Human Experiments, Trafficked Athletes, and Poisoned Runners: America's First Olympics // Dark Summer Series
The 1904 Olympic Games were considered to be the darkest games in history. A mad scientist was able to run experiments on athletes while the games went on, runners were given poison to enhance their performance, and people were stolen from all over the world and forced to compete.
TW: Suicide, Racism
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SOURCES
https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/remembering-the-anthropology-days-at-the-1904-olympics.htmhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/olympic-games-history-rio-david-goldblatt
https://www.npr.org/2004/05/31/1909651/living-exhibits-at-1904-worlds-fair-revisited
12. St_Louis_Post_Dispatch_2004_04_25_Page_Z010.pdf
13. Sun_Journal_2021_07_26_A5.pdf
https://www.slam.org/teachers-students/educator-resource/art-on-display/1904-st-louis-worlds-fair/
The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology): https://www.scribd.com/document/298308484/The-1904-Anthropology-Days-and-Olimpic-Games
https://www.history.com/topics/sports/olympic-games
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/largest-human-zoo-world-history
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-modern-olympic-games
https://gizmodo.com/strychnine-a-brief-history-of-the-worlds-least-subtle-1727903421
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1032344725/?match=1&terms=%22ota%20benga%22
TRANSCRIPT
No matter where you’re listening to this podcast from, you’re probably aware that we’re about the start the Summer Olympics. The 33rd Olympics, if we’re being technical about it.
The games, which are said to have started some 3,000 years ago, are a time where the world can come together for friendly competition and be amazed at what the human spirit can accomplish. I can’t tell you how many tik toks of Simone Biles I’ve already cried over.
But, would you believe, the Olympic games don’t have a squeaky clean history, and that there’s a lot of questionable decisions, coverups, and horrors that have occurred to make the games what they are today. Of course you can believe that, this is Heart Starts Pounding, it’s what you’re here for.
So what if I told you that there was one Olympics where a mad scientist was allowed to run wicked experiments on the contestants. Where players didn’t just travel from around the world to be there, but they were kidnapped from their homes, dragged to the games and forced to compete. Where bodies of those who died at the games were dug up and their brains stolen. I know, it sounds fake, it sounds like a strange conspiracy theory. But it’s all true.
Today, I want to peel back the curtain for you a bit, and shed light on the 1904 Olympic Games, known as one of the darkest, if not THE darkest games in history, even though history has largely forgotten about them.
And I’ve been sitting in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters reading books and old newspaper articles about these games, and I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve found,
First though, I want to give a shoutout to everyone who has rated and reviewed the podcast–it’s really helpful for the algorithms. I’ve been sitting in the Rogue detecting society headquarters reading through some of them, and they’re so kind. McKittens listens on apple and recently wrote “Me and my sister love to listen to this in her car I love it so much it’s so great you should definitely listen”. ZaneJT, another apple podcast subscrbier who uses the secret code in their review said a lot of nice wonderful things including that they “drive over an hour each way for work on top of a 12 hour shift and a new episode is always something I look forward to in driving”--thank you for listening Zane. Your kind words dont got unnoticed and I really appreciate them you have no idea. Zane also said they like that I never ‘go on and on’ like some other hosts–so I’d better get back to the episode but thank you again everyone for listening and for your reviews. Now…
We’re going to get right into it after a short break, and as always, listener discretion is advised.
Before I tell you about the 1904 Olympic Games, let me give you a brief history of the Olympics.
Legend has it that the Olympics were created in Greece by the God Hercules himself around 3,000 years ago as a way to honor his father, the mighty god Zeus. That’s why they were put on every four years at the end of the summer during a festival for the deity.
