August 27, 2024 • 40 mins
The Olympic marathon of 1904 is an incredible story filled with wacky characters, cheating, heat and humidity, dust and dirt, and oh yeah, a few actual qualified athletes.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're on a sprint
to retirement. You're on Stuff you should Know a marathon sprint. Yeah, unfortunately,
marathon so never ending, ceaseless ultrathon marathon of all time.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
You know, this was another listener suggestion. I feel like
those have been rolling in lately with a lot of
good suggestions, and this was something I had not heard of,
the story of the nineteen oh four marathon. And this
comes to us from Peter Fitzgibbon.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, and thanks today for helping us out with this
one too. Yeah, thanks all around, Peter Fitzgibbon, what a
great name. Agreed, So thanks a lot, Peter, because this
is a really interesting story and I hadn't heard anything
about it either, But there was what's widely considered as
the hardest, worst, most difficult marathon ever run. Marathon, not ultrathon.
(01:10):
No again, I'm just specifically talking about marathons, and the
mind bending part of it is it wasn't even an
official marathon link. It was two miles shorter than what
we consider marathons today, and this is still considered the hardest.
And it wasn't because some racing genius came up with
the perfect difficult marathon course. No, it was because the
(01:34):
people involved had no idea what they were doing. Yeah,
and this was one of the first marathons in the
modern era, in the modern Olympics, it was actually the
third one.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
If you know, there was no marathon in the the
og Ancient Games. I think a lot of people think
that maybe there was because of the great story of
how the marathon came to be, but that would happen
much later. There was a gentleman named Mishe Brielle, who
is a nineteenth century French linguist, and he loved Greek mythology.
(02:07):
Happened to be good friends with the founder of the
modern Olympics, a guy named Baron Pierre de Corbetin, and
he went to that first IOC meeting braille did, and
he said, hey, guys, we've all heard the story of
the Battle of Marathon in four ninety PC, when the
Greeks fought the Persians and the Greeks won, and very
(02:29):
famously sent Fidipites the messenger to run twenty four miles
back to Athens to say we won. We won, And
then when he did that, immediately dropped dead, like we
should commemorate that race by making people run that far
in these modern Olympics.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, and the IOC said, I don't think anyone even
invited you. Who are you? And he said the same
thing again, almost very it was creepy, and they were
finally like, well, a good idea is a good.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Idea, he says, I'm friends with the baron.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So they decided to include the Olympic marathon in the
inaugural Games in Athens eighteen ninety six, the first modern Olympics,
and because it was an Athens they were actually able
to make a legit marathon from Marathon to Athens, just
like the original version.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Right yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Their goal was for no one to drop dead when
they got back, and fortunately no one did. Into the
Greek's great delight, Greek runners took the top three spots,
the winner being spirit On lewis not the Greek ist
last name, but his first name definitely screamed Greek.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Did you say, unfortunately no one died?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Or and fortunately I said, and what kind of a
monster do you think?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I am Hey, I knew it, but I just wanted
to clear that up for people.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Oh thank you, you're looking out for me.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I was looking out for you.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Thank you, my friend.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So nineteen oh four was the third Olympic Games, the
first one in the US, just as a little bit
of a backdrop because it ties in a bit to
what happened in Saint Louis. But the nineteen hundred Games
in Paris were a bit of a flop because it
was overshadowed by the Paris Exposition that was held at
(04:20):
the same time, and the same thing basically happened in
Saint Louis. It coincided with their World's Fair aka the
Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exhibition, and it was, you know, just
sort of overshadow At world's fairs were very big deals.
The Olympics at the time weren't that big of a deal,
in fact, because it wasn't like a big city like
(04:42):
New York or Chicago or something. A lot of American
athletes didn't even come, so we maybe didn't necessarily field
our best. But one noteworthy thing was this was the
first Olympics to debut all three metal colors or I
Guesstal medals.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, gold, silver, bronze. Right, I don't mean to be pedantic, Chuck,
I'm sorry in advance, but it's my understanding that it
wasn't until the seventies people called it Saint Louis. I
think up to that point it was Saint Louis.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Okay, I'm glad you puted that out.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So one of the cool things about the Saint Louis
Olympics is that there was a guy named George iSER
who I read a little bit about. He had a
wooden leg, and this is a nineteen oh four wooden leg.
He won six medals I think in one day as
an American gymnast.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Did he win leg throwing?
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Did he win?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
What? Leg throwing?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
I didn't know that that was an event. I think
you're thinking of the strongest lumberjack event.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, okay, that are the Highland Games. Sure.
So he won.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Gymnastic medals with the wooden leg.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, that's amazing, pretty impressive, six of them.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So this is actually a pretty sweet mashup of our
marathon episode in our Human Zoos episode. They kind of
collide here in this episode, the nineteen oh four marathon
and the reason why is because in nineteen oh four,
there's a guy named James E. Sullivan, and he was
essentially the guy who ran amateur sports in America, and
(06:16):
he was also on the International Olympic Committee representing America.
He had a lot to do with amateur sports, right. Yeah,
he was selected as the organizer of the nineteen oh
four Games in Saint Louis. And he's also one of
the reasons why there was such a thing as the
human Zoo at the World's Fair that year too.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
He was, by all accounts a pretty xenophobic, racist kind
of guy. One of the things he did later on
famous I say, legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, Indigenous American Jim
Thorpe at his metal strip because Sullivan made a push
(07:01):
to do so because they found out that he played
minor league baseball. Very briefly, I want to do a
thing on a show on Jim Thorpe, by.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
The way, Yeah, I agree, we should definitely do an
episode on him, because in addition to him being such
an amazing athlete, he really apparently got screwed over, not
just by the people taking his medals back, but by
people around him he trusted who basically sold him out
to cover their own hides.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So back to Sullivan, before we get to his human
zoo experience that he cultivated at this World's Fair, just
want to also point out that he was pretty much
exclusively into white men participating in sports, because not only
did he have a bone to pick with Jim Thorpe,
but he did not like black athletes participating. He did
(07:50):
not like women participating. In nineteen oh eight, at the
Olympics in London, they finally said, hey, you know what,
we should have women in here swimming and running, and
Sullivan refused to let the United States field a women's team.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Right, And like you also said, the World's Fair was
going on at the same time as the Olympics, and
part of the World's Fair, as was profiled more closely
in our Human Zoos episode, was essentially just a bunch
of indigenous villages from around the world that where the
actual people, like actual indigenous people from the Philippines, from Congo,
(08:25):
from all sorts of other countries at the time, were
brought to be in these living exhibits, essentially to show
just how superior white America and white Europe was to
these people. They were basically paid under contract to act
as native and indigenous as they possibly could, and that
(08:46):
was a big central feature of the nineteen oh four
World's Fair, and being the head of the Department of
Physical Culture for the World's Fair, Sullivan kind of did
a mash up between the World's Fair and their human
zoos and the Olympic Games that he was organizing and
came up with what were called the Anthropology Games, whereas
(09:08):
he also called them the Special Olympics.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
These were athletic contests where they would get white Americans
and pit them against indigenous people people of color. In
the newspaper there in Saint Louis, you know, things like
barbarians meet in athletic games, and it was, you know,
it was like an exhibition again of like to try
(09:31):
and show the superiority of white athletes for this World's Fair,
and isn't everyone gonna love it?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, So they came up with the shot put, the
long jump, the high jump, the mile run. And I'm
pretty sure we talked about this in the Humans News episode,
but the indigenous people who were recruited to participate on
the indigenous side essentially weren't really told the rules they
were just told go do this essentially, and so of
(10:01):
course they lost. It was super lopsided, and so I guess,
just to be fair, they came up with some indigenous
type events. I made scare quotes everybody, tree climbing, archery, javelin,
and yes, essentially the white athletes mopped the floor with
the indigenous athletes, proving to Sullivan and the rest of
(10:24):
the white people assembled to watch this stuff that whites
were inherently superior for another while longer.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So Sullivan was also the guy that was in charge
of designing this race, even though he probably shouldn't have
been because he did a very poor job designing this course.
