The Olympic Marathon Where Drinking Water Was Banned

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 our American Stories dot com.
There are some of our favorites. And today we have
the story of the nineteen oh four Olympics. Susan Brownell,
Professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri Saint Louis,

(00:31):
is an expert in Olympic Games and Olympic history. She
brings us the story.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
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 nineteen

(01:00):
eighty and nineteen eighty four 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,

(01:21):
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,

(01:41):
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
ex position, the Paris Exposition of nineteen hundred. Coubertan had

(02:04):
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 nineteen oh four, 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 nineteen

(02:25):
oh three because it was a celebration of the one
hundred year anniversary of the Louisiana purchase, which was in
eighteen o three, but they couldn't get their act together
and they were behind schedule, so they had to push
back the opening a year to nineteen oh four, and
they were planning a huge amount of sports events. James

(02:46):
Sullivan was the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, the
most powerful man in sports in the US at that time,
and he was the one organizing the sports in association
with the World's Fair. In nineteen oh one, there had
been a big exposition in Buffalo, New York, at which
he had declared that he was going to organize on

(03:08):
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 nineteen oh four he would
want those sports that he already planned to organize an
association with the World's Fair to be designated, you know,

(03:29):
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 four hundred events and several thousand participants. And

(03:51):
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

(04:13):
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 One and nationalism, you know, in the
worst sense, really was growing day by day in Europe.

(04:38):
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,

(04:59):
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

(05:20):
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,

(05:40):
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

(06:03):
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

(06:24):
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

(06:44):
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

(07:06):
Games are like.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
And you're listening to Professor Susan Burnell. When we come
back more of this story, the story of the nineteen
oh four Olympics in Saint Louis here on our American stories. Folks,

(07:31):
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,
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(07:54):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue with our American stories
and with Professor Susan Brenell, Professor of Anthropology at the

(08:15):
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

(08:38):
about how casual the marathon event was for the nineteen
to four Olympic Games.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
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

(09:06):
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

(09:26):
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

(09:48):
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 in jan twelfth.
So the race itself was just not well planned. I mean,
I think the attention that was given to the course

(10:10):
or the facilities in other sports somehow just didn't happen
in the case of the marathon. So it was about
ninety degrees 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.

(10:31):
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

(10:55):
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

(11:17):
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 eighties. 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

(11:39):
than you might think. So anyway, they're running nearly twenty
six 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

(12:01):
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

(12:23):
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

(12:46):
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,

(13:09):
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

(13:32):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:37):
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.

(14:59):
They went back to Athens in nineteen oh six. 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

(15:20):
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.

(15:44):
So the world wasn't divided up into countries in the
same way then, and in particular, athletes didn't compete representing
countries in nineteen oh four, 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

(16:07):
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.

(16:30):
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 nineteen oh four is one that has continued up

(16:51):
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

(17:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
And great job is 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 nineteen
o four Olympics in Saint Louis