A lot goes into becoming an Olympic champion. It takes dedication, sacrifice, and of course there’s all the rat poison you have to swallow.
Today’s Moment of Science… Dope running.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is about as old as, well, drugs and sports. Long before the Russian Olympic team, USA cycling, and an asterisk of Major League Baseball players juiced in the 90s (fucking allegedly or whatever), this shit had a history. The drug of choice for cheating in the Olympics in Ancient Greece was mainly good old-fashioned bribery. Running low on cash? Putting a curse on the competition was barely frowned upon. It’s been suggested that athletes also dabbled in hallucinogens, and I have questions.
In the late 1800s, a Corsican chemist named Angelo Mariani crafted a wine with a cocaine pick-me-up called Vin Mariani. The Leamington Spa in England declared it the “wine for athletes.” The goddamn pope endorsed it. It wasn’t the only refreshment of its sort on the market, but there was clearly a target audience in mind for the elixir. To set itself apart, Mariani wrote that “professional bicyclists and athletes (…) invariably give the preference to our Coca preparation.”
My great-grandparents got Vatican-approved cocaine drunk and my parents… are not so sure about Red Bull.
So, the modern marathon.
Held in Athens, Greece in 1896, the first modern Olympics hosted the second race dubbed a ‘marathon’ (the first one being their qualifying race). It tied their history to the new games, representing the infamous run from Marathon and Athens to announce a victory in battle before the messenger dropped dead in his sandals. However, Pheidippides was a hemerodrome, a professional runner and message courier. He’d already hiked his ass over three hundred miles over a few days before the 25-ish mile run that somehow gets blamed for the act of Pheidippicide (which I believe is Greek for “killing the messenger”).
Spyridon Louis reportedly downed a glass of cognac during the 1896 race and won. Out of seventeen who entered, only nine competitors finished. None returned for the 1900 Olympic marathon.
Things got interesting for the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Missouri. A quick aside from your Auntie SciBabe- if you’ve never run a marathon, pass on that (I’ve run two, learn from my mistakes). If you insist on running one, don’t do it in Missouri in the summer lest you enjoy heatstroke. If you insist on running one in Missouri in the summer, start it in the dead of night so the heat is merely insufferable.
The race started just after 3pm, which was ‘fuck-you-o’clock’ for the 90℉ day. The length of the marathon was 24.85 miles (the modern 26.2 miles is taken from the 1908 Olympic Games). There was only one water stop the entire race. If they were trying to recreate the finale of Pheidippides run, well played, but otherwise? Utter catastrophe. Thirty-two athletes entered; only fourteen finished.
Two runners who had previously won the Boston Marathon were taken down by illness and goddamn dusty roads. Frederick Lorz took a car for ten miles of the race and was damn near awarded with a gold medal for it. Cuban runner Andarín Carvajal lost everything gambling on his way to the games, cut his long trousers to shorts for the race, stopped to have some apples (that turned out to be rotten), and took a quick snooze. He placed fourth.
Then there was Thomas Hicks. He had a commanding lead but with seven miles to go, he was ready to take a cue from Carvajal and snuggle up to the dust beneath him. His trainers weren’t having it. And they gave him a dose of… *checks clipboard* strychnine.
Fucking strychnine.
Used as a rat poison, it will come as little surprise that strychnine is not magically delicious. Even doses as low as 5-10mg can be lethal, though typically the minimum lethal dose in adults is 30mg. Muscle spasms, overheating, high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, agitation, and hypervigilance are the less scary symptoms before multi-organ failure.
At itsy bitsy controlled dosages though? This rodenticide had more zing than coffee and wouldn’t make you too dead. Er, probably.
At eighteen miles, Hicks was given brandy, egg whites, and one milligram of strychnine. Which revived him for a time, but he needed another dose four miles later.
He could barely stand, let alone walk or run by the end. Hallucinating that he had twenty more miles to go, described as “ashen” and stiff, his legs were said to have kept pedaling forward as his two trainers lifted him across the finish line. Down eight pounds from the beginning of the race, he could well have suffered the same fate of the legendary Greek messenger had he not been treated by a team of doctors immediately.
With a time of 3 hours 28 minutes and 53 seconds, he was a half hour slower than the winner of the first Olympic Marathon eight years before.
Thomas Hicks, full of brandy, egg whites, rat poison, and questions about his life decisions, won that goddamn marathon. Though it’s widely rumored that he gave up running that day in 1904, he ran competitively for several more years, including snagging another marathon win in 1906. Lorz, who hitched a ride to the finish, would win the Boston Marathon in 1905. It appears in both cases, they were powered by their own two feet.
This has been your Moment of Science, enjoying my favorite fully legal performance enhancing drug: caffeine.
Join the discussion!