And the original Greek olympics were fit for the Gods. They featured Greece’s finest male athletes competing in races, pentathlons, wrestling matches, throwing, chariot races, and even something known as Pankration, which has been described as “a combination of boxing and wrestling with virtually no rules”
The games were beloved by all, except for married women who were barred from attending them. Probably because their out of shape husbands didn’t want them lusting after Greece’s finest athletes. Other than that, thought, they were attended by tens to hundreds of thousands of people
But, over time, the influence of the Christian Roman empire grew. And although the games brought unity and excitement to the people, the new Christian Government wasn’t stoked about the pagan underpinnings of the event, and so they were banned in 393.
And for 1500 years they were forgotten to ancient history. Until a man named Pierre de Coubertin (coo-ber-tahn) became obsessed with the Olympics after visiting Athens, Greece and learning about them. He was able to drum up enough excitement around the idea of the games to revive them. And in 1896, he organized the First Modern Olympics in Athens Greece.
And that first Olympics inspired the masses. It brought back all of the glory of the God-sanctioned games from centuries ago. 280 Athletes from 13 nations competed in original contests like wrestling, the pentathlon, and foot races. The track and field events were held in Panathenaic Stadium, originally built in 330 BC. Runners were instantly transported 2,000 years prior, and had the same view of 60,000 spectators in the stands as the original Greek Athletes saw. Except this time, there were married women in the stands
More events were added, like the Marathon, a 26 mile run in honor of the Greek soldier who brought news of a victory over the Persians from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. Swimming, gymnastics, and cycling among others were also added.
By the end of the first modern olympics, Coubertin was probably on cloud 9. He had proved that the love he felt for the games was universal, and he could bring them back in full swing. This was on its way to being a truly global event, one that would be hosted in all of the greatest cities on earth, and the world was on board.
So, in 1904, invitations went out inviting participating countries to join Coubertin at the third modern olympics in, drum roll please, St. Louis Missouri.
“Saint Louis?!” the countries asked as they opened their invitations. “BLEHHH”. That’s not verbatim what was said, but it captures the spirit. The first games were in Athens, the second in Paris, why were the third being held in St. Louis, a city that, in 1904, was nearly impossible to travel to and hugely underdeveloped.
Coubertin was also not very excited that the games were being held in St. Louis, but he felt backed into a corner. You see, that year, St. Louis was hosting something called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the 1904 World’s Fair. And the fair had five major objectives: (1) to promote the city of St. Louis and demonstrate its sophistication; (2) to make money for stockholders and bring economic development to the Midwest; (3) to demonstrate the superiority of American democracy, capitalism, and culture; (4) to celebrate industrial, social, commercial, and technological progress; and (5) to predict the future and see education as a cornerstone in future progress.”
The games were supposed to happen at the same time as the fair but in Chicago, so St. Louis threatened to outshine the event. They wanted all of the tourism brought to their city. Worried that people would choose the World’s Fair over the Olympics, Coubertin conceded and allowed them to be held in St. Louis.
The problem now, though, was no one was going to come. Basically all of Europe backed out of participating, and Coubertin himself couldn’t even make it. Would there even be an Olympics if no one wanted to go?
Well, St. Louis came up with an idea, how about we absorb the games into the larger World’s Fair spectacle? That way everyone who is already at the fair will be able to watch them and it’ll be fine.
And it’s this decision that forever changed what the 1904 Olympics would be. Because now the event was not going to be overseen by Coubertin's Olympic Committee, there was no official organization trying to uphold the honor and tradition of the games. they were now just a sideshow at the world’s fair, an already morally dubious event.
And that would allow some bad actors to come into the fold, who wanted to blend elements of the fair INTO the Olympics to create a side show much more disturbing than anything already being offered.
The First of those bad actors, was a man by the name of James Sullivan.
Sullivan was in charge of “promoting american athleticism” at the World’s Fair and now the Olympic Games. At the time, he was the leading national authority in amateur sports, and had founded the Amateur Athletic Union. He was also the editor of Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac. This basically meant he oversaw the Olympics that year.
