Athletics at the 1904 Summer Olympics: Men's Marathon
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
and
> The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race, a side effect of being administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine by his trainers.
What in the world
https://bicyclingaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/02...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVjC1SIWkAU1MCQ?format=jpg&name=...
More recently, Dimitar Berbatov was a known regular smoker. Also Jack Grealish but I think that's just when he's out drinking.
And that wasn’t exceptional. See for example https://smoking-room.net/johan-cruyff-smoking-and-football/
And that’s decades before the publication of “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/) ;-)
Great discussion on an almost unbelievable story.
Nine sailors started the race; four retired before leaving the Atlantic Ocean. Of the five remaining, Chay Blyth, who had set off with absolutely no sailing experience, sailed past the Cape of Good Hope before retiring; Nigel Tetley sank with 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km) to go while leading; Donald Crowhurst, who, in desperation, attempted to fake a round-the-world voyage to avoid financial ruin, began to show signs of mental illness, and then committed suicide; and Bernard Moitessier, who rejected the philosophy behind a commercialised competition, abandoned the race while in a strong position to win and kept sailing non-stop until he reached Tahiti after circling the globe one and a half times. Robin Knox-Johnston was the only entrant to complete the race, becoming the first man to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world. He was awarded both prizes, and later donated the £5,000 to a fund supporting Crowhurst's family.That's a name I recognise, he's pretty famous now.
https://chayblyth.com/ and also https://www.yachtingmonthly.com/cruising-life/chay-blyth-50-...
> Sir Chay Blyth is known to many as the first person to sail non-stop, “the wrong way” round the world. This however is only one of his many achievements. Since 1966 when he and John Ridgway rowed across the Atlantic, Chay has been pushing the boundaries again and again in sailing, and in business. He has been awarded the BEM and CBE, and is an inspiration to many.
The way he just sort of automatically exudes gravitas makes him surprisingly effective in comedy I think. Because comedy requires surprises, and even when he's playing a goofy character it is still somehow surprising when he does something silly.
But Clooney is a master at goofy. Intolerable Cruelty is the most underrated movie ever.
I've typecase Gosling as a shallow heartthrob in my head, even though he's been doing interesting roles for ages.
> many observers were sure Tau could have done better if he had not been chased nearly a mile off course by wild dogs.
Running research experiments during an Olympics marathon??
> Sullivan was also the primary organizer of the human zoo-style “Anthropology Days” at the St. Louis World's Fair held in conjunction with the Olympics.[5][6] The event was intended to showcase supposed theories of athletic ability differences between races, but ended up a public disaster as the groups brought in to "perform" at the games generally refused to compete in the expected fashion. Such events are now generally considered to constitute scientific racism.
yikes
The 1904 Olympics were around half the size of the 1900 Olympics in terms of countries and athletes participating, and only 10% of the athletes were from outside North America. The 1900 Olympics were themselves also part of the 1900 Paris Exposition, and were effectively taken over by the exposition organizers, to the point where the events rarely even had "Olympic" in their names: both 1900 and 1904 were effectively sideshows, with events haphazardly held over a period of months.
It was only with the 1906 Olympics in Athens that the games' prominence and success recovered; then, in another odd twist, the IOC retroactively declared that the 1906 Olympics had not been Olympics.
For comparison, Eliud Kipchoge’s world record from 2018 is 2:01:39 and his unofficial best is 1:59:40.
You probably won’t see that kind of improvement in marathon times again in your lifetime.
The improvements in running performance of amateur runners is amazing.
https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify
Edit: As bizarre as the competition was in other respects, even the world record at the time would barely qualify.
> many observers were sure Tau could have done better if he had not been chased nearly a mile off course by wild dogs.
In the 1913 Tour, Eugène Christophe broke his fork. He walked two hours to the nearest blacksmith, spent 3 hours repairing the fork himself (otherwise it would have been outside help), and he still got a time penalty because he let a little boy pump the bellows for him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Christophe#1913_an...
Either way sounded like a silly time to be alive.
I first saw it posted by the `depthsofwikipedia` instagram account, it is definitely worth a follow: https://www.instagram.com/depthsofwikipedia
Every time it gets popular I am afraid that it will bring attention to itself and Wikipedians will edit it to be less funny or delete parts that seem not relevant (or disputed). But it still lives on.