Thomas Hicks won gold in the 1904 Olympic marathon walking on air. It nearly cost him his life.
The United States was hosting the nation’s first Olympic Games in St. Louis, eight years after Greece revived the competition in Athens.
Those inaugural Games had also reintroduced the marathon in its country of origin. But the race was far from reaching its modern popularity.
“Nobody knew how to train for the marathon,” George Matthews, author of “America’s First Olympics: The St. Louis Games of 1904,” said. “That’s why it was bizarre.”
Hicks wasn’t even the first competitor to cross the finish line. That was fellow American Fred Lorz. But officials disqualified Lorz for completing the race in a car due to cramps.
Most runners combated dehydration and fatigue. Fourth-place finisher Félix Carvajal of Cuba stopped midway to sleep off discomfort after eating rotten apples at an orchard. American William Garcia collapsed from a stomach hemorrhage.
As for Hicks, he consumed two doses of strychnine as a stimulant. The chemical was often used to poison rats, and Hicks suffered the effects. Barely able to run after three and a half hours, trainers carried him on both sides as he crossed the line, feet moving in the air.
Given such casualties, Matthews said some event officials wanted to discontinue the marathon. But the race remained for London in 1908 and for every Olympic Games since then.
“[The St. Louis Games] gave impetus to the Olympic movement,” Matthews said.
Unlike most Olympic cities, St. Louis had not won the official bid to host the Games. It first went to the much larger Chicago, site of the 1893 World’s Fair.
St. Louis, though, was set to host the World’s Fair in 1904. Fair organizers argued an athletic competition in Chicago would distract from the fair, thus securing hosting duties for both events.
Many St. Louisans fondly remember the lavish yet controversial World’s Fair. In comparison, the city’s Olympic legacy seemed to fade.
Before that legacy could disappear, the St. Louis Sports Commission took action in 2018.
The group worked to erect a sculpture of the Olympic Rings in front of Francis Olympic Field at Washington University in St. Louis, which hosted several events during the 1904 Games.
Michael Loynd, chairman of the commission’s Olympic Legacy Committee, said he’s heard the sculpture is “one of the most selfied points at WashU.”
“Especially for little kids, when you can touch and feel like the rings, you can dream about striving to become an Olympic athlete,” he said. “I think it just makes it that much more tangible for an individual.”
As younger generations discovered St. Louis’ role in the Olympics’ beginnings, so did adults — including Loynd himself.
Growing up in the city, he knew it had hosted America’s first Olympics. But he learned details, such as 1904 being the first time the Olympics handed out gold, silver and bronze medals, much later.
Olympian Michelle Venturella attended the sculpture’s dedication ceremony in 2018. Afterward, she often passed the rings while coaching softball at WashU.
Venturella won gold with the women’s softball team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She was also an alternate for the 1996 team in Atlanta, which marked the United States’ fourth and most recent Summer Olympics.
“When I was walking on campus, I loved it. It just made me smile, made me think about my own history and my story, and the people that helped me achieve my dreams,” Venturella said.
Another attendee at the rings’ dedication was St. Louis native Ray Armstead.
Eighty years after Hicks won one of the first-ever Olympic gold medals, Armstead secured one of his own in the 4×400-meter relay in the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
Armstead only started running track his senior year of high school. Prior to that, he played basketball in hopes of receiving a college scholarship.
Although he didn’t play collegiate basketball, he did achieve his goal of graduating university — through the sport he’d picked up on a whim. He ran Division 2 track and field at Northeast Missouri University, now Truman State University.
“The big deal about sports around St. Louis, it was this gateway to another level of reaching a goal,” he said.
That level doesn’t come easily.
When Venturella played softball for Indiana University, West Coast schools like the University of California, Los Angeles dominated the sport. The Midwest had far fewer facilities, especially indoors.
Left-handed catchers — the position Venturella played at the Olympics — were even rarer. In fact, she spent most of her career at first base before learning to catch during sophomore year of college.
“There’s this left-handed catcher from Indiana, from the Midwest, who ended up making the team,” Venturella said. “I think it has broken down some barriers with that position specifically.”
Armstead said his success didn’t happen overnight either.
Waking up at 6 a.m. to train barely scratched the surface. When he returned out of shape after winter break, his freshman year, his coach said the weather wasn’t an excuse to not run.
Afterward, Armstead would run in circles for three hours in his parents’ basement on cold days.
“When you’re out there racing in the Olympics, you have to work out when you get hurt,” he said. “You have to work out when you barely got water in you. You have to prepare for everything that’s going to happen. And then when it does, it doesn’t shock you.”
The 32 runners in the 1904 marathon were not prepared. They couldn’t be. Matthews said barely anyone had run two dozen miles before.
But somehow, 14 of them completed a race humans were not made to run. Some of them even ran it again. Lorz, temporarily suspended after the Olympics, won the 1905 Boston Marathon not even a year later.
This time, he was prepared.
So were the millions of runners who would go on to compete in the thousands of marathons worldwide in the following decades. Some are training right now to compete at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
Yet for Loynd, it’s not just athletes who carry the Olympic torch. It’s whole cities that do. St. Louis was only the first.
“Anytime you can be a part of something like that, you can see that there’s a bigger world out there,” Loynd said.