When Sullivan stepped foot onto the fairgrounds at the St. Louis World’s fair, he would have seen a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen before. Massive exhibit halls featured the newest and most exciting inventions from all around the world. Outdoor electric lighting, private automobiles, even a new medical invention known as an X-Ray.
There was a natural history exhibit full of dinosaur bones and other fossils. A palace made of corn was on one side, and an elephant made out of almonds was on the other. Miniature trains transported guests around the grounds, and an exhibit hall known as The Pike was full of games and rides. Animals from around the world were on display, giving Americans a chance to see creatures they had only read about in books like Llamas and camels.
But there was one thing at the Fair that really caught James’ eye. Actually, it was a display that had caught the eyes of many, who would run past the animals and fossils to catch a glimpse of something they could really gawk at. Human Zoos.
What is a human Zoo, you might ask? Well it is exactly what it sounds like. People from all over the world were collected and transported to the world’s fair for others to gawk at. They were put into exhibitions that embellished their home environments to make them look as uncivilized as possible. All so westerners could watch them. Most westerners had not traveled the world and had never seen people from developing countries, and they viewed this the way we view going to see tigers at a zoo. Though in reality it was making a freak show of the rest of the world and reinforcing dangerous stereotypes about foreign people.
But seeing these human zoos sparked something inside of Sullivan, he got an idea. He was afraid that the Olympic games were going to be overshadowed by the fair, so he was looking for interesting ways to combine the two. What if he took all of the people in the human zoos and made them compete against each other in their own olympic games? That way the world could laugh at how inept these foreigners are.
Perhaps Sullivan’s idea wouldn’t be such a dark spot on the history of the olympics if everyone that was in these zoos had come to the fair on their own accord and wanted to participate in the games, but let’s take a little bit of a closer look at what was actually happening.
So The Zoos at the World’s fair consisted of 3,000 people from 75 societes, including the Ainu (eye-knew) People from Japan, Mbuti people who, at the time were referred to as ‘African Pygmies’, people referred to as “patagonians” who lived near the Andes Mountains in Chile, members from 51 first nations in the Americas, filipino people, as well as many others.
Sullivan would have walked past the Philippine Reservation where the people from the Philippines were kept and seen over 1,000 scantily clad villagers crowded near tents and camp fires. He would have watched as Western Women from america and europe approached the tribesmen to touch them or get a photo with them. Mostly, though they stared and whispered in each other's ears. Have you ever seen anything like that before?
The way people were brought to these human zoos varied.
People from the Philippines were put on a month long boat ride across the pacific in packed quarters. Some of them didn’t even realize they were going to America. Upon arrival, they were immediately stuck on near freezing trains for the rest of the journey. Conditions were so bad that the fair had graves pre dug on the grounds for those who didn’t survive the trip.
Native Americans, however, were usually lured by the promise of tips from spectators. With few exceptions, they weren’t actually paid for any of their work, though.
To acquire Mbuti (mabootie) people from Congo, one of the fair workers contacted a man who traveled often to Africa, Samuel Verner, and paid him $8500 to acquire 12 people that met their specifications, “four Red Africans” and “two other ethnic types of his choosing”. One of the men that he purchased was a 20 year old named Ota Benga.
Ota stood at just 4’11” (CM) when he was brought to the fair. Verner paid just a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth for him. He had a boyish look, having just left his teen years and not having shed the baby weight in his face.
When he was brought to the fair, the head of the anthropology department and man in charge of the zoos, WJ McGee rejoiced. See, Ota had a sweet disposition and would do this thing where he smiled when he didn’t really understand something, which happened a lot because he didn’t speak any english. And it was this smile that made McGee see dollar signs. As a child, Ota’s teeth had been filed into sharp points in a ritual that was common amongst Mbuti people. He knew spectators would line up to see him.
“Where did you find this boy?” McGee asked Verner. “I rescued him from a clan of cannibals,” Verner proudly proclaimed. That was not true. Ota had previously been captured by an enemy tribe and Verner purchased him from them. And yet, Ota was labeled as a cannibal, and put on display for everyone to see.
