> 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.
Running research experiments during an Olympics marathon??