The Disastrous 1904 Olympic Marathon

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. There are some of our favorites. And today we have the story of the 1904 Olympics. Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri Saint Louis, is an expert in Olympic Games and Olympic history. She brings us the story.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: I became interested in the Olympics as an athlete. Actually, I mean, from the time I was quite young, I just really wanted to compete in the Olympic Games, and one thing led to another. I got a full athletic scholarship to college, and I competed at the heavy level in track and field, but I just wasn’t good enough to make an Olympic team. I competed in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Trials. My best finished was seventh, but I was lucky because I was able to convert it into an academic career. The first Olympic Games had been held in Greece in Athens, and so that had really stamped the character of the early Olympic Games, which were connected with Western civilization, which actually was a sort of fairly new concept at that time. It was a concept that was emerging as Europe tried to figure out what it had in common versus the rest of the world, and so the games were linked with this, you know, glorious tradition going all the way back to Classical Greece, which was shared by every culturally Western person in the world. Supposedly, the second Games were held in Paris, Pere de Kubertan’s home-stomping grounds. They had been less successful because they had been held together with a big exposition, the Paris Exposition of 1900. Coubertan had thought that would be a good idea, but in the end they just kind of got lost in the mix with this huge exposition that was going on. So, heading into the next Olympic Games in 1904, he had not wanted them to be held in association with an exposition, and originally they had been awarded to Chicago at that time. The World’s Fair was scheduled for 1903 because it was a celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which was in 1803, but they couldn’t get their act together, and they were behind schedule, so they had to push back the opening a year to 1904, and they were planning a huge amount of sports events. James Sullivan was the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, the most powerful man in sports in the U.S. at that time, and he was the one organizing the sports in association with the World’s Fair. In 1901, there had been a big exposition in Buffalo, New York, at which he had declared that he was going to organize on Olympic Games because the Europeans didn’t organize them, and the Americans could organize one if they wanted. He got into a fight with Kubertan over that, and eventually he yielded. But I think you could see that it would be a natural thing that in 1904 he would want those sports that he already planned to organize an association with the World’s Fair to be designated, you know, at least part of them, as Olympic sports. So there was a huge sports program surrounding the World’s Fair, which was not all Olympic. The World’s Fair went on for six months, that’s how long they typically last, and the sports program went on for that entire time, and there were about 400 events and several thousand participants. And then within that only a small chunk was designated as the Olympic Games, and that was where you had the international participants. And it was quite dominated numerically by Americans because Europe was in a recession at the time. The Olympic Games really didn’t mean much at the time anyway, so there just wasn’t a lot of desire on the part of Europeans to send representatives to those games. The Americans really didn’t care. They just weren’t quite as obsessed with national identity as Europe was, because of course, this was in the time period when Europe was leading up to World War I, and nationalism, you know, in the worst sense, really was growing day by day in Europe. The Europeans had this notion about all the pomp and circumstance and protocol that should surround Olympic Games. Part of it borrowed from the monarchical traditions, so, like, at the first Games in Athens, the king sort of appeared for the opening ceremonies and marches in and takes his place, you know, with his retinue, and then other people follow, and they express obeisance to the king. So monarchy was just kind of big at those games. Well, we didn’t have a monarch, so, you know, the Americans just weren’t into all that kind of display of power and hierarchy. That what they were into was the quality of the performances because, and that actually linked up with something else that was going on, which was the commercialization of sports, particularly by the Spaulding Sporting Goods company, which really utilized those games to advertise its products. And part of what they did was to provide equipment and help renovate facilities, so that the technological part of it was really the best Olympic Games held to that date. Of course, the Europeans could care less about that, but that, you know, because of that, many of the performances were quite good, and world records were set, of course, mostly by Americans, and that was really what the Americans cared about. But they got labeled by the Europeans as utilitarian. That was an insult back then, and it came up over and over, and I think by that the Europeans meant they just don’t pay enough ttention to, enough attention to, you know, culture and refinement, civilization, appearance, protocol, and they just, you know, wanted to do the sports. And that’s, that wasn’t quite right in the European point of view. And also, the sports were partly being used as a tool, which was to sell the products of small and sporting group. Now, that was not the case with the marathon because at that time, you know, there wasn’t a market in running shoes. And another important point is that—and this was characteristic of the first three games—athletes represented their clubs, not a nation. Representation by nation didn’t happen until immediately after the Saint Louis Games. But in the case of the marathon, it was even more casual than that, because basically, if you showed up at the starting line, you could jump into the race. And that’s why it’s such an interesting event, you know, compared to our typical assumptions about what Olympic Games are like.

00:07:08
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Professor Susan Burnell. When we come back, more of this story, the story of the 1904 Olympics in Saint Louis, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Professor Susan Brenell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri Saint Louis, who is an expert in Olympic Games and Olympic history. And by the way, what interesting storytelling! America was an interested in monarchy. We didn’t do power that way, she said. We cared about the performance. And by the way, in classic American spirit, how to commercialize that performance. Now, let’s return to Professor Burnell talking about how casual the marathon event was for the 1904 Olympic Games.

