The 1904 Olympic Marathon (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The 1904 Olympic Marathon (2012)

smithsonianmag.com

73 pointsmkl27 comments

For a more elaborate retelling of the events here, I recommend the following video by Jon Bois in his inimitable style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4AhABManTw

Jon Bois is a modern day sports historian artist. I also highly recommend this particular video of his.

> Strychnine, in small doses, was commonly used a stimulant at the time; today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it as a “strong poison” that is “used primarily as a pesticide, particularly to kill rats.”

Trite as the saying is, the dose makes the poison.

Strychnine is similar to caffeine -- only orders of magnitude more potent, so that a couple of milligrams will stimulate your CNS, and a hundred milligrams will kill you. Caffeine, of course, will only stimulate you if you take more than about 100mg, and it'll only kill you if you take it by the teaspoon.

The strychnine derivative securinine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securinine) was sold in Russia as a "safer" stimulant along the same lines as strychnine, until roughly the turn of the millennium. I enjoy experimenting with strange drugs -- and the Russian pharmacopoeia is as strange as it gets (the Italian one is also strange, with rubidium chloride as a stimulant!) -- so I've tracked down and tried securinine. Didn't notice much from it. Not much better than a strong cup of coffee. No discomfort, in any case.

A very common quote by Paracelsus in medicine and toxicology: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

With the exception of prions of course

It reads like a Monty Python sketch!

> he playfully snatched two of the fruits and ate them as he ran. A bit further along the course, he stopped at an orchard and snacked on some apples, which turned out to be rotten. Suffering from stomach cramps, he laid down and took a nap. Mellor, now in the lead, also experienced severe cramping.

I imagined Yakety Sax playing in the background while reading that part. Hilarious.

"At the time, it was widely believed that when a runner slowed down, a few vigorous taps on the head with a wooden mallet would revive his spirits and encourage him to renew his efforts. J. Harmon Bixley and John Jacob Ott disagreed on whether wooden or rubber mallets were more effective, and ended up killing each other with simultaneous blows with their respective mallets in 1903."

Fascinating reading, and crazy to believe that someone who's run 20 miles in blistering heat and humidity, still has 5 miles to go and is begging with water is instead used as a lab rat and loaded up with drugs so that he be studied, but still not actually given the water he needed. And a bit later, repeating that with the addition of brandy but still no water. Honestly, it kind of seems like these "scientists" didn't care if any of their subjects died.

All that research, and a hundred years later it turns out that you need to be born from a very small gene pool to set long distance running records. Shows that your research is crap (or gets trapped in a local maximum) if you don't step back to get a complete picture.

Even if that were true, I feel like this is off topic. In the article the winner that cheated got a time of a little over 3 hours, a time that has been unlocked these days for almost any elite due to much better scientific understanding of running, nutrition, and hydration level regardless of genetics.

I don't think the strychnine was a scientific experiment? As the article says it was in use as a stimulant (including medicinally) at the time.

Correct. The scientific experiment was the lack of water.

> James Sullivan, the chief organizer of the games, wanted to minimize fluid intake to test the limits and effects of purposeful dehydration, a common area of research at the time.

Prior to like the 70s it was widely believed that drinking water during marathons (and maybe exercise in general?) was bad. Some of the best American marathon runners would do crazy stuff like run in deep summer wearing sweaters and drinking no water to condition their bodies.

Gatorade was invented in 1965, and the cross country shoe in the 70s. Prior to that it was the wild west, no one studied or knew anything about this stuff really prior to that.

The marathon trials for 1968 Olympics at Mexico City were held at high altitude (women were not allowed to race that far for many more years)

They drank cold coca-cola that was defizzed every five miles, which surprisingly has good fuel as sugar with caffeine

https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20827587/history-in-t...

2:30 marathon at 10,000 feet in August heat is pretty damn impressive given the poor shoe quality over 50 years ago.

Coca cola was still a sports thing in the 90s to the point where I remember being told (maybe apocryphal) that one of the reasons Sampras threw up during the coretja match was he was drinking coke instead of Gatorade or water.

Coca Cola is still a thing among amateur endurance athletes (think cycling for days with minimal rest) and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just water, plenty of sugar and some coffeine.

Water with lots of sugar is wrong, when your body needs water.

So drinking water and a sip of cola is fine, but drinking cola against thirst has side effects as you need water to process lots of sugar.

Elite distance runners don't really need much water during a typical marathon. The water serves more as a delivery mechanism for the carbohydrates and electrolytes which they actually need to maximize performance.

Consuming plain water during really long endurance events can cause hyponatremia. Not recommended. But for the short 10k and under running events that most of us do, it doesn't really matter much.

Are those the electrolytes that plants crave?

>It's just water, plenty of sugar and some coffeine.

And a ton of phosphoric acid.

Related. Others?

Athletics at the 1904 Summer Olympics – men's marathon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39036502 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)

Athletics at the 1904 Summer Olympics: Men's Marathon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651197 - Aug 2022 (47 comments)

Running a marathon was never crazier than during the 1904 St Louis Olympics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24112827 - Aug 2020 (23 comments)

1904 Summer Olympics – Men's Marathon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016964 - April 2020 (1 comment)

In related news in the 2016 Olympics, a bronze medal winning weight lifter [1] had his medal revoked for having ingested rat poison, strychnine, as a performance enhancer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_Artykov

Every modern day Parkrun is organized better by magnitudes. On the other, it's my watch that tells me how far or fast I have to run today.

This was one of three times Americans have won the olympic marathon, and in none of the three was the Americam the first to enter the stadium at the end!

Well, Frank Shorter was the first "Olympian" to enter the stadium. The person ahead of him was an imposter.

This is a highly entertaining recounting of the event: https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/309921

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