president of the 1904 World’s Fair raises his right arm straight into the air and fires the starter’s pistol.  The runners take off choking and coughing amidst a cloud of acrid dust.

This is the start of the marathon of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games--the third running of the modern day Olympiad and the first ever held in the United States of America.

On the day of the marathon temperatures soar into the upper 90’s and the high humidity makes the air feel more subtropical than midwestern.

There are a few experienced and finely conditioned marathoners running that day, but not very many.  Though over thirty athletes from half a dozen nations participate in the marathon of the third modern Olympiad most of them are downright amateurs without any form of training or past experience.  

In 1904 there were neither any qualifying events nor any physical or personal requirements that needed to be met or fulfilled before participation in the Olympic Games.  One marathoner from Cuba, a former mailman by trade named Felix Carbajal alternately walked and hitch-hiked his way to St. Louis after losing all of his money in a dice game and finding himself living on the streets.

Felix Carbajal in 1904

That year international tensions were at a fever pitch between European nations as a result of the ongoing Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.  Many diplomatic ties which would have facilitated Olympic travel had been temporarily halted and travel itself on the high seas was downright dangerous.  Additionally, many of Europe’s finest athletes resented the fact that the Olympic Games were being held outside of Europe for the first time in the United States and simply refused to participate.

So that, in addition to competitors such as Carbajal, the 1904 marathon also hosted ten Greeks, all of whom had never run a marathon before but simply wanted to represent Greece in what they considered to be their national sport, two South African tribesmen who ran the entire race barefoot, and an American named Fred Lorz who only trained at night because he worked as a bricklayer during the day.

There simply weren’t many athletes who took off running in a cloud of dust at the sound of the starter’s pistol on August 30, 1904 who had any idea what hardships lay in store for them.  Nineteen of the thirty-three competitors who begin the marathon will drop out before finishing.

At the time, the marathon was the single most celebrated event of the entire Olympic Games.  Given its classical heritage the marathon was viewed as the one seminal event which tied the modern games back to their ancient Greek forerunners.  However, even the Spartans and Athenians would have had to admit that the course chosen for the running of the 1904 Olympic Marathon made this event more akin to torture than sport.  

One official is reported to have said of the 1904 Olympic marathon course that it was, “the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over.”  

From the moment that the starter’s pistol sounded at the odd time of 3:03 pm the runners were choked by clouds of dust and stricken with uncontrollable fits of coughing as they ran.  And that was just the beginning of the twenty-five mile journey through hell and folly that lay in store.

The course was strewn with jagged stones and criss-crossed by active and busy railway tracks.  It wound through populated neighborhoods where runners had to contend with dogs and people out for an evening’s stroll.  Worst of all, the marathoners had to ascend and descend no less than seven hills, some of which were as high as three-hundred feet!

As if all of this weren’t bad enough, there were only two places along the entire twenty-five mile course where the competitors could stop to get any water.  The first place was at a water tower located on the side of the road about six miles into the course and the second source of water was at a brackish well located at the twelve mile mark.  This means that the runners had to complete the entire second half of the marathon, a distance of some thirteen miles, without any water at all.  

It would have been reprehensible enough had this lack of hydration for the participants been caused simply as a result of negligence or lack of planning, but the truth is, it had all been done on purpose.

The chief organizer for the 1904 Olympic Games was a man named James Edward Sullivan.  James Edward Sullivan was the president of the American Amateur Athletic Union and one of the nation’s leading Irish-American immigrants.  When St. Louis was chosen to host the 1904 Olympic Games Sullivan was an obvious choice to organize and facilitate the running of the Olympiad.

In addition to being one of America’s chief advocates for the benefits of amateur sport as well as a notable benefactor for many Irish-American charities, Sullivan also considered himself to be a man of science.  It was his idea to willfully withhold water from the runners of the 1904 Olympic Marathon so that physicians following the runners in motorcars throughout the course could actively monitor the effects of dehydration on the participants.

In the beginning of the twentieth century the study of the nature of hydration was very popular because it was a subject that was not yet fully understood by the scientific community.  By willfully depriving the runners of water, and by knowingly putting their lives at risk, James E, Sullivan believed that he was doing a great service to humanity.

Given the odd nature of what happened in St. Louis in 1904, it comes as no surprise that people thought that watching others die from the effects of dehydration right before their eyes was a good thing.  

In 1904 St. Louis hosted both the Olympic Games and the World’s Fair.  The World’s Fair was held in St. Louis that year as a celebration of the centennial anniversary of The Louisiana Purchase and the official name of the fair was The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.  Originally, Chicago had been the city that had won the bid to host the third modern Olympic Games, but local leaders in St. Louis said that they would refuse to host the World’s Fair that year if another city in the United States got to host a different international event, so for that reason the members of the Olympic Committee had decided to change the host city from Chicago to St. Louis.

Not only was The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 designed to highlight a singular historical event it was also intended to celebrate western, specifically American, imperialism and might.  The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was host to exhibits that showcased the military grandeur of the burgeoning United States Navy and its steam powered all steel dreadnought battleships, as well as, reenactments of the wild west that portrayed scenes of brave Christian United States cavalrymen defeating hordes of supposedly savage native Americans.

