When Thomas Hicks won the marathon at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, he was lucky to reach the finishing line. As he broke the tape, he fell to the ground. Incapable of collecting the winner’s trophy, Hicks was carried off and examined by four doctors. His vital signs were poor and it took them an hour to rouse him from his stupor. Hardly able to stand and with blank, staring eyes, Hicks was bundled into this car and driven away to the Missouri Athletic Club to recover. The marathon had proved too much for more than half the men who started the race. Most were defeated by the terrible heat and clouds of choking dust. But Hicks had to contend with something the others didn’t: his trainer’s belief in the benefits of strychnine and brandy.
AT THREE minutes past three on 30 August 1904, 31 men lined up for the start of the Olympic marathon. After five laps around the stadium, they headed out into the city streets. The temperature was a sizzling 32 °C in the shade, not that there was any of that for the next 40 kilometres or so. What followed was a nightmare that secured the St Louis marathon a place in the record books as the worst in Olympic history. And it still tops the league a century later, its reputation sealed by the case of Thomas Hicks.
Today’s marathon runners train for the distance, following a strict regime based on the latest scientific thinking – what and when to eat and drink, how far to push themselves before a race, how to cope with heat stress. At St Louis, there was a feeble attempt to learn something about the effects of long-distance running on the body by weighing the runners before and after the race. But whether they were fit to be in the race at all was clearly not an issue.
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More than half the competitors had no experience of long-distance running. A few of the Americans, including Hicks, were veterans of the Boston marathon, a fixture in the sporting calendar since 1897. Others were middle-distance runners inveigled into having a go. Greece was desperate to take part in the event it invented but none of its athletes could afford the trip. Instead, nine Greek emigrants who had lived in the US for anything up to 15 years were persuaded to enter. None had trained for the race. Cuba’s man was not an athlete either but a postman. He at least was used to running long distances as part of his job. And if this line-up was dubious, there were also Len Tau and Jan Mashiani. They weren’t athletes either but Tswana tribesmen from the western Transvaal, in town as part of a “Boer war spectacle” showing at St Louis’s other big event that year – the World’s Fair.
Even for top athletes, conditions were tough. The heat was terrible and there were just two sources of water, a water tower 9 kilometres along the course and a well at 19 kilometres. The road surface was treacherous. In places, the roads were made of uneven crushed rocks. Elsewhere they were ankle deep in powdery soil, which created the biggest problem of all, dust. “Accompanying the runners were a number of automobiles, which raised a great quantity of dust…choking the men until they were forced off the road, or causing them to choke and cough,” grumbled Charles Lucas, Hicks’s personal manager. Along with race officials, reporters and even spectators, Lucas shadowed the runners in a car.
The race claimed its first victim after little more than a kilometre, when one of the hot favourites succumbed to a fit of vomiting. At 14 kilometres another strong contender, New Yorker Fred Lorz, had an attack of cramp and retired to the comfort of a car. A little further down the road, Californian William Garcia collapsed and almost died from a stomach haemorrhage. Lucas blamed the constant pall of dust: Garcia must have swallowed so much it eroded the lining of his stomach. He was wrong about the mechanism, but might have been right about the cause. “Gastrointestinal haemorrhage is common in running,” says Dan Tunstall Pedoe, medical director of the London marathon. “Dust wouldn’t cause the haemorrhage but it might make you very stressed and that does cause the stomach to bleed.”
As runner after runner fell by the wayside, Hicks pounded on. At 20 kilometres, he was fading fast but Lucas had come prepared. In his car he had sponges, water warmed next to the engine, a flask of brandy and a supply of strychnine. Under such conditions, he maintained, an athlete needed “proper care”, including stimulants if necessary.
Around the halfway mark, Hicks was out in front. Now on the verge of collapse, he asked for water but got no more than a damp sponge to wipe out his mouth. At 30 kilometres, Lucas felt “forced to administer 1/60th grain of sulphate of strychnine, by the mouth, beside the white of an egg”. A few kilometres later, Hicks tried to lie down. “His color began to become ashen pale,” Lucas wrote later. His answer was to give Hicks a second dose of strychnine, two eggs, a sip of brandy and a good sponging all over with warm water.
Hicks revived a little. He was now “running mechanically like a well-oiled piece of machinery”. But Lucas’s descriptions suggested something else was happening to him too. “His eyes were dull, lusterless; the ashen color of his face and skin had deepened; his arms appeared as weights well tied down; he could scarcely lift his legs while his knees were almost stiff.” He began to babble incoherently.
With only a few kilometres to go, a runner passed Hicks. It was Fred Lorz, who had retired earlier and hitched a ride in a car. When the car broke down, he got out, rejoined the race and romped in first. After a few fleeting moments as Olympic champion, he owned up and was disqualified.
Hicks now had 2 kilometres left and two steep hills to conquer. He walked up and ran down the hills, aided by two helpings of brandy – one for each hill. There is no record of how much brandy Hicks had drunk – only that by this stage Lucas’s flask was empty and he had had to scrounge a refill.
At the finish, Hicks immediately passed out. Despite his poor shape, Lucas was convinced that Hicks’s win vindicated his methods. “The Marathon race, from a medical standpoint, demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road,” he declared. Hicks, he said, had triumphed over better men simply because he’d had better care.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Hicks won in spite of Lucas’s intervention not because of it. In 1904, both alcohol and strychnine were thought to be stimulants. But alcohol is a depressant. It slows the flow of blood and oxygen to the muscles, reducing strength, power, speed and endurance.
If brandy was bad, strychnine was positively dangerous. Strychnine is a lethal poison, used primarily to kill rats. In the past, doctors gave small doses to stimulate blood flow and increase appetite, and it was a common ingredient in tonics until well into the 20th century. But strychnine is not a stimulant: what appeared to be signs of revitalisation were symptoms of something more sinister.
Strychnine interferes with the neurotransmitter glycine, triggering a frenzy of neuronal activity in the spinal cord and muscles. The most obvious result is an increase in muscular activity – from mild twitching to convulsions. “Strychnine would definitely not be associated with any performance enhancement,” says Paul Dargan, a toxicologist at the National Poisons Information Service in London. “Strychnine makes all the muscles fire at once, in a chaotic fashion rather than in the ordered way you need for running. It decreases muscle efficiency and that’s not a positive thing for an athlete.”
Two doses of 1/60th grain amounts to 2 milligrams of strychnine which is enough to produce clinical symptoms of poisoning. The effects can kick in after just 10 minutes. So Lucas had dispensed his “proper care” just in time to do its worst at the toughest stage of the race, and in just a large enough dose to explain Hicks’s collapse at the end. A little more proper care and he might never have run again.