00:08:44
Speaker 2: There were a number of well-known long-distance runners who showed up at the starting line and were ready to run a serious race. And then there were those like Felix Carba Hall from Cuba who had, well, he had a reputation in Cuba because he would sort of run across the island and raise money. He was a bit of an oddity demonstrating his endurance. And he had caught a ship to New Orleans where he lost his money in a casino, and he had to hitchhike from there to Saint Louis. And he showed up on the starting line wearing long pants, leather shoes, a little beret, and apparently one of the competitors said, “This isn’t going to work real well in ninety-degree heat to be running in long pants,” and got out some scissors and cut his pants off to about just below knee-length. And so, you know, there were amusing stories like that. There were the two men who were called Zulus at the time, so they were from South Africa. We’ve recreated their biographies, Lynn Tao and Jan Mashiani, and they were Twauna. They were members of the Tuna tribe. Lynn and Jan jumped into the marathon barefoot and did amazingly well, especially considering that one of them got run off the course by dogs who were chasing him, and after his detour, rejoined, and Lynn ended up getting ninth, and Jan twelfth. So the race itself was just not well planned. I mean, I think the attention that was given to the course or the facilities in other sports somehow just didn’t happen in the case of the marathon. So, it was about ninety-degree heat. It’s very humid in Saint Louis because we’re right here at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The road was dirt-dust. Most of the way it was dirt. It went out into the suburbs. Dust was being kicked up not only by the runners, and there were cars driving alongside the runners kicking up dust, but also they hadn’t even stopped traffic, so normal traffic was going on along the roads—delivery trucks, people walking their dogs—so the runners were just dodging everything. The dust was so bad that one of the runners collapsed and almost died from a ruptured esophagus, I believe, who was hauled off to the hospital and would have died if not for emergency surgery, and most of the runners didn’t finish for that reason. There were only two water stations, and that was an interesting part of the state of sports science at that time. It was believed that you should not drink water while you are running, so they deliberately dehydrated the athletes. Essentially. That might sound crazy to us today, but I actually remember when I was training as a track athlete in the early ’80s. Even up until then, it was believed that you shouldn’t drink water while you’re running, while you’re working out, because it might give you stomach cramps. So that belief persisted for longer than you might think. So anyway, they’re running nearly 26 miles; they were dehydrated, it was dusty, and a lot of them just dropped out. The guy who was originally declared the winner, Fred Lures. He was a well-known long-distance runner with legitimate credentials, but, part about nine miles into the race, he got cramps, as most of the runners were getting because they were dehydrated, and he hitched a ride with a car until close to the end, when he got out and ran into the stadium for the final part of the race. As a result of which, he was declared the winner, and the daughter of the president, you know, declared him the winner. But he was very quickly revealed because, among other things, he’d been riding along in the car waving to the other competitors and to the spectators. Well, he said it was just a joke, that he had never intended to accept, you know, being declared the winner, and he was taken by surprise and all that. So, who knows how premeditated that was? It could be that when he came in, and they, you know, they thought he’d won, maybe it was just too appealing to try to get by with the lie. The American Athletic Union didn’t believe him and did ban him from the sport for a year. But interestingly, he then one year later won the Boston Marathon. So then, the man who was declared the winner, Thomas Hicks, was another interesting case of really bad sports science because he also was deliberately dehydrated. Sullivan had actually sort of pinpointed him for special treatment as a guinea pig literally for Sullivan’s theories. So, not only was he not allowed to drink water even though he was begging for it, they did sponge him off with warm distilled water, and they had some brandy that they were prepared to give him if he just couldn’t go on, which, at one point, he’s even begging for the brandy because he’s so thirsty, and they wouldn’t even give him that, but they were drugging him. So they gave him egg whites mixed with a little bit of strychnin sulfate, which is maybe not quite as bad as the strict, straight out strychnin used as rat poisoning, but strychinin sulfate is also used as rat poisoning, so it is poisonous, it’s deadly, it causes convulsions and cramps, but it was used at that time as a stimulant in very small doses, so he was basically being given a stimulant. But he was lucky because any more of that and he probably would have died. So, by the time he got to the finish line, he was collapsing, hallucinating. It’s a little unclear whether he got across the finish line by his own power. Maybe he was sort of carried by with a man under each arm while he sort of moved his legs. In any case, he was declared the winner, so that was the official winner of the marathon in Saint Louis. The diversity was really kind of an American feature of those games, but that was part of the messiness that the Europeans just didn’t like, you know. They wanted everybody to be organized behind national flags, and that was what happened. Immediately afterwards, there was an Olympic Games called the Intermediate Olympic Games. They went back to Athens in 1906. It wasn’t an official games at the time, but the International Olympic Committee these days refuses to recognize it as an official Olympic Games. But that was the first Olympic Games at which there was a parade of athletes, with athletes marching behind flags, and at which there was a metal ceremony when the flags of the athletes were raised, and also national Olympic committees were in charge of designating who got to compete. So, very quickly from the messiness of Saint Louis, we got this well-ordered national representation that characterized has characterized the Games up until today. Debates still rage about the history of Olympic participation for different countries. So, the world wasn’t divided up into countries in the same way then, and in particular, athletes didn’t compete representing countries in 1904, but that has meaning today, and because there are metal tallies on the website of the International Olympic Committee, and there are historians who keep track of how many medals has one country one throughout Olympic history compared to the other country, and who was the first medalist for a particular country, and these things really matter. People get very angry about them. So, the problem for these people is that in Saint Louis you have to go back and reconstruct, and it’s open to interpretation as to exactly what country these athletes were representing. So anyway, it’s just amusing how strongly some people feel about this. There are letters petitioning the International Olympic Committee, and, you know, it just gets very heated sometimes. What happened in the split between the Europeans and the Americans in 1904 is one that has continued up until the present day. And there’s just been this difference in that Europeans prefer more sort of cult protocol symbolism, and Americans are more utilitarian, and our sport is more commercialized. This has just been a sort of continual conflict, which is a cultural difference that’s worth thinking about. Inside the International Olympic Committee, the Europeans control the organization, but the Americans provide the vast amount of the funding, and so it’s basically money versus power, culture versus profit. It’s a tension that has continued up until the present day.

00:17:34
Speaker 1: And great job as always by Faith, and a special thanks to Professor Burnell, and the difference to us in Europe still prevail. Differences aren’t bad. They’re to be celebrated here in Our American Stories. The story of the 1904 Olympics in Saint Louis.