AS I SEE IT COLUMN: The craziest Olympic marathon of all-time

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This article was published 20/07/2024 (291 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fans of the Olympics know that the last event of the 2024 Paris Olympics – as is the case in every Olympics – will be the marathon. It’s a tribute to the Greek origins of the marathon, where legend has it in 490 BCE, Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens without stopping to warn the Greek army about a possible attack from the Persian army.

The most bizarre marathon the Olympics has ever and will ever see took place in the 1904 summer games in St. Louis.

The first strange-but-true aspect of that marathon is that even though it was a very hot day, there was only one water station for the entire marathon, located 12 miles from the starting line. The conditions for the 1904 marathon – the 32.3 degree Celsius temperature and the dusty roads the runners ran on – resulted in only 14 of the 32 runners who started the event being able to actually complete it. One runner, William Garcia from America, started coughing up blood at mile 19 and nearly died.

The first person to cross the finish line was Fred Lorz, but he turned out to be a cheat and a fraud. He dropped out at mile 9 and got a car ride almost all the way to the end of the race. He got out of the car and entered the stadium, pretending that he had run the entire race. He was quickly disqualified.

The legitimate winner ended up being American Thomas Hicks. The crazy part about Hicks’ run is during the race he was given several doses of strychnine — a rat poison and common stimulant in those days — mixed with brandy and egg whites. He was so out of it he had to be carried over the finish line. The reports are that his support team carried him while he moved his legs pretending to be running. There is a picture of Hicks sitting in the back of a convertible after the race, looking absolutely catatonic.

But the most interesting athlete of the 1904 marathon was a Cuban runner by the name of Felix Carvajal. He took a boat to New Orleans, where he promptly gambled away all his money, so he walked, ran and hitch-hiked to St. Louis.

He arrived at the starting line wearing dress shoes, dress pants and a dress shirt. A sympathetic U.S. discuss thrower felt sorry for Carvajal, so he grabbed some scissors and cut off the lower part of his pants to make them shorts. (If you Google it you can see pictures of Carvajal in his cut off pants, dress shoes and beret.)

Carvajal, who was a mailman back in Cuba, used the marathon to practice his English, stopping several times along the route to speak with fans who had lined the marathon route.

He became thirsty in the extreme heat and thought he could get some relief by eating apples from an orchard that lined the Olympic route. But the apples gave him extreme gastric discomfort and caused several delays for the cramps to go away. Those stops cost him valuable time and he finished 4th.

Between a runner who literally took a car ride to the finish, another runner who was given strychnine to keep him running and another runner who stopped along the marathon route to practice English with spectators and got sick after stealing some apples from an orchard, you have the most absurd marathon the Olympics will ever encounter.