Like a Well-Oiled Piece of Machinery

Charles Lucas was proud of what he had done to Thomas Hicks. Afterward he wrote that his runner had gone up the last hills of the 1904 Olympic marathon moving “mechanically — like a well-oiled piece of machinery.” He meant it as praise. By the time Hicks crossed the line he was hallucinating, had been dosed twice with strychnine, had drunk brandy on the road, and had to be held up by two men. It took four doctors about an hour to get him into a state where he could leave the stadium. He won the gold medal.

Lucas wasn’t a villain. He was a trainer doing what he believed was cutting-edge sports science, and he wrote it up with the cheerful thoroughness of a man who expected to be thanked. That’s what makes his sentence so useful. It’s the whole race in seven words. Almost everything that went wrong in St. Louis on August 30, 1904 went wrong because someone in charge looked at a human being and saw a machine to be tested.

The usual telling of this story plays it for laughs, and I’m going to play some of it for laughs too, because a lot of it is very funny. But the jokes land better when you can see the lab coat in the background.

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A fair that happened to have an Olympics

The 1904 Games barely qualified as Olympics. The IOC had given them to Chicago. St. Louis was already planning the Louisiana Purchase Exposition — a world’s fair of absurd scale — and made it clear it would run competing athletic events whether or not it had the Games. In February 1903 Pierre de Coubertin informed Chicago the Olympics were moving.

So the Games became a department of the fair. They ran from July 1 to November 23, smeared across nearly five months and mixed in with ordinary exposition contests, and a large share of the athletes — around 81% — were American. If you wanted to see the world’s best athletes, St. Louis in 1904 was not where you’d find them. If you wanted to see the world, though, it was the place. The fair had built entire villages of people from colonized and conquered places and put them on exhibit: living displays, with admission.

Hold onto that. It comes back.

The experiment

The marathon started at 3:03 in the afternoon, with the pistol fired by David R. Francis, the president of the exposition. It was about 90°F in the shade, which is not where the runners were, and humid. Thirty-two men lined up: mostly Americans, ten Greeks, three South Africans, one Cuban. Most of the Greeks had never run a marathon before.

The course ran 40 kilometers, point to point. It opened with five laps of the stadium track and then went out into the Missouri countryside along roads made of dust and loose stone, over seven hills between 100 and 300 feet high. The roads were open. Runners shared them with delivery wagons, trolleys, and people out walking their dogs. Rain had washed out a stretch near Creve Coeur, so the route was changed at the last minute. Ahead of and behind the runners drove officials, doctors and journalists in automobiles, which in 1904 meant open cars on unpaved roads producing a rolling wall of dust that the runners had to breathe for three hours. One fair official called it “the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over.”

On that course, there was one place to get water: a well, roughly twelve miles in.

This is where the race stops being a story about bad planning. James E. Sullivan, the chief organizer of the Games and a powerful figure in American amateur athletics, reportedly wanted to study what he called “purposeful dehydration” — what happens to men who run hard in the heat without fluids. I want to be careful here: the claim comes from later accounts, and I haven’t found Sullivan saying it in his own words. But the water arrangement itself isn’t in dispute, and it’s hard to explain a single well on a 25-mile course in a Missouri August as an oversight.

He found out.

The man inside the machine

Fred Lorz, a bricklayer from New York, cramped up around mile nine. He did what anyone sensible would do, which was stop running. He then did what nobody sensible would do, which was climb into one of the official cars and ride along with it, reportedly waving to the runners he passed.

Around mile nineteen, the car broke down. Lorz, now rested, got out and jogged the remaining miles back to the stadium, where a crowd that had been waiting for hours watched him come through the tunnel first. He was cheered as the winner. A popular version has him posing for photographs with Alice Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, and being moments from the medal — I can’t confirm that part, and it has the tidy shape of something that improved with retelling. What’s documented is that someone who had seen him in the car spoke up, and the celebration collapsed.

Lorz said it was a joke. The Amateur Athletic Union banned him for life. After he apologized, in February 1905 the ban was cut to six months, and that spring he won the Boston Marathon, legitimately, which is the single most redemptive sentence in this essay.

I’ve always liked Lorz more than I’m supposed to. He’s the only person in the story who looks at the conditions — the heat, the dust, the one well — and responds proportionately. He just picked the wrong ending.

The machine with fuel

Thomas Hicks was born in England and ran for the United States. He was a good runner, and for long stretches he led. He also had a support crew: Charles Lucas and Hugh McGrath, a Boston trainer, following in a car.

At around ten miles from the finish Hicks begged for water. His handlers refused. Instead they sponged out his mouth with warm distilled water, the principle being, as far as I can tell, that a thirsty man’s mouth is the problem rather than the rest of him.

Then, about seven miles out, they gave him strychnine mixed with egg white.

Strychnine is a convulsant. In large amounts it kills you by making every muscle in your body contract at once; it’s the classic rat poison. In tiny amounts it was a respectable stimulant in 1904 medicine, the way a lot of things that are now poisons were respectable then. The doses were small — Lucas’s account gives them as a sixtieth of a grain each, which is around a milligram. Hicks faltered again, so they gave him a second dose, with more eggs and some brandy. Accounts disagree on whether there was a third; modern estimates of his total intake land around one to three milligrams. That is a tiny amount of a lethal poison, and it is still the first recorded case of performance-enhancing drug use in the modern Olympics.