He had a theory and it wasn't his idea, but
there was a theory at the time where something called
purposeful dehydration was the way forward for endurance athletes. That is,
(10:55):
don't drink it much, don't eat much, because that'll just
upset your stomach and it'll not help you in your race.
So he said, hey, why don't we try this out
here and we'll just put one water station close to
the twelve mile mark and not let them drink any
water aside from that, and we'll see how it shakes out.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, from what I can tell, it was you would
be disqualified if you were caught drinking water other than
at that station. So yeah, I know that. So the
runners involved had support teams who were basically helping them
along with like, you know, keeping their spirits up or whatever,
but one of the things they were absolutely forbidden from
doing is giving their athlete water their runner water.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So it sounds nuts purposeful dehydration, but if you stop
and think about, you know, it's also not a good
idea to eat a bunch of stuff and then go
out and run today. I think this is people just
mistakenly thought that about water at the time too.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
The other bad idea was they started this thing at
three in the afternoon in August, and Saint Louis, which
is hot and humid, it was ninety degrees that late afternoon,
you know, into early evening is most times the hottest
part of the day. And not only that, but he said, hey,
let's run it out there on the dirt road, which
(12:12):
may have been okay if it was just these what
was it, thirty two runners running, but they had a
team of horses running in front of them to try
and like clear the road and lead the way along
with doctors and race officials and journalists. So they're just
kicking up like clouds of dust that you know, reportedly
(12:33):
you couldn't even see through at times that they're having
to run through and breathe this stuff in.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah. Yeah, basically the whole time they're just choking on
dust apparently. Also, I think that there were regular cars
just using the road too at the time, so it
was not it was just a poorly designed, poorly planned,
poorly executed thing altogether.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
There was one other thing about it too that I
think most marathons would be, like what there were seven
hill climbs. They range from one hundred feet to three
hundred feet, and a three hundred foot hill is as
tall as a twenty to thirty story building. I'm sure
it's not nearly as steep as climbing up a thirty
story building, but still you're walking up a substantial or
(13:14):
running up a substantial incline to a substantial height and
then back down seven times. That's on top of everything else.
That just is everything that's set up this race to
be just legendary. I mean, we're talking about one hundred
and twenty years later, you.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Know, yeah, Heartbreak Kill.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Just to compare, if you don't know what kind of
elevation rise that is for a marathon. For the Boston Marathon,
I think it's about ninety feet well, and I'm not
sure of the actual you know, I think it's I
think it's about a half mile for Heartbreak Hill. But
again I'm not really sure how far that three hundred
feet was, but it's more than three times, so it
couldn't have been fun.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Are you are you in a marathon? Are you going
to run a marathon?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Am I into marathons? I've never run more than two
miles in my life.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, I mean, hey, they say the journey toward a
marathon starts with a two mile run. No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
My line that I always use is I don't even
like to drive twenty six miles.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
That's a good line.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Man. Not not into it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I say, we take a break and come back and
start talking about some of the runners that were in
this thing.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Okay, all right, we'll be right back. All right.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So I mentioned that thirty two people participated in this
race in nineteen oh four, fourteen would end up finishing
the race, which is by far the fewest ever in
Olympic history still to this day. But you know, we'll
kind of go through some of the runners here, because
some were more experienced than others, some were wackier than others.
(15:07):
Three had won the Boston Marathon, so they were you know,
there were some legit experienced marathoners in there, but there
were definitely some dudes running this race that and again
in nineteen oh four. Running marathons wasn't you know nowadays,
if you do that kind of thing, that's your full
time job basically, you know, if you're competitive, that is
(15:28):
like at an Olympic level. But back then it was
just like, hey, I do this. I run a bakery
or I'm a professional clown. But I'm pretty good. You know,
I can run a long way, so I'm in the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right. There was a guy named Fred Lowers who was
a brick player, and he had won a five mile
race sponsored by Sullivan's Amateur Athletic Union. Goodness, yeah, sure,
five miles marathon. What's the difference. There's a guy named
Albert Corey. He worked at Slaughterhouse in Chicago. He was
from France, so I guess Albert Carrier Corey, I blew
(16:07):
up in my face. And then there was one of
the best known non professional or non one of the
best known walk ons I guess you could call him
same was Felix Carvea Hall and he was from Cuba.
He was five feet one inch and he was one
hundred percent awesome.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
He was he was He had a big personality. He
was quite a character according to all accounts. At various
time during the race, he would he would stop just
to chat it up with people who were cheering him on.
He would playfully like steal peaches out of their hands
as he was running. He showed up in long sleeves
(16:47):
and long pants and everyone was like, dude, you got
to cut those pants down at least and luckily enough
there was a someone there with a knife and cut
them off at the knees for him, like right before
the race started.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, he was no stranger to running or moving long distances.
His nickname was Anderene the Walker, and he was well
known in Cuba already because he had walked the length
of Cuba and back at least once. I saw it
twice in one source, that's seven hundred and seventy seven
miles and He just did it because he wanted to.
(17:22):
I saw him compared to the turn of the century
Cuban Forrest Gump.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I wonder how he liked his shrimp.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That's a great question. He probably liked it free because
he very frequently didn't have any money.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
He was also a messenger, supposedly ran thirty miles a
day as part of his job. When he and this
is where it gets really kind of fun. They didn't
They weren't going to pay his way. Cuba was like sorry.
I think the mayor of Evan was like, you know,
we're not going to pay your way to go there.
You're welcome to race, but we're not supporting this financially.
(17:58):
He started running around hall in circles in protest and
got so many supporters. They said, all right, here's the
money book, your passage on a steamship, which he took
to New Orleans and supposedly was lost his money gambling
and had a hitchhike close to seven hundred miles to
Saint Louis from there.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, he hitchhiked and walked, And I saw that by
the time he arrived in Saint Louis for the race,
he hadn't eaten in two days, so he ran that
marathon without having eaten the last two days.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You also said that he liked to joke around with
people and stop and chat with spectators and stuff. Apparently
he didn't speak English, and I also saw they didn't
really speak Spanish, that he spoke some strange slangy dialect
of Cuban or from Cuba, and that people didn't necessarily
know what he was talking about. Yeah, well, I could
tell he was so animated. You were just engrossed in
(18:54):
what he was saying, and maybe kind of got what
he was saying, the general broad strokes of what he
was trying to get cross, or at the very least
you get a laugh out of you. That's that's how
I kind of took all that.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I know I've said this before, but when I first
traveled through Europe in the mid nineties, I spent an
entire night at a German brew house with my friend
that I was traveling with, hanging out with this old
German guy.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
I mean old.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
He was probably in his forties, but we were in
our early twenties. Old he seemed ancient. But yeah, hung
out with this guy drinking with him for probably five hours.
He didn't speak a word of English and I spoke
very bad German, but we communicated all night long.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's the international language of beer.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I exactly ed love.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
We kissed later on, very nice after drinking for five hours.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, imagine that.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So carve Hal is again the biggest personality to emerge
out of this, but he was far from the only
kind of character. I guess. There were two guys and
it's awesome. There's a picture of them together, Leneyu Yanni
and I don't know if it's Yan or John, but
Yan Masciani. They were both from South Africa and they
(20:11):
were from the Swana tribe Dswana, and they were at
the World's Fair because they were some of the indigenous
people who've been imported to really kind of play up
their indigenousness and also to reenact the Boer War between
the Dutch and the English that had just concluded, and
they in the war. They had been messengers for the Boers,
(20:34):
so they were kind of recreating this on the daily.
