How Brandy And Egg Whites Played A Role In The 1904 Summer Olympics

Throughout all of recorded human history, there has never been a sporting event as deeply outlandish as the 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon. Though the international event has had its fair share of goof-ups, including McDonald's 1984 Olympic marketing campaign fiasco, none were as baffling in retrospect as what happened that year. Dust from clouds kicked up by cars choked competitors and there was only water available at one spot halfway through the course, nearly killing one racer. Another was chased a mile off course by wild dogs. Another stopped to eat apples from an orchard, got sick because they were rotten, and then laid down to take a nap mid-race (he somehow finished fourth). Also, eventual winner Thomas Hicks was given a cocktail of egg whites, brandy, and strychnine during the race, and was literally carried over the finish line.

You read that correctly: The winner of an Olympic gold medal only managed to do so using a cocktail including literal poison to get him across the finish line in the hopes it would give him energy. The strychnine was to stimulate his nervous system, the egg whites were because they contained protein, and the brandy was to wash the nightmarish concoction down.

The lack of water during the event — established on purpose since its organizer, a white supremacist named James E. Sullivan, wanted to test what would happen if you purposefully dehydrated athletes — hit all of them especially hard, including eventual winner Thomas Hicks. Hicks wasn't the first person declared the winner; despite showing up first, fellow American Fred Lorz was disqualified after everyone realized he'd ridden a car to the finish line. That left Hicks in the lead, but man, he did not have an easy go of it.

Ten miles into the nearly 25-mile race, Hicks started begging for water. Incredibly, his trainers said no, instead sponging his mouth with warm water for some unfathomable reason. Seven miles out from the finish, they decided to get a bit more drastic, coming up with an unholy cocktail of strychnine and egg whites. In small doses, strychnine can stimulate the nervous system, and it actually used to be medically prescribed. The thinking was that this would perk him up — and it did, briefly. A bit later, though, he again flagged, and so they gave him another rat poison-egg white cocktail, this time with brandy. Unhealthy sports drinks may be a problem today, but they're not a rat poison-level problem.

Though this cocktail did revive Hicks a bit in the short term, it also caused him to begin hallucinating and he attempted to lie down on the track. He was only able to complete the race because helpers literally carried him over the finish line, an arm around each trainer, his legs kicking in the air in what has to be the most cartoonish scene in Olympic history. Incredibly, this was perfectly allowed under the rules of the competition at the time. This story would seem apocryphal, far too fanciful to be real — except there are pictures of the event.

If you're wondering whether the rat poison-egg white-brandy cocktail would constitute a performance-enhancing drug, the answer is yes, absolutely, since the entire purpose was to give him the ability to finish first. This, however, was perfectly legal, as stimulants weren't banned at the Olympics until 1968. Hicks probably wished they had been in 1904; it was an hour before he was physically able to leave the competition field after winning. He remains, as far as we are aware, the only Olympic athlete to have won a gold medal in large part thanks to brandy, egg whites, and literal poison.