1904 Olympic Marathon

[Doctor Steuss]

My sole social media platform is Instagram, and one of the accounts I follow is Depths of Wikipedia.

Yesterday's entry just popped up in my feed, and it is too fantastic not to share. It's a short read, and well worth it, in my opinion.

1904 Summer Olympics - Men's Marathon (Wikipedia)

[Marcus]

wow. that was ... unreal.

the list of bizarre events went on and on and ON. just when you think they are winding it up, after listing so many issues, the final sentence is this:

The South African entrants, Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, finished ninth and twelfth, respectively: this was a disappointment, as many observers were sure Tau could have done better if he had not been chased nearly a mile off course by wild dogs.[8]

[Doctor Steuss]

1904 Sports Medicine = Give 'em some rat poison and brandy.

[Xenophon]

1904 Sports Medicine = Give ''em some rat poison and brandy.

It's okay... they cut it with an egg... for protein or something.

I like how they intentionally didn't include water stations because: "science".

[Marcus]

and the guy who ran in street clothes after gambling away all his money, stole peaches from a spectator, and napped after eating rotten apples--STILL came in 4th.

well fifth, at first, until the guy who hitched a ride in a car got disqualified.

[Doctor Steuss]

The only thing that was missing was end credits with Mel Brooks.

[Morley]

Forgive me for this, but the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis are famous for another reason. They were held in conjunction with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition which hosted something called 'Anthropology Days'.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloniali ... 2.%5B18%5D


Anthropology Days took place on August 11 and 12, 1904, with about 100 paid indigenous men (no women participated in Anthropology Days, though some, notably the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team, did compete in other athletic events at the LPE). Contests included "baseball throwing, shot put, running, broad jumping, weight lifting, pole climbing, and tugs-of-war before a crowd of approximately ten thousand".[18]



I'll jump to Slate for the (ahem) color commentary:

https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/remem ... %20peoples.


For James E. Sullivan, however, the games were at least partially successful. They demonstrated that these savages couldn’t even play a proper game of tennis, after all. Sullivan considered the natives’ failure to beat the Olympic record for the javelin a sure sign of racial inferiority rather than an aversion to an apparatus never before encountered.

The Anthropology Days experiment was, thankfully, a one-shot deal as an Olympic event. McGee did go on to repeat the experiment that fall, however, this time giving the participants (mostly Native Americans) time to learn and practice the games. Thirty thousand spectators packed the bleachers. Taken together, McGee wrote, the two events proved that the course of human events marched on, inexorably toward the civilized, white-American ideal. His quackery had “proved” the physical inferiority of “primitive” peoples.


See also, from a First Nations perspective:

https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/ ... louis-1904

[Morley]

You might have guessed that I'm not a fan of James Sullivan. Also from wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Edw ... c%20racism.

Sullivan was a chief organizer of the 1904 Summer Olympics. He decided to allow only one water station on the 24.85 mile course of the marathon even though it was conducted in 32 °C (90 °F) heat over unpaved roads choked with dust. His ostensible reason was to conduct research on "purposeful dehydration," even though dehydration is potentially fatal. The marathon ended with the worst ratio of entrants to finishers (14 of 32) and by far the slowest winning time, 3:28:45, almost 30 minutes slower than the next slowest winning time (1900 Summer Olympics).[4]

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.

[Doctor Steuss]

Yikes!

Thank you Morley for the added information on the turd.

[Morley]

You’re welcome, Steuss. Though I feel like I shat all over ruined your thread.