They were also involved in I think they ran a
marathon in the Anthropology Games. I have no idea how
they were actually brought into the actual Olympic Marathon. The
main one, the closest explanation that I saw is that
(20:54):
there was not a lot of internationality among the participants. Again,
like you said, people just weren't coming. I think d
kouber Tan, the guy who founded the modern Olympics, didn't
even bother to show up. That was that poorly attended
in that klue Ge, Right, So they needed to make
it more international, and so they had too on Yani
(21:19):
and Mashiani run in this marathon. That's the best explanation
I could see of how two black athletes ended up
running in the Olympic Mathon they would actually become the
first black African athletes in Olympic history of any event
of any sport. Yeah, and the first or the last
to represent South Africa for another eighty six years until
(21:39):
apartheid was taken down taken apart Wow. And then there's
one other thing about tu Yani to on Yani, he
was a mailman, which will come into play in just
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I love the picture of those guys, like you mentioned,
it's the look on their faces a little bit like
we're gonna.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Do what it's like studiously avoiding looking perplexed, but I
think they're kind of perplexed.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Yeah, it's we're gonna do what slash we got this.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, it's kind of got that feel for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Because spoiler they finished the race.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, I mean, you spoiled it for me, all right.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So the first thing that they did is they ran
five laps around the Olympic Stadium. You know, I think
they still do something like that now where they you know,
where their spectators are to watch before they get out
on that dirt road. And before they left the stadium,
John Lorden Boston Marathon Winter started vomiting and quit the race.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah. It was really surprising because he was a favorite.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Five laps in less than five.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, exactly, So that was the first guy. Once they
made it out of the stadium and onto the dirt roads,
they were immediately confronted with the problem of the thick dust.
So in addition to running, they're also coughing, breathing shallowly,
I'm sure, And about ten miles in things really started
to fall apart. And that's I mean, that's a significant
(23:09):
distance considering what they were having to put up with.
And again, this is a ninety degree day in the afternoon,
in August. Right, Yeah, So what happened first after John
Lorden was out.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Well, they're getting dehydrated. They're choking on the dust and
dirt everywhere. About the ten mile mark, our buddy Fred
Laure's the brick layer, said.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
I'm tapping out.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
He called on his little satellite phone and seid, I'm
officially withdrawing, and they got a helicopter and there flew
him out.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
He actually didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
He said he couldn't continue, and then he flagged down
a car and jumped in the car and was like,
I'll just ride with you guys, because you're heading back
to the Olympic Stadium. But I'm out, and they said sure,
no problem. So just kind of put that in your
back pocket.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I saw somewhere also that it was his court team
slash coach that had been riding along with him. Yeah,
like next to him. Yeah, car yeah, so carve Hall.
He doesn't have anybody there. He's totally on his own.
He doesn't have a support team. And remember he hasn't
eaten in two days. So part of the course ran
past an apple orchard and he decided to stop and
(24:20):
eat some apples, and depending on who you ask, either
he ate too many apples because he was very hungry.
The apples he ate were rotten, or didn't he eat
apples at all, and he just ate a bunch of
peaches like you said that he'd snatched from some spectators.
Either way, he ended up with stomach cramps from either
the apples or the peaches or both. And so carve
Hall did what any Olympic marathon or would do face
(24:42):
with that situation. He found a shady place to lay
down and took a nap in the middle of the marathon.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
That's right, which is hysterical. So one guy's in a car,
one guy that the favorite had had puked and stopped
before they left the stadium. Fun Cuban friend is napping
in the orchard. One of the South African runners is
chased a mile off course by a stray dog. So
(25:09):
that ends up adding I mean, I guess a couple
of miles if he had to get back right, yeah,
and so he ran like a real marathon.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Then yeah, exactly, yeah, because this is about two miles shorter.
So yeah too. On Yanni was the only one to
run a real marathon. And the reason I mentioned that
he was a mailman is because yes, he was chased
by a dog while he was running the marathon. Little cliche,
but it's it's true. I've seen dogs chase mail carriers before.
It's not a pretty sight.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
And now ask a mail carrier, they will say that
it's a trope for a reason.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
So all the way at mile sixteen, Sam Meller, who
was another favorite, he started to cramp up from dehydration,
and there's an account that says that he got lost.
Actually he was kind of disoriented from dehydration and exhaustion
and trying to find his way back to the course.
(26:05):
He wore himself out and eventually he was just like,
I can't do this anymore. I'm out, all.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Right, So Maloria's now out.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
And then we've got the worst case of them all,
which was a guy from California named William Garcia Billy
Garcia a mile nineteen starts coughing up blood. He passes
out on the road and has rushed to the hospital
and has to have emergency surgery because his esophagus was
so caked with dust and dirt and he was swallowing
(26:34):
so much of this stuff it tore his stomach lining,
so he could have literally died yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
And imagine. I mean, like this guy just started breathing
this dust just a couple hours before, so I mean
it had a really pronounced effect. There was some really
nasty dusts.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
I guess should we take up a break.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna start
closing in on that finish line after we get back.
How about that.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
All right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So I mentioned earlier, you might have thought I was
kidding when I said some people, you know, might work
as a professional clown but can run far. That was
the case with Thomas Hicks. He was a clown, but
he was also a clown that suffered from dehydration because
he was not allowed to drink. Right at mile ten,
was like, you've got to give me water, you know,
(27:43):
dust flying out of his mouth, and they said no, no, no,
you have to run two more miles to get that water.
They sponged him down with some warm, distilled water, which
must have been quite a relief, wiped his back and
shoulders off a little bit. Eventually he would get that water.
But then on the other side of that break at
the seven mile mark, was like, by the way, I'm
(28:05):
thirsty again.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
That didn't satisfy me for the rest of the race.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
They said, here, drink this, and he said, what is
it and they said his egg whites and strychnine down
the hatch.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, and apparently that that was like giving Popeye spinach,
because you definitely put a little peppin in step. And
the reason why is because strick nine, in very small doses,
I saw something like one milligram acts as a stimulant,
so much so that there was a bronze medalist from
Kazakhstan in weightlifting name Isat Artikov who had his metal
(28:38):
strip because he tested positive for stryck nine in twenty sixteen. Yeah,
and it's enough of an effective stimulant that it's a
banned substance. At the time, there weren't any banned substances
apparently except water in the Olympics or in the marathon. Right,
so they were able to give them this little boost
with strychnine. I don't know what the purpose of the
(28:59):
egg whites were, but I'm sure he was like, I
don't care. It's there's some percentage of this this water
and I'll take it.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Water was a performance enhancing drug, but stri thinks, yeah,
exactly all right, So back to Fred Lawres. Remember this
guy's kicking it in his doctor's car. He's riding around
the AC's blaring, he's listening to run DMC in the
back of that limo, and they, you know, they get
close to the finish line. Back at the stadium about
(29:27):
four miles out. He was like, this will be hysterical.