Over the last miles Hicks’s grip on things loosened. Accounts have him believing the finish was twenty miles away when it was a couple. He was sponged with warm water from the car’s boiler. His handlers half-carried him across the line in 3 hours, 28 minutes and 53 seconds — still the slowest winning time in Olympic marathon history. He had lost about eight pounds.

And there’s Lucas, afterward, writing about the well-oiled machinery. He also wrote, in a passage people quote less often, that three runners who were better than Hicks “lacked proper care on the road.” Proper care, here, meaning a poison and some eggs. He wasn’t being ironic. He thought he had won a scientific argument.

Specimens

Two weeks before the marathon, on August 12 and 13, the fair ran an event called Anthropology Days.

The organizers — Sullivan among them — took around a hundred Indigenous men from the fair’s living exhibits, paid them, and entered them in athletic contests in front of roughly ten thousand spectators: running, jumping, pole climbing, mud fighting. The aim was to measure what the “savage races” could do against white athletes, and to keep score. The results were what you’d expect when you put men with no training in unfamiliar events and then measure them with an expectation already written down. They were reported as proof of the expectation.

Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, didn’t object on moral grounds. He was bored by it. He said the spectacle “will of course lose its appeal when black men, red men, and yellow men learn to run.”

Two of those men did learn to run, or rather already knew. Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani were Tswana men who had been recruited in South Africa through a newspaper advertisement in March 1904. The job was performing in the fair’s Boer War exhibition, which re-enacted the battles of Colenso and Paardeberg daily for a paying audience, at four pounds a month. Both had reportedly been dispatch runners during the actual war. At Anthropology Days, Taunyane placed third in the “intertribal” marathon. Two weeks later, he and Mashiani were entered in the Olympic one — the first Black Africans ever to compete at the Games.

The newspapers couldn’t spell their names (“Lentauw,” “Yamasani”), and called them Zulus, which they weren’t. Taunyane finished ninth and Mashiani twelfth. Their numbers were 35 and 36; we know that from the only photograph of them, found decades later by the historian Floris van der Merwe at the Missouri Historical Society. When the New York Times ran a retrospective in 1932, it left them out. Nothing is known about the rest of their lives.

You’ve probably heard that one of them was chased a mile off course by a dog. It’s true that a dog was involved. A St. Louis reporter described “the Lion” — tau means lion in Setswana — crossing a stubble field with “a plain yellow cur of an American watchdog running a close second.” But there’s a decent argument that the reporter mixed the two men up and the dog was chasing Mashiani. The claim that the dog cost Taunyane a medal is pure speculation. Most retellings also have both men running barefoot; the photo suggests at least one of them wore shoes.

Those small errors aren’t trivial. They’re what happens when nobody thinks it’s worth getting a person’s name right. The two of them were at the fair as exhibits first and athletes second, and the record treats them that way.

The rest of the casualties

Sammy Mellor, who had won Boston in 1902, led at the halfway point and dropped out around fourteen and a half miles. John Lordan vomited and quit. William Garcia, from California, was found collapsed by the side of the road; the dust kicked up by the cars had done real damage, and he was hospitalized with internal bleeding. He survived, which on this course counted as a result.

Of thirty-two starters, fourteen finished. Nothing in Olympic marathon history comes close to that ratio. Albert Corey, a French immigrant running for an American club, took silver, about six minutes behind Hicks. Arthur Newton took bronze.

The man who wasn’t a machine

And then there’s Félix Carvajal.

He was Cuban, five foot one, and had worked as a mailman. He’d raised money to get to St. Louis, lost it shooting dice in New Orleans, and covered the rest of the distance however he could — hitching, walking. He arrived at the start in a long-sleeved shirt, long trousers, a beret and street shoes. Someone, possibly an American discus thrower, took pity and cut his trousers off at the knee.

During the race he kept stopping to chat with spectators. When a car went by with people eating peaches, he asked for some; when they refused, he took a couple anyway and ate them on the run.

Here’s where the record and the legend split again, and I love this one too much to hide it. Almost every retelling says Carvajal also detoured into an orchard, ate some rotten apples, got stomach cramps, and lay down by the road for a nap. There’s no contemporary evidence for any of that. The earliest known version comes from a book published in 1948, forty-four years later. Somewhere along the way the story decided Carvajal needed a nap, and gave him one.

What we do know is enough. A tiny man who’d lost his travel money, wearing trousers that had been altered by a stranger, who didn’t have a handler, didn’t have strychnine, didn’t have a car, and spent part of the race talking with the crowd, finished fourth in the hardest marathon anyone had ever organized. No time was recorded for him. Nobody was measuring.

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I’ve come to think the 1904 marathon is remembered as a comedy because the comedy is about individuals — the cheater, the guy on drugs, the funny Cuban — and individuals are easier to laugh at than an arrangement. The arrangement was a fair built to display human beings, run by men who wanted to know what bodies could take, and who were curious in exactly the way you shouldn’t be about other people: completely, and without care.

Lucas looked at a man in distress and saw an engine running well. Sullivan looked at a summer course and saw an experiment. The fair looked at two dispatch runners from South Africa and saw an exhibit.

Carvajal, as far as anyone can tell, looked at a long road through Missouri and saw a day out. He ate the peaches.

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