A closer look
Olympic marathon runners in the 1904 St. Louis games faced incredibly dangerous conditions, including a course entirely covered in thick dust, only one water station, and a route shared with active automobile traffic. The winner, Thomas Hicks, was hallucinating wildly and had to be physically supported across the finish line by his trainers after they injected him with a mixture of strychnine and brandy mid-race to keep him going. Another competitor was chased a mile off course by aggressive feral dogs, while the guy who initially crossed the finish line first had secretly hitched a ride in a car for eleven miles. Modern sports nutrition relies on electrolytes and careful carb-loading, but back in the day, the pinnacle of athletic enhancement was apparently just rat poison and a stiff drink