I'm feeling pretty good now after being in the car
for so long. Yeah, I'm going to pretend like I'm
still in this race. Got out of the car, ran
into the stadium. The crowd roars because he's in the lead,
and crosses the finish line at three hours and thirteen
minutes and was being handed basically the Brial Cup named
(29:52):
for Brial who invented this thing from Alice Roosevelt, daughter
of Teddy, and someone in this stands says, wait a minute,
that guy was in a car. I'm not sure how
they found this out, but someone in the stands clued
them in that he was cheating, and despite him saying like, hey,
this is just a joke, they're like, no, no, no, my friend,
you were about to take that cup your band for life.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah. I imagine that person like shouting out that he
was a cheater, being kind of like Princess Buttercup getting
booed in the Princess Bride. Everybody's cheering, and there's that
one old woman going boo. Yeah, that's kind of exactly
how it happened, to tell you the truth, now I
think about it. So Laws was disqualified and Hicks, Thomas Hicks,
(30:37):
the professional clown, was far enough back that his team
received word like, hey, this guy is just disqualified. The
first place is now opened again. And Thomas Hicks is like, Okay,
I'm gonna try hit me with some more strychnine and
egg whites, and you got any brandy on you, because
I think it's brandy time. And they did. They gave
(30:59):
him concoction of those three things, and he drank it down,
and they said, wait a minute, champ, we got something
even better for you. We're gonna give you another warm
sponge bath.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Right, I'll get out there and chafe.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
And so he kept running. And as he kept running,
remember he had apparently a mile twelve. With that water station,
they were allowed one cup of water.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
They couldn't just sit there and pound water. So this
guy was nearing the end of a twenty four mile
run with one cup of water on, two doses of
Strych nine, a bunch of egg whites, and some brandy,
and he is just barely hopping along. Toward the end,
he was kind of engaging in like a shuffling jog
(31:42):
into a walk and then back into a shuffling jog.
And he seemed to as far as the I think
the race officials said, he was basically out of it,
just totally out of it, not even in his body anymore.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Can you imagine the pasty glue like quality of the
inside of his mouth and the sweaters on his teeth, Yeah,
for sure, and his breath. Frankly, yeah, at least they.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Didn't gi him yokes, but yes, it would still be
pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, there was one quote about the last couple of
miles there his eyes. Almost want to read this as
Quint from Jaws, because that's what it sounds like. His
eyes were dull, lustreless, the ashen color of his face
and skin had deepened. His arms appeared as weights well
tied down. He could scarcely lift his legs while his
knees were almost stiff.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, he's walking around like Molly Shannon on the episode
of Seinfeld where she doesn't move her arms when she walks. Right,
That's how this guy was running his marathon toward the end. Yeah, totally, Yeah,
making meringue in his mouth. Oh god, So he started
to hallucinate as the report that Thomas Hicks was like,
the finish line is still twenty miles away. Can you
(32:55):
imagine just the sense of dread. Oh my god, that
would run over you if you suddenly start believing that.
And I guess his support team was like, no, no, buddy,
we're almost there. We're right there. And as he started
to cross the finish line, his trainers helped him. This
was a kind of something that plagued early marathons that
the trainers of supports staff were totally fine with essentially
(33:16):
carrying you across the finish line.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I don't know if it was this one or the
guy from the nineteen oh eight Olympic Marathon, but one
of the two were so carried across the finish line
that their feet were still moving in mid air as
if they were still making their way, you know, cartoon
pretty much. Yeah, so he was very much helped across
(33:40):
the finish line. But this thing was so exhaustive and
just so brutal that he's still one first place. But
even as he was crossing the finish line, there was
the Saint Louis Dispatch wrote about how he looked and
how he was behaving, which was even worse than what
the race official wrote earlier.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Do you't me to read it? Yeah? You want me
to read like quint.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Well, Either that or like a nineteen oh four Saint
Louis writer.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Oh, I'll just read it Sammy Davis.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Okay, all right, no, no, come on.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
No, it's too long.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I'll read the last bit. He must have heard the
uproar around him, but he betrayed no sign of it.
He was past that. He did look up once, when
the din was at its height. He was within a
few yards of the finish.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Did you hear that?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Did something blow up?
Speaker 3 (34:29):
No, it's bad thunder.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Let's leave it in there and here come Sammy to
finish up his lower job. Man was hanging as an imbecility.
His eyes stared blankly bab but his pitiful expression didn't change.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Man.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I think the best thing that ever happened in this
podcast was everyone, including me, discovering that you can do
a great Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Oh, I mean it all goes to Billy Crystala just
stole his impression from SNL.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I'm not I reject that.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Okay, Yeah, so he was in worse shape than we thought.
Even he didn't even know what was going on.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
What was his time?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Three hours, twenty eight minutes, the worst time in history
of the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
So apparently by thirty minutes, it was the slowest gold
medal time in the Olympic marathon by thirty full minutes.
And keep in mind, starting at the next Olympics in
nineteen oh eight, the marathon began to be run as
a twenty six point two mile race, so this was
two miles shorter and still slower by thirty minutes. So
technically he was probably about forty minutes slower than the
(35:35):
next worst time in Olympic history. There was one other
really significant thing about all this. It had the greatest
number of did not finishes. Something like fifty six percent
of the people did not complete the race. Only fourteen
of the original thirty two runners completed this race. That
is abysmal. I think the next worse percentage was like
(36:00):
twenty eight percent. In Tokyo a few years back. This
is like, no, nothing has ever been run like this
before and hasn't been since.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, our friends from South Africa both finished, like I
said earlier. One came in twelfth place, so beat two people,
and one of them came in ninth place, so you know,
ninth out of fifteen. And these guys had never run
marathons before.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
No, and one of them I think we left out.
If you look at that photo, one of them's wearing
boots and the other one's barefoot, so it's pretty impressive. Carvall,
Carve Hall, I just I keep thinking of the ice
cream cake in it. Message. Yeah, Carve Hall. He finished fourth,
and don't forget he took a nap in the middle
(36:42):
of this, hadn't eaten in two days, and still finished fourth.
So there's no telling what he could have done had
he been wrested and fed and hadn't eaten a bunch
of apples that gave him stomach cramps. So Carve Hall
won in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
You would think that James Sullivan learned his lesson, and
I was like, well, I guess we proved that water
drinking is probably something you should do, because you know,
less than half of these guys finished. Not. So he
actually wrote a book in nineteen oh nine called Marathon Running,
where he said, don't get into the habit of drinking
(37:19):
and eating in a marathon race.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial. Smart
smart guy.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
So he did also say that there was that the
marathon was essentially indefensible and that I asked too much
of human endurance. So he kind of turned his back
on it. But other people are like, no, we like
the marathon. He's like, really, okay, yeah, the marathon's great, right,
And like I said, the nineteen oh eight Olympic Marathon
was the first where it was run as twenty six
(37:47):
point two miles, And the lore goes that that extra
point two miles was because the distance from the actual
finish line at twenty six miles to the box where
the royal were sitting watching the race was point two miles,
so they had to add point two miles onto that
twenty six miles so that the royals could be sitting
(38:08):
there at the finish line. That's the lore, and I'm.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Pressing it's true. Yeahs not totally buy that.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Sure you got anything else.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I got nothing else. This was a good one. Thank
you to Peter Pittsgibbon.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Thanks Peter. If you want to be like Peter and
send us an email, we would love that. We always
are happy to get good ideas. We'll add them to
the pile. And since I said that and got confused
for a second thinking that I was wrapping up the show,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
I'm going to call this short and suite on phone
freaking And this is from Kathy with a K. Hey, guys,
when you mentioned long distance calls and how people got
around the high rates, reminded me of when I was
a teenager and we'll go out of town with friends
skiing or to the beach at a system where they
would arrive at our destination. We would call home person
to person asking to speak to buddy, who was their dog,
(39:05):
and that was the little clue there. My parents would
say he was not at home, and they would know
that we'd arrived safely.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's from Kathy with a K. So it's a nice
little workaround hack parents knew when someone called asking for
the dog, that just meant they were there safely.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Fair charges.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Anytime I hear Kathy with the K. It makes me
wonder if it's one of our Stuff you Should Know
Army members Kathy with the K from Arizona who gave
us the lastos to learn how to steer with.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I don't think it's at Kathy, but I've still got
that rope. I keep it at the camp same here.
