1904 Olympic

1904 Olympics  by Steve Silverman

About Steve:  Steve Silverman was looking for a way to add some spice to his high school lectures when he realized that weird and bizarre true-life stories would capture his students’ attention. In fact, they worked so well that the science teacher then began posting his discoveries to his own Web site, which he dubbed Useless Information. Well-researched and clearly sourced, Silverman’s unusual tidbits have gained a wide following.  In Einstein’s Refrigerator, Silverman collects more than 30 of the most fascinating stories he has gathered–tales of forgotten genius, great blunders, and incredible feats of survival, as well as answers to puzzling questions.  Einstein’s Refrigerator is a remarkable book with spellbinding stories. Whatever happened to the refrigerator Einstein helped invent? While it never became a commercial success, its underlying concepts became the basis for cooling nuclear breeder reactors.

These games were a sideshow in every sense.

We usually have the image in our minds that the Olympics is really big business. The hosting cities go out of their way to make sure that everything runs smoothly and that the best facilities are provided for the competing athletes.  But, it wasn’t always this way.

Take the 1904 St. Louis, Missouri Summer Olympics for example. These games were only the third summer games ever held.  (There actually were no winter games at this time; they were added in 1924.)  The original games were held in 1896 at Athens and were then followed by the 1900 Paris games.

The St. Louis games could hardly be called an international competition.  Since traveling overseas from Europe was extremely expensive at the time, the competition consisted mostly of Americans and Canadians.  In fact, of the 681 athletes, 525 were from the United States.  Not a single athlete from England or France participated in the games.  It should be pointed out, however, that the Olympics was not intended to be a competition among nations at the time.  Instead, it was a competition among amateur athletes from around the world.  It was the job of the amateur athletes to find their ways to the games at their own expense.  No one really cared if you couldn’t get there.

Needless to say, the 1904 Olympics was of relatively minor importance to the world as a whole.  They were originally scheduled to take place in Chicago, but President Teddy Roosevelt urged for the games to be held in St. Louis because the Louisiana Purchase (World) Exposition was being held there at the same time to showcase the world’s newest technologies (electricity, automobiles, airplanes, etc.).

The Exposition organizers built a permanent gymnasium and a stadium with enough seats to hold some 35,000 Olympic spectators.  (This may sound like a lot of people, but it’s really nothing when you compare it to the estimated 20 million people that attended the Exposition during its six month run.)  The entire event lasted from Monday, August 29 to Saturday, September 3, 1904.  There were no events scheduled for that Friday, so the entire series of Olympic games lasted for just five short days.

At this point, you probably don’t see too much wrong with this scenario.  Unfortunately, when the games were actually held, they were a disaster.  The sideshows at a typical county fair are better organized.

To start, if you were considered to be a minority, you were expected to compete in separate games to show off your native skills.  These events came under the high-sounding name of “Anthropology Days” which were held on August 12 and 13, 1904.  These games were designed to face “costumed members of the uncivilized tribes” against one another.  Never-to-be classic Olympic games were included: mud fighting, rock throwing, pole climbing, spear throwing, and… well, you get the idea…

Things went downhill from there.

In swimming events, which were held in a lake, Hungary’s Zoltan Halmay won the 100m and 50m freestyle.  Originally, Halmay beat American J. Scott Leary by just one foot in the 50m event. However, the American judge ruled that Leary had won.  This ruling resulted in a brawl between the two swimmers, so the judges ordered a rematch. Halmay won on the second attempt. (They couldn’t check the videotape at this time in history.)

An American gymnast named George Eyser won two gold, two silver, and one bronze medal at the games. Quite a remarkable feat when you consider the fact that he only had one real leg – the other leg was solid wood.  It seems that his other leg was amputated when he was run over by a train.  Ouch!

Now for the competition that Olympic officials would really like to strike from the record books – the Marathon.

The marathon was run on a very humid, 90+ degree day. The 40-kilometer course started with five laps around the stadium track. The runners then left the stadium and embarked on a dusty, unpaved course that took them up and down over seven different hills. The path was marked by red flags that designated the way. A vanguard of horsemen cleared the trail along the way. Doctors, judges, and reporters followed them in the newly invented automobiles. The net result was a constant cloud of dust kicked up into the runners’ faces. They were literally forced to eat dust.

The first man to cross the finish line was Fred Lorz from New York City. Lorz had completed the race in just over three hours.  When he entered the stadium, the crowd roared with excitement.  Photographs were taken of President Roosevelt’s daughter Alice placing a laurel wreath over Lorz’s head.

Lorz’s moment in the limelight did not last very long.  Just as Lorz was about to accept his medal, officials learned that Lorz had been spotted passing the halfway mark in an automobile.  It seems that Lorz had been suffering from cramps, so he hitched a ride at the 9-mile point. He waived at the spectators and fellow runners along the way.  Lorz  rode in the vehicle for eleven miles, at which point the car overheated and broke down. Lorz, now rejuvenated from his ride, chose to run the rest of the race.