One of the many, many problems with these human zoos, was that people from around the world weren’t really encouraged to live how they actually lived. They were encouraged to behave in ways that made them look barbaric.
For instance, during the Chicago Worlds Fair, an indigenous group from Canada, the Kwakuitl (kwaky-yoo-tle) were encouraged to partake in a cannibalism ritual that they did not practice in Canada. The promise of being able to watch the people eat other people boosted ticket sales immensely, and encouraged all other exhibitions to do the same
At the fair in St. Louis, McGee had heard that the people of the Philippines ate dog during certain religious ceremonies, so the people at Philippine Reservation were forced to eat as many as 20 dogs in front of spectators. Fair planners made them butcher the animals every day, which they would later go on to say was degrading to them and their culture.
Ota, who quickly became a fan favorite at the fair due to his playful demeanor and sharp teeth, was not spared from this cultural degradation. He was kept in huts on the grounds with ample viewing areas for people to watch him. He was brought to the fair in late spring and wasn’t prepared for the cold, but on days that he huddled with the other men from his tribe in the huts for warmth, spectators threw rocks at him, beckoning him to come out so they could get a good look at his teeth.
But for how bad these displays were, it was nothing compared to what was about to happen. Because in the shadows of the fair, Sullivan was working on putting together the Olympic games involving these indigenous people. And not just to give the audience something else to gawk at, no. He was going to use these games to prove, definitively, a theory he had held deep down for a very long time. That white people were superior, in every way to anyone else, especially when it came to athletics. After the break.
On August 11th, 1904, the world’s fair had already been going on for 3 and a half months, but the Olympics portion was just getting started.
Athletes from mostly america traveled into the fair grounds to prepare for their events. Remember, Europe did not want to come to St. Louis, and most other countries weren’t invited, so the majority were American contestants.
August 11th, was the day when Sullivan started his strange and unethical experiment. He was going to call the 2 day event “Anthropology Days” This off shoot of the Olympics was given that name because Sullivan was going to prove a now, very outdated “anthropology” belief, that white athletes were superior to athletes of other races.
To do this, he put together a list of Olympic sports that the native people in the human zoos would definitely fail at. Swimming, tennis, water polo, javelin. Essentially any sport that wasn’t available in other countries. There was weightlifting because Sullivan wanted to test the strength of white people vs the natives. He wanted there to be running, because native americans were known to be runners, and he thought it would be even more impactful when they lost against the white contestants
The plan was to run these games within the Olympics for 2 days, so spectators could see how indigenous people performed compared to the White athletes.
Records were not kept very well for the Anthropology days (hm I wonder why), but we do have a partial list of the participants, and there, the last name on the list of the Mbuti athletes, is Ota Benga.
He would have been told to leave his hut one day, and head down to the fields where the events were taking place. There, he would have been told, in English, which he did not speak, the rules of the race he was participating in.
Mind you, Ota came from a culture where waiting for your friends was common and polite. But He watched as the spectators in the stands laughed at him as he slowed his running to make sure his friends didn’t fall far behind during the sprints.
He also was forced to participate in multiple games per day, something that Olympic athletes are typically not made to do. By the end of the first day, he was made to do an event called Loaded Running, where he had to carry 25% his body weight on his back while he ran. He and other contestants were desperately tired.
Ota also had to run a relay race which was a disaster because no one understood what to do with the baton, and don't even get me started on hurdles. I ran track and field in high school and I can’t even get over a hurdle, so I can’t imagine what it was like for people who had never seen one before.
And Ota was short, how could he have been expected to compete against say Cocopa men from the Mexican tribe who were often over 6ft tall?
But, I will say, The whole competition wasn’t just Natives losing. It’s interesting to note here that every single person from the human zoo that participated in the pole climb, where participants literally just climbed a pole for speed, beat the white world champions time. And not by a little, by at least 10 seconds. This win never made it into the final score, however.