I hope to rope a bear one day.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That would be great. I hope you get it on
video if you do. Yeah, Well, if you want to
be like Kathy and send us a cute little anecdote
about something we talked about, we love that too, and
you can send that as well to Stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're on a sprint
to retirement. You're on Stuff you should Know a marathon sprint. Yeah, unfortunately,
marathon so never ending, ceaseless ultrathon marathon of all time.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
You know, this was another listener suggestion. I feel like
those have been rolling in lately with a lot of
good suggestions, and this was something I had not heard of,
the story of the nineteen oh four marathon. And this
comes to us from Peter Fitzgibbon.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, and thanks today for helping us out with this
one too. Yeah, thanks all around, Peter Fitzgibbon, what a
great name. Agreed, So thanks a lot, Peter, because this
is a really interesting story and I hadn't heard anything
about it either, But there was what's widely considered as
the hardest, worst, most difficult marathon ever run. Marathon, not ultrathon.
(01:10):
No again, I'm just specifically talking about marathons, and the
mind bending part of it is it wasn't even an
official marathon link. It was two miles shorter than what
we consider marathons today, and this is still considered the hardest.
And it wasn't because some racing genius came up with
the perfect difficult marathon course. No, it was because the
(01:34):
people involved had no idea what they were doing. Yeah,
and this was one of the first marathons in the
modern era, in the modern Olympics, it was actually the
third one.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
If you know, there was no marathon in the the
og Ancient Games. I think a lot of people think
that maybe there was because of the great story of
how the marathon came to be, but that would happen
much later. There was a gentleman named Mishe Brielle, who
is a nineteenth century French linguist, and he loved Greek mythology.
(02:07):
Happened to be good friends with the founder of the
modern Olympics, a guy named Baron Pierre de Corbetin, and
he went to that first IOC meeting braille did, and
he said, hey, guys, we've all heard the story of
the Battle of Marathon in four ninety PC, when the
Greeks fought the Persians and the Greeks won, and very
(02:29):
famously sent Fidipites the messenger to run twenty four miles
back to Athens to say we won. We won, And
then when he did that, immediately dropped dead, like we
should commemorate that race by making people run that far
in these modern Olympics.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, and the IOC said, I don't think anyone even
invited you. Who are you? And he said the same
thing again, almost very it was creepy, and they were
finally like, well, a good idea is a good.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Idea, he says, I'm friends with the baron.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So they decided to include the Olympic marathon in the
inaugural Games in Athens eighteen ninety six, the first modern Olympics,
and because it was an Athens they were actually able
to make a legit marathon from Marathon to Athens, just
like the original version.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Right yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Their goal was for no one to drop dead when
they got back, and fortunately no one did. Into the
Greek's great delight, Greek runners took the top three spots,
the winner being spirit On lewis not the Greek ist
last name, but his first name definitely screamed Greek.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Did you say, unfortunately no one died?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Or and fortunately I said, and what kind of a
monster do you think?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I am Hey, I knew it, but I just wanted
to clear that up for people.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Oh thank you, you're looking out for me.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I was looking out for you.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Thank you, my friend.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So nineteen oh four was the third Olympic Games, the
first one in the US, just as a little bit
of a backdrop because it ties in a bit to
what happened in Saint Louis. But the nineteen hundred Games
in Paris were a bit of a flop because it
was overshadowed by the Paris Exposition that was held at
(04:20):
the same time, and the same thing basically happened in
Saint Louis. It coincided with their World's Fair aka the
Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exhibition, and it was, you know, just
sort of overshadow At world's fairs were very big deals.
The Olympics at the time weren't that big of a deal,
in fact, because it wasn't like a big city like
(04:42):
New York or Chicago or something. A lot of American
athletes didn't even come, so we maybe didn't necessarily field
our best. But one noteworthy thing was this was the
first Olympics to debut all three metal colors or I
Guesstal medals.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, gold, silver, bronze. Right, I don't mean to be pedantic, Chuck,
I'm sorry in advance, but it's my understanding that it
wasn't until the seventies people called it Saint Louis. I
think up to that point it was Saint Louis.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Okay, I'm glad you puted that out.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So one of the cool things about the Saint Louis
Olympics is that there was a guy named George iSER
who I read a little bit about. He had a
wooden leg, and this is a nineteen oh four wooden leg.
He won six medals I think in one day as
an American gymnast.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Did he win leg throwing?
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Did he win?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
What? Leg throwing?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
I didn't know that that was an event. I think
you're thinking of the strongest lumberjack event.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, okay, that are the Highland Games. Sure.
So he won.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Gymnastic medals with the wooden leg.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, that's amazing, pretty impressive, six of them.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So this is actually a pretty sweet mashup of our
marathon episode in our Human Zoos episode. They kind of
collide here in this episode, the nineteen oh four marathon
and the reason why is because in nineteen oh four,
there's a guy named James E. Sullivan, and he was
essentially the guy who ran amateur sports in America, and
(06:16):
he was also on the International Olympic Committee representing America.
He had a lot to do with amateur sports, right. Yeah,
he was selected as the organizer of the nineteen oh
four Games in Saint Louis. And he's also one of
the reasons why there was such a thing as the
human Zoo at the World's Fair that year too.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
He was, by all accounts a pretty xenophobic, racist kind
of guy. One of the things he did later on
famous I say, legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, Indigenous American Jim
Thorpe at his metal strip because Sullivan made a push
(07:01):
to do so because they found out that he played
minor league baseball. Very briefly, I want to do a
thing on a show on Jim Thorpe, by.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
The way, Yeah, I agree, we should definitely do an
episode on him, because in addition to him being such
an amazing athlete, he really apparently got screwed over, not
just by the people taking his medals back, but by
people around him he trusted who basically sold him out
to cover their own hides.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So back to Sullivan, before we get to his human
zoo experience that he cultivated at this World's Fair, just
want to also point out that he was pretty much
exclusively into white men participating in sports, because not only
did he have a bone to pick with Jim Thorpe,
but he did not like black athletes participating. He did
(07:50):
not like women participating. In nineteen oh eight, at the
Olympics in London, they finally said, hey, you know what,
we should have women in here swimming and running, and
Sullivan refused to let the United States field a women's team.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Right, And like you also said, the World's Fair was
going on at the same time as the Olympics, and
part of the World's Fair, as was profiled more closely
in our Human Zoos episode, was essentially just a bunch
of indigenous villages from around the world that where the
actual people, like actual indigenous people from the Philippines, from Congo,
(08:25):
from all sorts of other countries at the time, were
brought to be in these living exhibits, essentially to show
just how superior white America and white Europe was to
these people. They were basically paid under contract to act
as native and indigenous as they possibly could, and that
(08:46):
was a big central feature of the nineteen oh four
World's Fair, and being the head of the Department of
Physical Culture for the World's Fair, Sullivan kind of did
a mash up between the World's Fair and their human
zoos and the Olympic Games that he was organizing and
came up with what were called the Anthropology Games, whereas
(09:08):
he also called them the Special Olympics.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
These were athletic contests where they would get white Americans
and pit them against indigenous people people of color. In
the newspaper there in Saint Louis, you know, things like
barbarians meet in athletic games, and it was, you know,
it was like an exhibition again of like to try
(09:31):
and show the superiority of white athletes for this World's Fair,
and isn't everyone gonna love it?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, So they came up with the shot put, the
long jump, the high jump, the mile run. And I'm
pretty sure we talked about this in the Humans News episode,
but the indigenous people who were recruited to participate on
the indigenous side essentially weren't really told the rules they
were just told go do this essentially, and so of
(10:01):
course they lost. It was super lopsided, and so I guess,
just to be fair, they came up with some indigenous
type events. I made scare quotes everybody, tree climbing, archery, javelin,
and yes, essentially the white athletes mopped the floor with
the indigenous athletes, proving to Sullivan and the rest of
(10:24):
the white people assembled to watch this stuff that whites
were inherently superior for another while longer.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So Sullivan was also the guy that was in charge
of designing this race, even though he probably shouldn't have
been because he did a very poor job designing this course.