Along these same lines, James E. Sullivan, in addition to turning the 1904 Olympic Marathon into a sort of macabre real world laboratory of suffering, also decided to stage a spectacle of the worst of Colonialism that he called the “Anthropology Days”.

The Anthropology Days were a degrading exhibition that pitted indigenous peoples from around the world in competition against one another in so called native sporting events such as: mud throwing, spear tossing and tree climbing.  The bizarre, degrading and freakish spectacle of the Anthropology Days caused a negative backlash in the press even at the time, with newspapers across the country calling the competitions degrading to black people and other people of color.  And yet, sadly, no exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition or event at the 1904 Olympic Games proved to be as popular with spectators as were the openly, unabashedly exploitative and unscientific Anthropology Days,

On that hot and humid day, August 30, 1904, amateur athletes are being exploited almost to death so that so called scientists can study the effects of dehydration firsthand and indigenous peoples from around the world are being put on display like animals in a zoo to entertain the masses, but what happens next during the marathon itself might be considered even more shocking, and in some ways, just as immoral as any of the actions of James E, Sullivan.

Spear Throwing at the Anthropology Days

       

         Early on in the marathon a runner from California by the name of William Garcia nearly dies when he collapses on the course as a result of internal bleeding.  Dust from the course had coated Garcia’s esophagus eventually causing the lining in his stomach to rupture.  Garcia collapsed in a heap at the side of the road and had he gone on a moment longer he most surely would have died as a result of internal bleeding.

The participants from South Africa, running barefoot, inadvertently exited the race after being chased off course by a pack of wild dogs.  The South African participants were forced to withdraw because had they been caught by the wild animals they most surely would have been ripped to shreds.  Carbajal, the homeless Cuban hitchhiker jogged along steadily, but soon began to fall off the pace due mostly to the fact that he didn’t have enough money to buy proper shoes, or even shoes that fit, prior to the start of the marathon.

At around the ten mile mark the leaders of the 1904 Olympic Marathon were the American bricklayer Fred Lorz and an experienced fellow American runner named Sam Mellor, who many had picked to win the race handily before it had even begun.  However, due to severe dehydration, Mellor fell victim to painful and debilitating stomach cramps.  The pain from these cramps may have played on Mellor’s sanity, and for some inexplicable reason at about the halfway point of the marathon, Mellor decided to lay down at the side of the road and take a nap!

With Mellor on the roadside snoozing, the nocturnal amateur Fred Lorz took the lead.  But Lorz was also suffering from terrible stomach cramps as a result of dehydration, but rather than drop out of the race completely or catch a quick nap like the rest of the competition, Lorz decided to hitch a ride in a passing motorcar.  Lorz jumped in the car and sped away, still leading the marathon, and all the while waving out at the crowds of spectators from the backseat of the car.

Along with Sam Mellor, the other American marathoner many favored to win the race was Thomas Hicks.  Hicks had run in many marathons, was in tip top shape and was one of the few participants who had actually brought a team of trainers along with him to the Olympic Games in St. Louis.  But he too felt the ravages of dehydration.  With only seven miles left to go, Hicks begged his handlers to get him a drink of water, but they refused.  Rather than give him any water, Hicks’ trainers decided to feed him a mixture of egg whites and strychnine mixed with brandy.

After drinking the concoction Hicks became listless and began to hallucinate.  He continued to ask for more water to drink, and believed he still had twenty miles left to run with less than a mile left in the race.  Each time Hicks asked for more water his trainers gave him more brandy mixed with strychnine.  It seemed as if Hicks would not be able to finish at all, as he alternately crawled and stumbled his way into the stadium and towards the finish line, but not surprisingly, after traveling eleven miles by car, Fred Lorz was disqualified from the race.  Lorz, who did have a reputation as a bit of a prankster, would later claim that he had attempted to win the marathon by riding in a motorcar as a practical joke.  But even with rat poison coursing through his veins, Hicks became revived once he heard that Lorz, who had been in the lead most of the race, had been disqualified.

Thomas Hicks after winning the 1904 marathon

        

        Thomas Hicks would win the 1904 Olympic Marathon and nearly lose his life in the process.  After crossing the finish line Hicks promptly passed out and it would take doctors nearly an hour to revive him.  Later, Hicks would go on to say of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon that, “Never in my life have I run such a tough course...it simply tears a man to pieces.”

The 1904 Olympic Games and its sister event The Louisiana Purchase Exposition put on display some of the worst facets of Gilded Age America for all the world to see.  In a way the 1904 Olympic Games were a disgraceful representation of exploitation, negligence and human stupidity, but it is a testament to the human spirit that men like Thomas Hicks could overcome all of that absurdity and immorality to still win a true test of human endurance fairly and honestly and it is remarkable, that in spite of all the scandalous cheating and behavior, the Olympic spirit still endures to this very day.