The Marathon Race To End All Marathon Races

In honor of the recently departed 28th modern Olympic Games in Japan, it’s time to dust off the Olympic Archives and Meet Me in St Louis, Missouri in 1904, with the most ridiculous Marathon Race to end all Marathon Races. A race so ridiculous, the Marathon was almost cancelled forever.

Looking at the results of the 1904 race, nothing appears out of the ordinary. Thomas Hicks of the USA takes the Gold with a fairly labored time of 3:28:53, Albert Corey of France takes Silver, and the USA wraps up the bronze medal spot, in a display of American dominance expected from a nation that had claimed victors in the last three Boston Marathons and were ranked first on the international stage.

But 40 people started the 1904 Olympic Marathon Run. And only 14 finished. Some of the history of this infamous race has been told, some conjectured, and much more will remain untold and hidden in the vaults of unwanted Olympic history.

It didn’t help that 10 of the Greeks who turned up to race had never run a marathon in their lives, two men from the Tsuana tribe in South Africa had turned up to be paraded at the World’s Fair taking place at the same time (an imperialist tragedy for another time), and casually decided to make the most of their trip and rocked up at the starting line of the Olympic marathon next door barefoot, raring to go.

The race kicked off at 3pm. Normally, marathons start early in the morning to take advantage of cooler times in the day. St Louis wasn’t great with organization—heat and humidity hit the 90s, and a psychopathic race official had established a 24.85-mile course that spanned seven hills up to 300 ft high, with dusty country roads that had not been cleared for the race, but added extra obstacles along the route from delivery wagons, railroad trains, and confused American families out walking their dogs.

Only at two points along the course (at 6 and 12 miles) were athletes given water. This was because some smart bloke wanted to test the latest scientific theory that water diminished athletic performance. Yep, that was a thing. William Garcia of California was the first of the runners to drop out—the dust being kicked up by travelling delivery wagons had coated his esophagus, ripped his stomach lining, and sent him to A&E with severe hemorrhaging. John Lordon then started vomiting and sacked it off. One of our barefooted legends, Len Tau, got chased a mile off course by wild dogs. Straight out of a fairytale, Cuban runner Félix Carvajal started feeling peckish en route, stopped by an orchard and enjoyed some apples … which ended up being rotten, caused serious stomach cramps, and forced him to take a nap on the side of the road. He’d initially raised a lot of money to travel to Missouri to race but had gambled it all away on a three-day bender in New Orleans—he rocked up hungover, penniless, and without food for 40 hours after hitchhiking his way to St Louis. Somehow, he still managed to finish fourth after waking up from his slumber.

Fred Lorz started getting some cramps too, but he was not going to sleep it off. Instead our hero, at the nine-mile mark, decided to hitch a ride in a passing car, and even had the gall to wave at spectators as he sped on past. His ride broke down at the 19th mile, at which point he decided he could probably jog it the rest of the way. Thomas Hicks, meanwhile, was struggling too—but his support team was too smart to consider napping or driving as a solution. Instead, they dosed him with a smashing concoction of strychnine (a common rat poison) mixed with brandy, and the poor bastard battled on, hallucinating off his rocker, and only made it to the finish line when his team carried him over the line while he shuffled his feet around as though still running. He lost eight pounds during this time and probably a few brain cells.

Surprise, surprise, hitchhiker Fred Lorz ended up finishing first and Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Teddy, started putting the gold medal around his neck until a witness decided it was probably unfair to reward somebody who had been chauffeured across half the marathon course. Lorz accepted his disqualification and claimed, “It was only bants.”

And so the gold medal ended up in the hands of rat-poisoned Thomas Hicks, who probably didn’t even know where he was or how he got there. He’d probably be disqualified for doping these days, but anybody who can run 20+ miles on regular doses of strychnine, egg whites, and brandy probably deserves his medal. 

Thus ended the greatest (or worst) marathon of all time, ending with the worst ratio of entrants to finishers and the slowest winning time in Olympic history. Luckily, the marathon event endured over the next century, despite some fairly warranted doubts over its capacity to continue.