He had a theory and it wasn't his idea, but
there was a theory at the time where something called
purposeful dehydration was the way forward for endurance athletes. That is,
(10:55):
don't drink it much, don't eat much, because that'll just
upset your stomach and it'll not help you in your race.
So he said, hey, why don't we try this out
here and we'll just put one water station close to
the twelve mile mark and not let them drink any
water aside from that, and we'll see how it shakes out.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, from what I can tell, it was you would
be disqualified if you were caught drinking water other than
at that station. So yeah, I know that. So the
runners involved had support teams who were basically helping them
along with like, you know, keeping their spirits up or whatever,
but one of the things they were absolutely forbidden from
doing is giving their athlete water their runner water.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So it sounds nuts purposeful dehydration, but if you stop
and think about, you know, it's also not a good
idea to eat a bunch of stuff and then go
out and run today. I think this is people just
mistakenly thought that about water at the time too.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
The other bad idea was they started this thing at
three in the afternoon in August, and Saint Louis, which
is hot and humid, it was ninety degrees that late afternoon,
you know, into early evening is most times the hottest
part of the day. And not only that, but he said, hey,
let's run it out there on the dirt road, which
(12:12):
may have been okay if it was just these what
was it, thirty two runners running, but they had a
team of horses running in front of them to try
and like clear the road and lead the way along
with doctors and race officials and journalists. So they're just
kicking up like clouds of dust that you know, reportedly
(12:33):
you couldn't even see through at times that they're having
to run through and breathe this stuff in.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah. Yeah, basically the whole time they're just choking on
dust apparently. Also, I think that there were regular cars
just using the road too at the time, so it
was not it was just a poorly designed, poorly planned,
poorly executed thing altogether.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
There was one other thing about it too that I
think most marathons would be, like what there were seven
hill climbs. They range from one hundred feet to three
hundred feet, and a three hundred foot hill is as
tall as a twenty to thirty story building. I'm sure
it's not nearly as steep as climbing up a thirty
story building, but still you're walking up a substantial or
(13:14):
running up a substantial incline to a substantial height and
then back down seven times. That's on top of everything else.
That just is everything that's set up this race to
be just legendary. I mean, we're talking about one hundred
and twenty years later, you.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Know, yeah, Heartbreak Kill.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Just to compare, if you don't know what kind of
elevation rise that is for a marathon. For the Boston Marathon,
I think it's about ninety feet well, and I'm not
sure of the actual you know, I think it's I
think it's about a half mile for Heartbreak Hill. But
again I'm not really sure how far that three hundred
feet was, but it's more than three times, so it
couldn't have been fun.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Are you are you in a marathon? Are you going
to run a marathon?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Am I into marathons? I've never run more than two
miles in my life.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, I mean, hey, they say the journey toward a
marathon starts with a two mile run. No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
My line that I always use is I don't even
like to drive twenty six miles.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
That's a good line.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Man. Not not into it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I say, we take a break and come back and
start talking about some of the runners that were in
this thing.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Okay, all right, we'll be right back. All right.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So I mentioned that thirty two people participated in this
race in nineteen oh four, fourteen would end up finishing
the race, which is by far the fewest ever in
Olympic history still to this day. But you know, we'll
kind of go through some of the runners here, because
some were more experienced than others, some were wackier than others.
(15:07):
Three had won the Boston Marathon, so they were you know,
there were some legit experienced marathoners in there, but there
were definitely some dudes running this race that and again
in nineteen oh four. Running marathons wasn't you know nowadays,
if you do that kind of thing, that's your full
time job basically, you know, if you're competitive, that is
(15:28):
like at an Olympic level. But back then it was
just like, hey, I do this. I run a bakery
or I'm a professional clown. But I'm pretty good. You know,
I can run a long way, so I'm in the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right. There was a guy named Fred Lowers who was
a brick player, and he had won a five mile
race sponsored by Sullivan's Amateur Athletic Union. Goodness, yeah, sure,
five miles marathon. What's the difference. There's a guy named
Albert Corey. He worked at Slaughterhouse in Chicago. He was
from France, so I guess Albert Carrier Corey, I blew
(16:07):
up in my face. And then there was one of
the best known non professional or non one of the
best known walk ons I guess you could call him
same was Felix Carvea Hall and he was from Cuba.
He was five feet one inch and he was one
hundred percent awesome.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
He was he was He had a big personality. He
was quite a character according to all accounts. At various
time during the race, he would he would stop just
to chat it up with people who were cheering him on.
He would playfully like steal peaches out of their hands
as he was running. He showed up in long sleeves
(16:47):
and long pants and everyone was like, dude, you got
to cut those pants down at least and luckily enough
there was a someone there with a knife and cut
them off at the knees for him, like right before
the race started.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, he was no stranger to running or moving long distances.
His nickname was Anderene the Walker, and he was well
known in Cuba already because he had walked the length
of Cuba and back at least once. I saw it
twice in one source, that's seven hundred and seventy seven
miles and He just did it because he wanted to.
(17:22):
I saw him compared to the turn of the century
Cuban Forrest Gump.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I wonder how he liked his shrimp.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That's a great question. He probably liked it free because
he very frequently didn't have any money.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
He was also a messenger, supposedly ran thirty miles a
day as part of his job. When he and this
is where it gets really kind of fun. They didn't
They weren't going to pay his way. Cuba was like sorry.
I think the mayor of Evan was like, you know,
we're not going to pay your way to go there.
You're welcome to race, but we're not supporting this financially.
(17:58):
He started running around hall in circles in protest and
got so many supporters. They said, all right, here's the
money book, your passage on a steamship, which he took
to New Orleans and supposedly was lost his money gambling
and had a hitchhike close to seven hundred miles to
Saint Louis from there.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, he hitchhiked and walked, And I saw that by
the time he arrived in Saint Louis for the race,
he hadn't eaten in two days, so he ran that
marathon without having eaten the last two days.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You also said that he liked to joke around with
people and stop and chat with spectators and stuff. Apparently
he didn't speak English, and I also saw they didn't
really speak Spanish, that he spoke some strange slangy dialect
of Cuban or from Cuba, and that people didn't necessarily
know what he was talking about. Yeah, well, I could
tell he was so animated. You were just engrossed in
(18:54):
what he was saying, and maybe kind of got what
he was saying, the general broad strokes of what he
was trying to get cross, or at the very least
you get a laugh out of you. That's that's how
I kind of took all that.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I know I've said this before, but when I first
traveled through Europe in the mid nineties, I spent an
entire night at a German brew house with my friend
that I was traveling with, hanging out with this old
German guy.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
I mean old.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
He was probably in his forties, but we were in
our early twenties. Old he seemed ancient. But yeah, hung
out with this guy drinking with him for probably five hours.
He didn't speak a word of English and I spoke
very bad German, but we communicated all night long.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's the international language of beer.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I exactly ed love.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
We kissed later on, very nice after drinking for five hours.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, imagine that.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So carve Hal is again the biggest personality to emerge
out of this, but he was far from the only
kind of character. I guess. There were two guys and
it's awesome. There's a picture of them together, Leneyu Yanni
and I don't know if it's Yan or John, but
Yan Masciani. They were both from South Africa and they
(20:11):
were from the Swana tribe Dswana, and they were at
the World's Fair because they were some of the indigenous
people who've been imported to really kind of play up
their indigenousness and also to reenact the Boer War between
the Dutch and the English that had just concluded, and
they in the war. They had been messengers for the Boers,
(20:34):
so they were kind of recreating this on the daily.
