I have many half-written newsletter articles but none that have been finished! My apologies! I have been busy with many things! However, right now, I would like to tell you about the 1904 Summer Olympics. I am not usually interested in sports, but in 1904, the Olympics were a major fiasco from start to finish. First of all, only about 15 nations were represented. It was difficult to get to St. Louis, and the Russo-Japanese War at the time made things harder. At first, the Olympic were meant to be held in Chicago, but at the same time there was a Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and they didn’t want there to be two different international events at the same time. So the guy in charge of the Olympics switched it from Chicago to St. Louis.

There were a few other interesting facts about the 1904 Olympics – one was an American gymnast named George Eyser who won six medals. His left leg was made out of wood. Also, some of the American athletes were recent immigrants and weren’t yet citizens, so the medals they won for the United States weren’t really for the United States but were instead for Norway, or Cuba, or whatever other country.

 

 

The most legendary part of the 1904 Olympics was the men’s marathon. There were 32 athletes competing, and 14 finished the race. The marathon started in the afternoon, and it was nearly a hundred degrees outside with high humidity. The race started and finished in a stadium, but the rest of it was on country roads that were dusty, creating clouds on the road so that race officials, following in cars, sometimes had their views obstructed. There was only one source of water, a well at the 11-mile mark. Many of the runners suffered from dehydration due to this. The winning time was actually the slowest winning time of all, and was almost half an hour slower than the second slowest winning time, showing just how awful this marathon was, even for the winner.

The winner of the race was Fred Lorz, who ran only nine miles, and then got a ride back to the stadium in someone’s car. The car broke down at mile nineteen, and he ran the rest of it, crossing the finish line. He had his picture taken with Alice Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, and was about to be given the gold medal when his FRAUD was REVEALED! How dramatic. He confessed right away, and he defense was that he was joking, but the Olympics banned him from competing ever again for his whole life. He was forgiven and the ban was lifted the next year.

The second-place finisher, who ended up being the winner, was Thomas Hicks. Ten miles from the end, Thomas wanted to stop and lie down, but his trainers stopped him, and gave him strychnine (rat poison which stimulates the nervous system) mixed with brandy. He was hallucinating that point, and kept going, though he was barely able to walk by the end. His trainers carried him over the finish line, his legs moving like he was still running. Thomas won the gold medal, but was treated by doctors in the stadium after the event. They probably saved his life.

 

 

William Garcia, another runner, breathed in the clouds of dust from the race officials’ cars and collapsed on the side of the road, with internal injuries. Andarin Carvajal, of Cuba, a postman, lost all of his money in New Orleans and hitchhiked to St. Louis, cutting off the legs in his street clothes so they looked like running shorts. He stopped and cracked jokes and chatted with the spectators around the course, stopping several times. He hadn’t eaten, so he stopped at an apple orchard, where the rotten apples gave him stomach cramps. He laid down to take a nap, but when he woke up, he kept going, and ended in fourth place.

 

 

The marathon also was run by the first two black Africans who competed in the Olympics, Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani. They had been dispatch runners during the Boer War, were in town due to the Louisiana Purchase Fair, and entered the contest on a whim. Len finished ninth but would have been able to do better but at one point during the race he was chased a mile off course by a pack of dogs (I feel there is more to this story but sadly I was not there and cannot say).

 

Anyway, that was the 1904 Olympics! Nice to know that the world has always been a wild and strange place.