The 1904 Olympic Marathon: Strychnine, Brandy and the Strangest Race in Olympic History

At 3:03 on the afternoon of August 30, 1904, the president of the St. Louis World’s Fair raised a pistol on the track of a brand-new stadium and fired it. Thirty-two men from four countries set off on the Olympic marathon. Three and a half hours later, the winner had to be propped up by his handlers through the final miles, fed egg whites, brandy and two doses of strychnine, bathed in water warmed on the boiler of a steam car, and kept from lying down in the road. The man who crossed the line first had spent a long stretch of the race riding in an automobile.

The 1904 Olympic marathon is often called the strangest race in Olympic history, and it has earned the title. It had a runner in cut-off street trousers who stopped to chat with spectators, a pair of Tswana runners recruited from a fair exhibit, a course laid over dusty county roads with a single well for drinking water, and a race doctor who wrote afterward, quite seriously, that the day had proved drugs were good for distance runners. It is a comic story in places. It is also a record of how little anyone then knew about what a long run in the heat does to the human body.

An Olympics inside a World’s Fair

The third modern Olympic Games were not really a stand-alone event. They were folded into the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the enormous fair that St. Louis staged in 1904 to mark the centennial of the land deal with France. Athletic contests ran for months alongside the fair’s palaces and pavilions, and the line between Olympic events and fair entertainment was blurry. The same summer included the so-called Anthropology Days, in which men from the fair’s ethnographic exhibits were made to compete in athletic events for the curiosity of white spectators.

The marathon was meant to be the showpiece. It was only the third Olympic marathon ever run, after Athens in 1896 and Paris in 1900, and Americans had won neither. The race started and finished at Francis Field, the new stadium at Washington University on the western edge of the fairgrounds, where about 10,000 spectators watched the start. The distance was 40 kilometers, or 24 miles and 1,500 yards, a little short of the 26.2 miles that later became standard.

The field was a mix. A few starters, such as Sam Mellor, Arthur Newton, John Lordon, Michael Spring and Thomas Hicks, had serious marathon experience, much of it at Boston. Ten Greeks lined up, men who had been living and working in the United States. Albert Corey, a French-born runner, wore the colors of the Chicago Athletic Association. Many of the rest were middle-distance men or hopefuls who had never run anything close to the distance.

The worst course anyone could remember

The best single account of the race comes from Charles J. P. Lucas, a race official who rode the course in an automobile and helped look after the eventual winner. His official report, published in 1905, is detailed, opinionated and in places startling. He did not mince words about the route. It was, he wrote, "the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over."

The temperature was 90 degrees in the shade. The roads through St. Louis County were deep in dust, and in places workmen had strewn cracked stone across the surface, so the runners had to pick their way over loose rock. Lucas counted seven hills between 100 and 300 feet high. Compared with this, he said, the Marathon road in Greece and the Paris course had been boulevards.

Then there were the cars. Officials, doctors, trainers and reporters followed the runners in automobiles, and every passing car raised clouds of dust. Lucas reported that the dust choked the runners until they were forced off the road or stopped to cough. He believed that without the cars the race would have been run in under three hours. Eight miles out, one of the accompanying automobiles rolled down a hill and two men were seriously injured.

Drinking water was almost absent. Lucas wrote that there was only one place after leaving the stadium where the athletes could get fresh water, a well twelve miles from the start, plus a water tower at about six miles. Later retellings, including a widely read Smithsonian account, say the chief organizer James E. Sullivan deliberately limited water to study dehydration. That claim is repeated often but is hard to pin to a primary source, so it is best treated as a later gloss. What is certain is that the runners went for long stretches in serious heat with almost nothing to drink.

One by one, the field fell apart

The race began with five laps of the stadium track, then headed out onto the county roads, and the casualties soon started. A runner named Devlin was put out by a cramp in his left leg. Edward Carr was seized with vomiting at Des Peres and retired. Lordon, Mellor and all but one of the Greeks ended up going home in automobiles.

The most frightening case was William Garcia of San Francisco. He was found by the roadside eight miles from the finish with a severe stomach hemorrhage. Lucas blamed the dust, which he thought had been carried into the runners’ stomachs as they ran with their mouths open, and wrote that Garcia would have bled to death if he had been left an hour longer. He was taken to the fair’s emergency hospital and survived.

Lucas’s medical explanations should be read as 1905 thinking, not modern diagnosis. But his catalog of cramps, vomiting and collapse is consistent with what heat, dehydration and an unforgiving course would do to a field of mostly underprepared men.

The man in street shoes

The runner most people remember is Félix Carvajal, a Cuban mail carrier who was about five feet tall. He had raised money for the trip by running exhibitions in Cuba, then, by the usual account, lost it gambling in New Orleans on the way and made his own way to St. Louis. He arrived without proper kit. Lucas described him in a cheap shirt and heavy street shoes, with his street trousers cut off at the knee "to make himself look like a runner."

His pace was slow but steady. Wherever a crowd had gathered, Carvajal stopped to chat in broken English, and Lucas reckoned the conversations cost him almost an hour. At one point he came up to Lucas’s own car, where the party was eating peaches, and asked for some. When they refused, he playfully snatched two and ate them as he ran. Later accounts add that he stopped in an orchard, ate some rotten apples, got cramps and lay down for a nap, though that detail does not appear in Lucas’s report.

Carvajal finished fourth. Lucas thought he was the strongest man in the race and wrote that, had anyone been looking after him, he would not only have won but lowered the Olympic record.