They were also involved in I think they ran a
marathon in the Anthropology Games. I have no idea how
they were actually brought into the actual Olympic Marathon. The
main one, the closest explanation that I saw is that
(20:54):
there was not a lot of internationality among the participants. Again,
like you said, people just weren't coming. I think d
kouber Tan, the guy who founded the modern Olympics, didn't
even bother to show up. That was that poorly attended
in that klue Ge, Right, So they needed to make
it more international, and so they had too on Yani
(21:19):
and Mashiani run in this marathon. That's the best explanation
I could see of how two black athletes ended up
running in the Olympic Mathon they would actually become the
first black African athletes in Olympic history of any event
of any sport. Yeah, and the first or the last
to represent South Africa for another eighty six years until
(21:39):
apartheid was taken down taken apart Wow. And then there's
one other thing about tu Yani to on Yani, he
was a mailman, which will come into play in just
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I love the picture of those guys, like you mentioned,
it's the look on their faces a little bit like
we're gonna.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Do what it's like studiously avoiding looking perplexed, but I
think they're kind of perplexed.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Yeah, it's we're gonna do what slash we got this.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, it's kind of got that feel for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Because spoiler they finished the race.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, I mean, you spoiled it for me, all right.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So the first thing that they did is they ran
five laps around the Olympic Stadium. You know, I think
they still do something like that now where they you know,
where their spectators are to watch before they get out
on that dirt road. And before they left the stadium,
John Lorden Boston Marathon Winter started vomiting and quit the race.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah. It was really surprising because he was a favorite.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Five laps in less than five.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, exactly, So that was the first guy. Once they
made it out of the stadium and onto the dirt roads,
they were immediately confronted with the problem of the thick dust.
So in addition to running, they're also coughing, breathing shallowly,
I'm sure, And about ten miles in things really started
to fall apart. And that's I mean, that's a significant
(23:09):
distance considering what they were having to put up with.
And again, this is a ninety degree day in the afternoon,
in August. Right, Yeah, So what happened first after John
Lorden was out.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Well, they're getting dehydrated. They're choking on the dust and
dirt everywhere. About the ten mile mark, our buddy Fred
Laure's the brick layer, said.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
I'm tapping out.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
He called on his little satellite phone and seid, I'm
officially withdrawing, and they got a helicopter and there flew
him out.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
He actually didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
He said he couldn't continue, and then he flagged down
a car and jumped in the car and was like,
I'll just ride with you guys, because you're heading back
to the Olympic Stadium. But I'm out, and they said sure,
no problem. So just kind of put that in your
back pocket.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
I saw somewhere also that it was his court team
slash coach that had been riding along with him. Yeah,
like next to him. Yeah, car yeah, so carve Hall.
He doesn't have anybody there. He's totally on his own.
He doesn't have a support team. And remember he hasn't
eaten in two days. So part of the course ran
past an apple orchard and he decided to stop and
(24:20):
eat some apples, and depending on who you ask, either
he ate too many apples because he was very hungry.
The apples he ate were rotten, or didn't he eat
apples at all, and he just ate a bunch of
peaches like you said that he'd snatched from some spectators.
Either way, he ended up with stomach cramps from either
the apples or the peaches or both. And so carve
Hall did what any Olympic marathon or would do face
(24:42):
with that situation. He found a shady place to lay
down and took a nap in the middle of the marathon.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
That's right, which is hysterical. So one guy's in a car,
one guy that the favorite had had puked and stopped
before they left the stadium. Fun Cuban friend is napping
in the orchard. One of the South African runners is
chased a mile off course by a stray dog. So
(25:09):
that ends up adding I mean, I guess a couple
of miles if he had to get back right, yeah,
and so he ran like a real marathon.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Then yeah, exactly, yeah, because this is about two miles shorter.
So yeah too. On Yanni was the only one to
run a real marathon. And the reason I mentioned that
he was a mailman is because yes, he was chased
by a dog while he was running the marathon. Little cliche,
but it's it's true. I've seen dogs chase mail carriers before.
It's not a pretty sight.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
And now ask a mail carrier, they will say that
it's a trope for a reason.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
So all the way at mile sixteen, Sam Meller, who
was another favorite, he started to cramp up from dehydration,
and there's an account that says that he got lost.
Actually he was kind of disoriented from dehydration and exhaustion
and trying to find his way back to the course.
(26:05):
He wore himself out and eventually he was just like,
I can't do this anymore. I'm out, all.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Right, So Maloria's now out.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
And then we've got the worst case of them all,
which was a guy from California named William Garcia Billy
Garcia a mile nineteen starts coughing up blood. He passes
out on the road and has rushed to the hospital
and has to have emergency surgery because his esophagus was
so caked with dust and dirt and he was swallowing
(26:34):
so much of this stuff it tore his stomach lining,
so he could have literally died yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
And imagine. I mean, like this guy just started breathing
this dust just a couple hours before, so I mean
it had a really pronounced effect. There was some really
nasty dusts.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
I guess should we take up a break.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna start
closing in on that finish line after we get back.
How about that.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
All right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So I mentioned earlier, you might have thought I was
kidding when I said some people, you know, might work
as a professional clown but can run far. That was
the case with Thomas Hicks. He was a clown, but
he was also a clown that suffered from dehydration because
he was not allowed to drink. Right at mile ten,
was like, you've got to give me water, you know,
(27:43):
dust flying out of his mouth, and they said no, no, no,
you have to run two more miles to get that water.
They sponged him down with some warm, distilled water, which
must have been quite a relief, wiped his back and
shoulders off a little bit. Eventually he would get that water.
But then on the other side of that break at
the seven mile mark, was like, by the way, I'm
(28:05):
thirsty again.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
That didn't satisfy me for the rest of the race.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
They said, here, drink this, and he said, what is
it and they said his egg whites and strychnine down
the hatch.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, and apparently that that was like giving Popeye spinach,
because you definitely put a little peppin in step. And
the reason why is because strick nine, in very small doses,
I saw something like one milligram acts as a stimulant,
so much so that there was a bronze medalist from
Kazakhstan in weightlifting name Isat Artikov who had his metal
(28:38):
strip because he tested positive for stryck nine in twenty sixteen. Yeah,
and it's enough of an effective stimulant that it's a
banned substance. At the time, there weren't any banned substances
apparently except water in the Olympics or in the marathon. Right,
so they were able to give them this little boost
with strychnine. I don't know what the purpose of the
(28:59):
egg whites were, but I'm sure he was like, I
don't care. It's there's some percentage of this this water
and I'll take it.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Water was a performance enhancing drug, but stri thinks, yeah,
exactly all right, So back to Fred Lawres. Remember this
guy's kicking it in his doctor's car. He's riding around
the AC's blaring, he's listening to run DMC in the
back of that limo, and they, you know, they get
close to the finish line. Back at the stadium about
(29:27):
four miles out. He was like, this will be hysterical.
