> While Fred Lorz was greeted as the apparent winner, he was later disqualified as he had hitched a ride in a car for part of the race.
and
> The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race, a side effect of being administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine by his trainers.
Nine sailors started the race; four retired before leaving the Atlantic Ocean. Of the five remaining, Chay Blyth, who had set off with absolutely no sailing experience, sailed past the Cape of Good Hope before retiring; Nigel Tetley sank with 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km) to go while leading; Donald Crowhurst, who, in desperation, attempted to fake a round-the-world voyage to avoid financial ruin, began to show signs of mental illness, and then committed suicide; and Bernard Moitessier, who rejected the philosophy behind a commercialised competition, abandoned the race while in a strong position to win and kept sailing non-stop until he reached Tahiti after circling the globe one and a half times. Robin Knox-Johnston was the only entrant to complete the race, becoming the first man to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world. He was awarded both prizes, and later donated the £5,000 to a fund supporting Crowhurst's family.
> Sir Chay Blyth is known to many as the first person to sail non-stop, “the wrong way” round the world. This however is only one of his many achievements. Since 1966 when he and John Ridgway rowed across the Atlantic, Chay has been pushing the boundaries again and again in sailing, and in business. He has been awarded the BEM and CBE, and is an inspiration to many.
I guess you'd want a young guy for this sort of role, but I can't think of anyone like Clooney nowadays.
The way he just sort of automatically exudes gravitas makes him surprisingly effective in comedy I think. Because comedy requires surprises, and even when he's playing a goofy character it is still somehow surprising when he does something silly.
Based on his performance in The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling is my first impulse to approximate young Clooney, but I might very easily be a cinema philistine.
I was thinking the same thing as I was reading the wiki -- this event could make for an absurd but fantastic movie. And yes, filmed in the style of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" would be especially entertaining.
> James E. Sullivan was a chief organizer of the Olympics, and 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".
Running research experiments during an Olympics marathon??
> 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.
The Olympics were not nearly as established or prominent then as they later became. The 1904 Olympics were essentially just part of the much more famous St Louis World's Fair / Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This was not by choice: the Olympic Committee had chosen to have the 1904 games in Chicago, but the organizers of the World's Fair pointed out that they would not tolerate another international event going on at the same time, and said that unless the Olympics were moved to St Louis, the World's Fair itself would put on a larger sports competition intended to crush the Olympics.
The 1904 Olympics were around half the size of the 1900 Olympics in terms of countries and athletes participating, and only 10% of the athletes were from outside North America. The 1900 Olympics were themselves also part of the 1900 Paris Exposition, and were effectively taken over by the exposition organizers, to the point where the events rarely even had "Olympic" in their names: both 1900 and 1904 were effectively sideshows, with events haphazardly held over a period of months.
It was only with the 1906 Olympics in Athens that the games' prominence and success recovered; then, in another odd twist, the IOC retroactively declared that the 1906 Olympics had not been Olympics.
Apart from the details of the actual race, it's interesting to see pictures of officials infront/behind runners in some sort of pre-Model T car/vehicle(/tractor?). The reason I say pre-Model T is because this race was in 1904, Model T production didn't start until 1908 (says wikipedia).
if anything i expect CRISPR, nanobots, 3D lab grown/printed body parts (like 2 hearts and more efficient lungs) etc. to produce such an improvement in half the time, say by 2070. I.e. once software/tech starts to "eat biology" i fully expect some kind of Moore law there too.
Pretty amazing isn't it? Those 1904 times are achievable by many dedicated amateurs (as indicated by the Boston qualifying time requirements). Not just mid-pack pros, but true amateurs who never competed at the elite level.
If you think that's crazy, read about the old Tour de France races. The stages were significantly longer than they are now (300 km to 480 km), and for a while the bikes only had two speeds. To change which gear you were in you had to take the wheel off and flip it around.
In the 1913 Tour, Eugène Christophe broke his fork. He walked two hours to the nearest blacksmith, spent 3 hours repairing the fork himself (otherwise it would have been outside help), and he still got a time penalty because he let a little boy pump the bellows for him.
This has been my absolute favourite Wikipedia article for years.
Every time it gets popular I am afraid that it will bring attention to itself and Wikipedians will edit it to be less funny or delete parts that seem not relevant (or disputed). But it still lives on.
and
> The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race, a side effect of being administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine by his trainers.
What in the world