The first Black Africans at the Olympics

Two of the starters were Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, Tswana men from South Africa who were in St. Louis working at the fair’s Boer War exhibit. They were billed at the time as Zulus, and Lucas’s report uses the racial language of its day. They are now recognized as the first Black Africans to compete in the modern Olympics. A popular story says they ran barefoot, but photographs show at least one of them in shoes.

Taunyane, according to Lucas, ran very well but was chased almost a mile off the course by a dog, losing six or seven minutes. He still finished ninth. Mashiani was twelfth. With a little luck, and the attentive support some American runners got, Taunyane might have placed much higher.

The winner who wasn’t

Fred Lorz of New York had been near the front early on, but at around nine miles he was struggling with cramps. He climbed into one of the automobiles following the race and rode for several miles. Lucas says he caught Lorz in the car and warned him off the course. When the car broke down, Lorz got out and ran the rest of the way, about five miles by Lucas’s count.

He entered the stadium ahead of everyone, ran the last lap, and crossed the line in about 3 hours and 13 minutes. The crowd cheered him as the winner. Alice Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, was photographed with him and reportedly was about to present a medal when word spread that he had not run the whole course. Lorz admitted it and insisted it had been a joke.

The Amateur Athletic Union did not see the humor and banned him for life. The ban was lifted early in 1905 after he apologized, and that spring he won the Boston Marathon fairly. Lucas, writing before the reinstatement, called him "an outcast" and predicted his deception would never be forgotten. On that point, at least, he was right.

Strychnine, egg whites and brandy

Thomas Hicks was a 28-year-old brass worker, born in Birmingham, England, who ran for the Cambridge YMCA in Massachusetts and had finished second at Boston that spring. From the ten-mile mark he was looked after by two men in a car: Hugh C. McGrath, a Boston gymnasium instructor, and Lucas himself.

Ten miles from the finish Hicks asked for water. He was refused, and his mouth was sponged out with distilled water instead. Seven miles from the stadium he was flagging badly, and Lucas gave him one-sixtieth of a grain of strychnine sulphate by mouth, along with the white of one egg. They had French brandy in the car but held it back for the moment.

Strychnine sounds outrageous now, and it is a strong poison. The compound now known mainly as a rat poison was then also used in tiny doses as a medical stimulant, to strengthen heart and muscle contractions, and athletes of the era took it as a pick-me-up. In larger amounts it blocks the nerve signals that let muscles relax, causing violent spasms. Like the arsenic green in Victorian wallpaper or the radium paint that factory workers were told was harmless, it sat in that era’s gray zone between remedy and hazard. There were no anti-doping rules in 1904, and Lucas did not hide what he had done. He wrote about it in his official report as a lesson.

Four miles from home, Hicks wanted to lie down. His handlers would not let him, knowing he might not get up again, and slowed him to a walk instead, since he had a lead of about a mile and a half. When Lorz rolled past, it briefly looked as though Hicks would collapse. He perked up only when he was told Lorz was out of the race.

At the twenty-mile post his face turned ashen. He got a second dose of strychnine, two more eggs and a sip of brandy, and his whole body, head included, was bathed in warm water that had been kept heated on the boiler of a steam automobile. He revived enough to jog again.

Over the last two miles of the road, Hicks was running mechanically, like a well-oiled piece of machinery.

Lucas’s description of those final miles is the most quoted passage of the whole report. Over the last two miles, he wrote, Hicks was "running mechanically, like a well-oiled piece of machinery. His eyes were dull, lusterless; 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." Hicks hallucinated that the finish was still twenty miles away and kept talking about food. He carried beef tea but was refused it, in case it upset his stomach. When the party’s brandy ran out, a bystander refilled his canteen.

On the last two hills he walked up and jogged down. He entered the stadium and tried to speed up but barely had the strength to finish the final 440 yards. His time was 3 hours, 28 minutes and 53 seconds. Some later accounts say his trainers practically carried him over the line.

He was in no condition to receive the trophy on the field. Four doctors examined him in the gymnasium and found his vitality very low. He had lost eight pounds during the race, fell asleep on the streetcar back to his club, and regained half of the weight after a night’s rest and a meal. "Never in my life have I run such a tough course," Hicks said afterward. "The terrific hills simply tear a man to pieces."

What the race taught, and what it didn’t

Albert Corey finished second, about six minutes behind, and Newton was third. Only 14 of the 32 starters finished. Lucas drew conclusions that sound alarming today. The race, he wrote, "demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road," and that warm sponging was better than cold for a runner in action. He did not suggest that giving Hicks water might have helped.

Modern sports medicine reads the day very differently. Running for hours in 90-degree heat with almost no fluid is a recipe for heat exhaustion and dangerous dehydration, and an eight-pound weight loss is a warning sign, not a badge of honor. Strychnine is still listed by the World Anti-Doping Agency as a prohibited stimulant in competition. Today a runner tracking pace and heart rate with one of the fitness trackers sold for exactly that purpose has more data on the run than Lucas’s whole medical team had in 1904.

The race itself nearly finished off the event. Officials were embarrassed enough that the marathon’s place on the Olympic program was in doubt, according to later histories, though it survived and went on to London in 1908 and every Games since. Distances settled, courses got water stations, and the sport slowly learned to measure human limits more carefully, the same long process traced in how the one-mile run got faster.

Hicks, Lucas wrote, said that with the title won he was willing to lay aside his running shoes for good. Lorz kept running and won at Boston. Carvajal turned professional a few years later and kept racing, though he lived in poverty and died in Havana in 1949. And Lucas’s report, with its strychnine doses and its warm-water baths, survives as one of the strangest documents in sports history: an honest account of a doctor doing exactly what he thought was best, on the hottest, dustiest road he had ever seen.

Further reading