The 1904 Olympic Marathon Was Won on Strychnine and Brandy

At 3pm on August 30, 1904, thirty-two men set off from Francis Field in St. Louis to run a marathon in roughly 90-degree heat. The course was 24 miles and 1500 yards of rutted country road, raked by automobiles and trainers' wagons throwing up walls of dust. There was a single water stop, at the halfway mark, around twelve and three-quarter miles in. James Sullivan, who ran the U.S. amateur athletic union, wanted to study "purposeful dehydration." He had limited the supply on purpose.

The consequences of that decision started showing up almost immediately. William Garcia, a Californian, collapsed at the side of the road. By the time officials reached him, the dust kicked up by the lead cars had coated his esophagus and torn his stomach lining; he was bleeding internally and would spend days in a St. Louis hospital. He nearly became the first man to die in an Olympic marathon. He was not the day's only casualty in the medical tent.

Fred Lorz of New York led for nine miles and then cramped up. He climbed into his manager's car. The car carried him another eleven miles, Lorz waving at runners and spectators along the way, before it broke down near the 19-mile mark. He got out and jogged the rest of the course on fresh legs. A crowd at the stadium cheered him as the winner, and Alice Roosevelt was on the track to put a wreath on his head when officials worked out what had happened. He was banned for life, then reinstated six months later after a contrite letter.

The actual leader, by then, was Thomas Hicks, a brass-worker from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around mile 17 his trainer Charles Lucas decided Hicks needed help and gave him a milligram of strychnine sulfate dissolved in egg whites. Strychnine in tiny doses was a recognized stimulant in 1904; it was also rat poison, and the line between dose and overdose was thin. Hicks asked for water and was given a sponge for his mouth. A few miles later he asked to lie down. Lucas dosed him again, this time washing the strychnine down with a swallow of French brandy.

By the closing mile Hicks was hallucinating. He told his handlers the road was rising and falling under him and that he had another twenty miles to go. They held him under the arms and shuffled his feet through the finish in 3:28:53. He had lost eight pounds. Four doctors stayed with him in the stadium until he was stable enough to be carried out on a stretcher. Lucas later published a chipper account of the race in which he credited the strychnine for the victory and recommended the protocol to other coaches.

Félix Carvajal, called Andarín Carvajal in the Cuban press, was a postman who had crossed to New Orleans by boat to fundraise for the trip, lost the money gambling, and hitched the rest of the way to Missouri. He ran in long trousers cut off at the knees with a pocket-knife, and a button-up shirt. Along the route he stopped to chat with spectators in his fragmented English, picked unripe apples from a roadside orchard, came down with stomach cramps from the apples, lay down for a nap, and still finished fourth.

Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, two Tswana men working the South African exhibit at the World's Fair next door, ran in the marathon as a sideline. They had no spikes, no training schedule, and almost no notice. Taunyane was chased a mile off course by a stray dog. He finished ninth. Mashiani came twelfth.

The strychnine-and-brandy protocol that won the Games was, technically, the first documented doping regimen in the modern Olympics. It was also legal. The IOC would not ban performance-enhancing drugs for another sixty-three years. Hicks was given his medal and never raced competitively again. The marathon distance itself would be standardized at 26.2 miles four years later in London, and Sullivan's water-rationing experiment would not be repeated. The St. Louis race lives on chiefly as the worst finish ratio in Olympic history, fourteen of thirty-two, and as the closest the modern Games have come to killing their winner before he could take the wreath.