And along with winning competitions, records show that some of the games were enjoyable for the contestants. many of these people had been kept in the human zoo enclosures for months at that point, and being out in the sun playing with the friends they had made was better in comparison, i mean the bar was so low. One of the events in particular, the long distance baseball throw was a favorite. Contestants lined up to participate and laughed at each other as they tried to figure out the correct way to throw a baseball.
There was also some down time where the native americans taught Ota and his tribe how to play Shinny, which is kind of like field hockey.
Now, if they knew that the results of their failures were being written down as proof they were inferior to their white counter parts, that would have been an entirely different story. But in the moment, when they had no idea what it was for, they were having fun.
All of that fun would be over, however, once it came time for the Marathon.
On one of the hottest days that August, Sullivan announced that the Marathon would begin shortly. Now, this was going to count towards the actual Olympic Games and the winner of the Marathon would win a gold metal. Therefore, most of the contestants this day were American men, though a few Native American men were allowed to participate, as well as two south african men, who were wrongly classified as being from the Zulu tribe and were given made up african-sounding names to participate. Their real names were Len Tau and Jan Mashiani, and They were the first black africans to ever participate in a modern Olympic Event
Other contestants included Felix Carvajal, a runner from Cuba who hitch hiked to the games, as well as experienced Marathon runners like American’s Michael Spring and Thomas Hicks,
Sullivan didn’t really think through the course when he chose where they would run. The 25 mile long track went directly through traffic and included 300 foot hills with brutal inclines.
But he wasn’t really concerned with how fast athletes could run this track. Instead, Sullivan wanted to use this event for another one of his twisted experiments. He wanted to see how well athletes would fare in extreme conditions.
So to start, Sullivan started the race at 3pm, the hottest part of the day, when it was in the low 90 degrees (33 c). He also intentionally did not put water stops along the track. No, one of the leading thoughts in sports science at the time was that hydration actually hindered performance, and Sullivan wanted to test and see if extreme dehydration actually helped the runners. So there was one water stop about halfway through the race.
To start the race, a dozen men on horseback ran ahead to clear the track, releasing a big cloud of dirt. The gun fired, and the athletes ran straight into it, coughing as they swatted at the cloud to get some fresh air.
And it only got worse from there. Pretty early into the run, a dog chased Len Tau off of the course, other runners turned back to see him screaming and flailing his arms as he ran in the wrong direction out of sight. Perhaps they silently celebrated one runner down, naively thinking the rest of the path would be fine
Soon, they found themselves in the middle of traffic. The horse riding men didn’t clear the center for the runners, and now, they had to dodge cars, trolleys and thick plumes of exhaust. The unpaved roads meant even more dirt kicked into the air, and it was nearly impossible for any of the runners to breathe.
William Garcia seemed to be the most affected by this, and collapsed about 8 miles from the finish line, clutching his stomach and screaming. The dust and smog had coated his esophagus and ripped his stomach lining causing a hemorrhage.
Carvajal, desperate for hydration, stopped by an apple orchard during the run to eat a few apples. Which probably would have helped them had they not been rotten. He also fell to the ground clutching his stomach, and proceeded to take a nap. In the middle of an olympic event.
One man was cramping so much from the dehydration he just gave up, another hitched a ride on a wagon for a portion of the track, and Len Tau miraculously emerged after being chased off by that dog and actually started passing people.
The man in the front of the pack, Thomas Hicks, was in really bad shape. By The 10 mile mark he was begging for water, but was refused. His coach started getting really worried about him though, he was keeping a good pace but he looked like death. So 7 miles from the finish line he intervened, and fed Hicks some egg whites and strychnine.
You may recognize strychnine by its use today, Rat Poison. When ingested by humans it can cause severe muscle spasms and eventually asphyxiation. But back in 1904, really low doses of strychnine were given as stimulants. The poison makes your neurotransmitters fire even when there’s no stimulus, and it’s this firing that causes a jolt of nervous energy.