I'm feeling pretty good now after being in the car
for so long. Yeah, I'm going to pretend like I'm
still in this race. Got out of the car, ran
into the stadium. The crowd roars because he's in the lead,
and crosses the finish line at three hours and thirteen
minutes and was being handed basically the Brial Cup named
(29:52):
for Brial who invented this thing from Alice Roosevelt, daughter
of Teddy, and someone in this stands says, wait a minute,
that guy was in a car. I'm not sure how
they found this out, but someone in the stands clued
them in that he was cheating, and despite him saying like, hey,
this is just a joke, they're like, no, no, no, my friend,
you were about to take that cup your band for life.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah. I imagine that person like shouting out that he
was a cheater, being kind of like Princess Buttercup getting
booed in the Princess Bride. Everybody's cheering, and there's that
one old woman going boo. Yeah, that's kind of exactly
how it happened, to tell you the truth, now I
think about it. So Laws was disqualified and Hicks, Thomas Hicks,
(30:37):
the professional clown, was far enough back that his team
received word like, hey, this guy is just disqualified. The
first place is now opened again. And Thomas Hicks is like, Okay,
I'm gonna try hit me with some more strychnine and
egg whites, and you got any brandy on you, because
I think it's brandy time. And they did. They gave
(30:59):
him concoction of those three things, and he drank it down,
and they said, wait a minute, champ, we got something
even better for you. We're gonna give you another warm
sponge bath.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Right, I'll get out there and chafe.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
And so he kept running. And as he kept running,
remember he had apparently a mile twelve. With that water station,
they were allowed one cup of water.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
They couldn't just sit there and pound water. So this
guy was nearing the end of a twenty four mile
run with one cup of water on, two doses of
Strych nine, a bunch of egg whites, and some brandy,
and he is just barely hopping along. Toward the end,
he was kind of engaging in like a shuffling jog
(31:42):
into a walk and then back into a shuffling jog.
And he seemed to as far as the I think
the race officials said, he was basically out of it,
just totally out of it, not even in his body anymore.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Can you imagine the pasty glue like quality of the
inside of his mouth and the sweaters on his teeth, Yeah,
for sure, and his breath. Frankly, yeah, at least they.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Didn't gi him yokes, but yes, it would still be
pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, there was one quote about the last couple of
miles there his eyes. Almost want to read this as
Quint from Jaws, because that's what it sounds like. His
eyes were dull, lustreless, the ashen color of his face
and skin had deepened. His arms appeared as weights well
tied down. He could scarcely lift his legs while his
knees were almost stiff.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, he's walking around like Molly Shannon on the episode
of Seinfeld where she doesn't move her arms when she walks. Right,
That's how this guy was running his marathon toward the end. Yeah, totally, Yeah,
making meringue in his mouth. Oh god, So he started
to hallucinate as the report that Thomas Hicks was like,
the finish line is still twenty miles away. Can you
(32:55):
imagine just the sense of dread. Oh my god, that
would run over you if you suddenly start believing that.
And I guess his support team was like, no, no, buddy,
we're almost there. We're right there. And as he started
to cross the finish line, his trainers helped him. This
was a kind of something that plagued early marathons that
the trainers of supports staff were totally fine with essentially
(33:16):
carrying you across the finish line.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I don't know if it was this one or the
guy from the nineteen oh eight Olympic Marathon, but one
of the two were so carried across the finish line
that their feet were still moving in mid air as
if they were still making their way, you know, cartoon
pretty much. Yeah, so he was very much helped across
(33:40):
the finish line. But this thing was so exhaustive and
just so brutal that he's still one first place. But
even as he was crossing the finish line, there was
the Saint Louis Dispatch wrote about how he looked and
how he was behaving, which was even worse than what
the race official wrote earlier.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Do you't me to read it? Yeah? You want me
to read like quint.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Well, Either that or like a nineteen oh four Saint
Louis writer.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Oh, I'll just read it Sammy Davis.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Okay, all right, no, no, come on.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
No, it's too long.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I'll read the last bit. He must have heard the
uproar around him, but he betrayed no sign of it.
He was past that. He did look up once, when
the din was at its height. He was within a
few yards of the finish.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Did you hear that?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Did something blow up?
Speaker 3 (34:29):
No, it's bad thunder.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Let's leave it in there and here come Sammy to
finish up his lower job. Man was hanging as an imbecility.
His eyes stared blankly bab but his pitiful expression didn't change.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Man.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I think the best thing that ever happened in this
podcast was everyone, including me, discovering that you can do
a great Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Oh, I mean it all goes to Billy Crystala just
stole his impression from SNL.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I'm not I reject that.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Okay, Yeah, so he was in worse shape than we thought.
Even he didn't even know what was going on.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
What was his time?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Three hours, twenty eight minutes, the worst time in history
of the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
So apparently by thirty minutes, it was the slowest gold
medal time in the Olympic marathon by thirty full minutes.
And keep in mind, starting at the next Olympics in
nineteen oh eight, the marathon began to be run as
a twenty six point two mile race, so this was
two miles shorter and still slower by thirty minutes. So
technically he was probably about forty minutes slower than the
(35:35):
next worst time in Olympic history. There was one other
really significant thing about all this. It had the greatest
number of did not finishes. Something like fifty six percent
of the people did not complete the race. Only fourteen
of the original thirty two runners completed this race. That
is abysmal. I think the next worse percentage was like
(36:00):
twenty eight percent. In Tokyo a few years back. This
is like, no, nothing has ever been run like this
before and hasn't been since.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, our friends from South Africa both finished, like I
said earlier. One came in twelfth place, so beat two people,
and one of them came in ninth place, so you know,
ninth out of fifteen. And these guys had never run
marathons before.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
No, and one of them I think we left out.
If you look at that photo, one of them's wearing
boots and the other one's barefoot, so it's pretty impressive. Carvall,
Carve Hall, I just I keep thinking of the ice
cream cake in it. Message. Yeah, Carve Hall. He finished fourth,
and don't forget he took a nap in the middle
(36:42):
of this, hadn't eaten in two days, and still finished fourth.
So there's no telling what he could have done had
he been wrested and fed and hadn't eaten a bunch
of apples that gave him stomach cramps. So Carve Hall
won in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
You would think that James Sullivan learned his lesson, and
I was like, well, I guess we proved that water
drinking is probably something you should do, because you know,
less than half of these guys finished. Not. So he
actually wrote a book in nineteen oh nine called Marathon Running,
where he said, don't get into the habit of drinking
(37:19):
and eating in a marathon race.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial. Smart
smart guy.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
So he did also say that there was that the
marathon was essentially indefensible and that I asked too much
of human endurance. So he kind of turned his back
on it. But other people are like, no, we like
the marathon. He's like, really, okay, yeah, the marathon's great, right,
And like I said, the nineteen oh eight Olympic Marathon
was the first where it was run as twenty six
(37:47):
point two miles, And the lore goes that that extra
point two miles was because the distance from the actual
finish line at twenty six miles to the box where
the royal were sitting watching the race was point two miles,
so they had to add point two miles onto that
twenty six miles so that the royals could be sitting
(38:08):
there at the finish line. That's the lore, and I'm.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Pressing it's true. Yeahs not totally buy that.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Sure you got anything else.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I got nothing else. This was a good one. Thank
you to Peter Pittsgibbon.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Thanks Peter. If you want to be like Peter and
send us an email, we would love that. We always
are happy to get good ideas. We'll add them to
the pile. And since I said that and got confused
for a second thinking that I was wrapping up the show,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
I'm going to call this short and suite on phone
freaking And this is from Kathy with a K. Hey, guys,
when you mentioned long distance calls and how people got
around the high rates, reminded me of when I was
a teenager and we'll go out of town with friends
skiing or to the beach at a system where they
would arrive at our destination. We would call home person
to person asking to speak to buddy, who was their dog,
(39:05):
and that was the little clue there. My parents would
say he was not at home, and they would know
that we'd arrived safely.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's from Kathy with a K. So it's a nice
little workaround hack parents knew when someone called asking for
the dog, that just meant they were there safely.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Fair charges.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Anytime I hear Kathy with the K. It makes me
wonder if it's one of our Stuff you Should Know
Army members Kathy with the K from Arizona who gave
us the lastos to learn how to steer with.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I don't think it's at Kathy, but I've still got
that rope. I keep it at the camp same here.
I hope to rope a bear one day.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That would be great. I hope you get it on
video if you do. Yeah, Well, if you want to
be like Kathy and send us a cute little anecdote
about something we talked about, we love that too, and
you can send that as well to Stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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