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Myth or no, marathon running has an awesome backstory. It’s an inspiring tale of victory, with Greek soldier Pheidippides allegedly dropping dead after allegedly running 26.2 miles to Athens to tell of non-allegedly kicking Persian ass at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. There is no mythology surrounding what happened at the 1904 Olympic marathon, however. It was an epic clusterfuck.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 30, 1904--
Marathons entered the modern age at the 1896 Olympiad. Nowadays masochistic recreational runners see it as a rite of passage; our battle scars include chafing, blisters, and psychosis from deciphering GPS watch instructions. Tales of marathon triumph and woe are legion. August 30, 1904 was a day of nothing but woe.
This was the third modern Olympic Games, and they hadn’t quite figured out the distance between Marathon and Athens yet; all three races were a bit short of the now official 26.2 miles. But that wasn’t the only thing race organizers hadn’t figured out. For example, they didn’t realize that people running a marathon needed to drink some fucking water.
James Sullivan was head organizer of this Olympics, held in St. Louis, and he was a sadistic fuck. Or just really stupid. Let’s be generous and say woefully misinformed. The temperature was 32 °C that day (90 degrees in freedom units). Sullivan permitted only two water stations on the 24.85-mile course, which was run on an unpaved road thick with dust. Sullivan’s rationalization was that he wanted to research “purposeful dehydration” on the athletes under the dumbass belief that being dehydrated would actually make them run faster. Nowadays, dumbshit Olympic organizers think marijuana is performance enhancing for runners and needs to be banned.
While inhaling copious amounts of dust along the way, the 32 competitors ran the hilly course that was strewn with rocks. They also had to dodge traffic, trains, trolleys, and people taking their dogs for a walk. One American runner almost fucking died; he collapsed from breathing in so much dust and was hospitalized because his stomach lining was hemorrhaging. A South African ran an extra mile because he was chased off the course by wild dogs.
One of the American racers, Fred Lorz, finished in under three hours, but he’d hitched a ride in a car for 11 miles. President Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice was about to bestow a gold medal on Lorz when someone yelled hey that fucker cheated, and people started to boo and Lorz said hey I was just joking keep your fucking medal.
Only 14 of the 32 runners even finished the race. American Thomas Hicks, hallucinating and shuffling along like a months-dead zombie, was fed small doses of strychnine by his trainers as a stimulant to help him keep going. He was practically carried across the finish line by his trainers, finishing in a time of 3:28:53. The doctors at the finish said ah fuck this guy is almost dead, and got to work on saving his life.
Thanks, Craig, for the suggestion of today’s topic.
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Shit like this makes me wonder how the human race (hehe yes pun intended if it can be considered one) has survived this long 😆