Lorz claimed that he never meant to fool anyone; he just couldn’t resist the praise and adulation of the roaring crowd. Lorz was immediately banned for life from any future amateur competition.  (This ban was lifted a year later allowing him to win the Boston Marathon.   We’ll assume that he was closely watched.)

So, if Lorz didn’t win, who did?

It was a British-born man named Thomas Hicks who ran for the American team.  Hicks ran the race in 3:28:53.  When he ran into the stadium the crowd was less than enthusiastic.  After all, they had already cheered for a winner, even if he had been disqualified.

Of course, good little Alice Roosevelt was again ready to pose with the winner. But she couldn’t.  Hicks had to be carried off the track.  It seems that Hicks had begged to lie down about ten miles from the finish line. Instead, his trainers gave him an oral dose of strychnine sulfate mixed into raw egg white to keep him going.  This was not enough – they had to give him several more doses, as well as brandy, along the way.  By the end of the race, Hicks had to actually be supported by two of his trainers so that he could cross the finish line.  (Essentially, he was carried over the line with his feet moving back and forth.)  Hicks was very close to death’s door.  It took four doctors to get him in good enough shape just to leave the grounds, eventually falling asleep on a trolley.

Wait! That’s not the end of the story! (Can it get any more bizarre?)

It seems that another entrant was a Cuban postman named Felix Carvajal. Once Felix heard about the marathon, he announced that he was going to run.  He had no money, so he quit his job and went into the fund raising business.  He ran around the central square in Havana and jumped on a soapbox pleading for donations.  He repeated this several times until he raised the cash necessary to come to the United States.

On his way to the race, Felix managed to lose all his money in a crap game in New Orleans.  As a result, he had to hitchhike his way to the games (not an easy thing to do in 1904).  When Carvajal arrived at the games, he lacked any type of running gear.  The officials were forced to postpone the start of the marathon for several minutes while a New York City policeman cut the sleeves off his shirt and the legs off his pants.  He ran the race in lightweight street shoes.

During the race, Felix didn’t seem to fatigue easily. He constantly conversed with the crowd, even running backwards at times while he spoke to the spectators in broken English.

But wait, in keeping with the 1904 tradition it had to get worse for poor Felix:

He blew any chance of victory by getting hunger pains.  He first ate some peaches that he stole from a race official.  He then took a detour into an orchard to munch on some green apples.  Big mistake.  Felix developed stomach cramps and had to temporarily drop out of the marathon.  He eventually got back in the race and managed to come in fourth place.  He probably would have won if he had not gotten the munchies.

Hold it – the marathon is still not over!

The marathon included the first two black Africans to compete in the Olympics – two Zulu tribesman named Lentauw (real name: Len Taunyane) and Yamasani (real name: Jan Mashiani).  They wore bibs 35 and 36, respectively.

The only problem was that these two tribesmen were not in town to compete in the Olympics – they were actually the sideshow!  Yes, they were imported by the exposition as part of the Boer War exhibit.  (Both were really students at Orange Free State in South Africa, but no one wanted to believe that these tribesmen could actually be educated – it would have ruined the whole image.)

Lentauw finished ninth and Yamasani came in twelfth. This was a disappointment, as many observers were sure Lentauw could have done better.  Unfortunately, he had been chased nearly a mile off course by a large, aggressive canine!

The marathon was over, but there is still one more little story to go along with this.

It seems that two of the patrolling officials driving in a brand-new automobile were forced to swerve to avoid hitting one of the runners.  The officials ended up going down an embankment and were severely injured.

In the end, the St. Louis Olympics (along with the previous Paris games) proved to be such a disaster that the Olympic Committee was forced to hold interim Olympic games in 1906 at Athens, in an attempt to revive the flagging Olympic movement. These games were not numbered, but were attended by twenty countries and put the Olympics back on a steady course to success.

An interesting useless sidenote: Iced tea made its debut at the 1904 Exposition.  It seems that it was so hot during the Expo that the staff at the Far East Tea House couldn’t even give away their product.

What to do? What to do?

Very simple; they poured the hot tea over ice cubes!  The drink quickly became the Expo’s most popular beverage.

And yet another useless fact: A teenager named Arnold Fornachou was selling ice cream at his exposition booth.  He ran into a big problem; he ran out of the paper bowls in which to serve the ice cream.  In a stroke of genius, he noticed that the guy in the next booth, a Syrian named Ernest Hamwi, was selling waffles.  Arnold rolled one of Ernie’s wafer-thin waffles up and invented the ice cream cone.  Within ten years more than one-third of all ice cream was served in a cone.

Useless?  Usleful?  I’ll leave that for you to decide.