Which initially worked, but a few miles later, Hicks looked pale and deathly. So his trainers gave him more egg whites, another dose of strychnine, and some brandy to wash it down. Just a quick reminder that he wouldn’t have needed any of this if sullivan had just allowed him water during the race.
Doped up on two hits of rat poison and some alcohol, Hicks was revived, though barely. He was described by a witness as “running mechanically—like a well-oiled piece of machinery. His eyes were dull, lusterless; the ashen color of his face and skin had deepened; his arms appeared as weights well tied down; he could scarcely lift his legs, while his knees were almost stiff”
Apparently, he had begun hallucinating and thought that the finish line was still 20 miles away. He was begging for water, or something to eat, but instead was given more brandy.
By the last mile, he was still in the lead, and the St Louis Dispatch described his state as
“His lower jaw was hanging as in imbecility, his eyes stared blankly, but his pitiful expression didn’t change”
Eventually, his two coaches came to his side and carried him over the finish line, but he was still considered the winner. It took four doctors and one hour to get him up off the ground. He had lost 8 pounds during the race.
Everything Sullivan had attempted during the Olympics had been a disaster. And everyone knew it. Anthropologists declared his “Anthropology days” useless, none of the data could extrapolate anything about fitness and race, though Sullivan tried to convince them that it did. It was ordered that the results be trashed.
And as for the Marathon, Sullivan refused to accept that dehydration had anything to do with the performance of the athletes. He insisted that Strychnine was the reason Hicks was in horrible shape at the finish line. Which, sure, he wasn’t wrong about that, but his conclusion that water hinders athletic performance was dangerous and untrue.
Coubertin, the head of the Olympic Committee was embarrassed by how the games had went, and publicly called Sullivan’s Anthropology Days “inhumane” and a “mistake”
But though the games were over, and later that year the fair would pack up its horses and leave town, the effects on the people, and anthropology would linger for a while.
Take for instance, Philippine Reservation. Many Filipino people died of pneumonia in the early days of the fair due to the horrible conditions of the travel over. One of them was an 18 year old girl named Maura. Her dying wish was that her body be brought back to the Philippines for a proper burial, but instead she was buried on the fairgrounds.
Her community tried to do a burial to honor her culture, but only a Christian burial was permitted for fear of paganism. After Maura was buried, a predatory scientist named Ales Hrdlicka (alish herdlishka) came to the fair grounds with a mission. He wanted to prove that the brains of white people and non white people were fundamentally different. It wasn’t just the athleticism that Sullivan spoke about, it went deeper than that. Under the cover of night, he dug up bodies from Philippine Reservation and stole their brains for research. Some of those brains are still in the archives of the Smithsonian museum.
And then there’s Ota Benga. Ota was brought back to Africa, but felt he didn’t fit in anymore. He had spent so much time away from his culture that he didn’t feel Mbuti. So, he opted to go back to America, where he was kept in the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an Orangutan.
Spectators would come and Ogle at Ota as he interacted with the monkey, his only protection a long spear. Until, one day, when Ota decided he was done being watched, and he turned the spear on the crowd, throwing it in their direction to hit one of them.
Ota spent the rest of his life in america, living in the margins between side show and free man. A reverend paid for his sharp teeth to be capped and gave him american style clothes. Ota was put in tutoring where he learned english and American customs. It seemed like he was acclimating.
That was until one day, in 1916. Ota lit a large, ceremonial fire, symbolically chipped off all of the caps on his teeth, exposing the sharp ones underneath, and shot himself in the chest. He would rather die an Mbuti man than live as an American.
It’s wild to think of how far the modern games have come since their early days. And as you’re watching this year, remember Ota and the other indigenous people who were made to compete for false science and spectators. This history has been largely lost, but there are a few historians who are working to keep their legacy alive.
So, no matter which country you’re rooting for, enjoy the games, and may the best athlete win.