Editor-in-Chief Aaron is here today to guide us through the highs and lows of the 1904 Summer Olympic Games.

St. Louis, Missouri is known for a lot of things: Barbecue! Budweiser! Blues music! The Arch! Toasted ravioli! Something called “gooey butter cake”! Their weird-ass pizza! All of this is well and good, but what should really come to mind when we think of the Gateway City are the 1904 Summer Olympics, hands-down the most bananas Olympics Games ever thrown.

Even the way the debacle began was nuts: That year, Chicago won the bid for what would be the first Olympics held outside of Europe. But St. Louis hated that idea, since they were already planning on hosting the World’s Fair — or officially, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, to commemorate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase — that year. (History and math majors may note that the Louisiana Purchase happened in 1803, which is 101, not 100 years, before 1904, but that’s the least wrong thing about any of this.) In an act of pure gangster bravado, St. Louis just gave a flat “no” to the IOC. They announced that if the Olympic Committee insisted upon holding it in Chicago, they’d just throw their own athletics competition at the exact same time, essentially telling them, “Gee whiz, it would be a shame if no athletes showed up to yours.” And the Olympic Committee, led by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement and himself a future Olympic gold medalist in literature (yes, literature) blinked. Coubertin bowed to St. Louis’s demands and yanked the Games from Chicago, to which they have never returned, and about which Chicagoans are still salty.

Now St. Louis had the Games, and they had their World’s Fair. We could — and others have — write entire volumes on the World’s Fair there, which in many ways augured the century that was to follow. It served as a public debut for the fax machine, wireless communication, the X-ray machine, dirigibles, automobiles, ice cream cones, Jell-O, Dr Pepper, Jack Daniels, cotton candy, Scott Joplin’s ragtime… and by some mostly apocryphal accounts, hot dogs, hamburgers, and iced tea. More importantly, it was a preview of the America that was to come, which is one that planted its feet in the face of adversity, screwed its little hands into fists, and said, “But I want it!” and somehow, despite all odds, mystifyingly got its own way.

But back to the Olympics. You’re probably guessing they had like all the normal sports you’re used to seeing at the Olympics, right? Well, yes… and then also, OH HELL NO. There were the usual diving and swimming and fencing and gymnastics. There was the debut of boxing, and of the brand-new sport called basketball. But there was also lacrosse, for the first of only two times it appeared. There was tug of war, which persisted as an Olympic event until 1920; and golf, which disappeared until 2016; and roque, which has never returned since. It was the kind of Olympics where one dude could win medals in three very different sports, just because, and where, to borrow a Wiki quote: “One of the most remarkable athletes was the American gymnast George Eyser, who won six medals even though his left leg was made of wood.”

It was that kind of plucky, old-timey sporting competition marked by flowing handlebar mustaches, straw boaters, and shameless public drunkenness, and it didn’t hurt the morale of the U.S. Olympians that a cross-continental trek across the American wilderness was too much for many foreign athletes to stomach. That meant that only 10 other nations deigned to send anyone, and many events included only American competitors. Pierre de Coubertin, the Olympics superfan himself, did not even bother to attend. If that were the end of it, history might have marked it only as an amusing curiosity. But then, there were also the Anthropology Days events… and the marathon.

Accounts differ whether the Anthropology Days exhibitions were official Olympics events or merely a sinister form of eugenics PR, but we can all agree that they were shockingly, brain-meltingly racist. To put things into perspective, the St. Louis World’s Fair had something called “human zoos.” These were exhibits dubbed “reservations” in which human beings were displayed among the trappings of their homelands to entertain rubbernecking American crowds. Among them were Ainu from Japan, Mbuti from Congo, “Patagonians” from the Andes, and several groups of Indigenous people from America’s interior, including Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and Quanah Parker of the Comanche. What the Anthropology Days Olympic events did was ask the question: “Hey, we’ve got these people here anyway — what if we made some of them throw a baseball around?” (I won’t go into much more detail here, because the whole thing makes my skin crawl, but interested readers can head over to this 2008 Slate piece on the topic, which — fair warning — has not itself aged terribly well, or this whole book by actual anthropologist and Olympic historian Susan Brownell.)

And then there was the marathon.

With the sort of mathematical adherence to be expected from a centennial event that didn’t happen on a centennial, the 26.2-mile course was 24.85 miles long. The race began at 3 p.m. on August 30, in 90 degree heat, on a course that included seven very large hills and only had one source of water along the entire route. Some participants began the race wearing long pants and dress shoes. No one bothered to close the course, which meant that runners had to dodge trains and traffic during the race. Among the competitors were:

Two previous Boston Marathon winners, who had to drop out due to the hot conditions and the constant dust kicked up by the cars of race officials driving immediately ahead of the runners on unpaved roads.
William Garcia, who likewise had to stop when he began vomiting blood from a dust-shredded esophagus, was found by a passerby, and was hospitalized for several days.
Cuba’s lone participant, mailman Félix Carvajal, who nearly didn’t make it to the starting line, as he’d previously lost all of his money gambling in New Orleans on the way to St. Louis and had to hitchhike to the Olympics. During the race, he chatted up spectators, got hungry, playfully stole some peaches from a passing motorist, ate them, got hungry again, wandered into an orchard and ate some rotten apples, suffered stomach cramps, and had to take a nap. He finished fourth.
Len Taunyane, a Tswana South African, who was chased off the course by a pack of wild dogs. He still finished ninth, and was one of the two first Black participants in modern Olympic Games.
Fred Lorz, the first ostensible winner, who was immediately stripped of his title when it turned out that he’d been driven for 11 miles of the race and only started running again when the car broke down. He was booed by onlookers and claimed it had all been a hilarious prank. He won the Boston Marathon the next year.
Thomas Hicks, the second winner, whose title stuck even though he’d been helpfully dosed with strychnine and brandy several times during the run—and despite him not actually finishing the race; while hallucinating, he was carried over the finish line by some friends and immediately fainted from dehydration.

Of the 32 runners who started the race, only 14 finished, with the slowest winning time in Olympic history. The marathon was considered such a catastrophe that the Olympic Committee considered banning it for future games, and even hometown booster paper St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it a “man-killing event.” Luckily, the 1908 games were held in the cooler and much more civilized London, where the marathon was won by… Johnny Hayes, an American.

One quick postscript: Let’s return to the charming, apple-eating mailman Félix Carvajal, who continued to cheerfully run. He returned to St. Louis the next year to clinch third in the All-Western Marathon. In 1906, when Greece threw a strange, off-brand, off-year Olympics now called the “Intercalated Games,” Carvajal was sent by Cuba to participate but disappeared in Italy while en route. He was presumed dead, and newspapers published fond obituaries. He then reappeared in Havana nearly a year later with zero explanation aboard a Spanish steamer, turned pro, and beat legendary American distance runner Henry W. Shelton in an early version of an ultramarathon, when Shelton gave up after 40 miles of being unable to catch Carvajal, our hero. He lived until 1949.