We all agree that the Olympics have furnished us with some of the greatest spectacles in sporting history. But they’ve also provided us with some bizarre, grotesque and outrageously funny moments, several of which we’ll be taking a hilarious look at in this week’s episode.
As a masterpiece of tragicomedy, you need to travel quite a long way, for example, to beat the story of two marathoners in the 1912 Stockholm Games, one from Japan, another from Portugal.
Shizo Kanakuri, had to pay his own train fare and travel from Japan for the Swedish Games, while Francisco Lázaro, a Portuguese carpenter, didn’t have to cross Siberia to get to Stockholm, he just needed to cross Spain, France and Germany.
The Japanese athlete’s journey on the Trans-Siberian Express was long and harrowing. To round it all off, he found the food outside of Japan unpalatable. By the time his marathon journey was over, he had an Olympic-sized appetite. And was, in all likelihood, malnourished.
To top it all, Kanakuri’s coach was bed-ridden because he had tuberculosis, so training for the Japanese athlete in Sweden was of the hit-and-miss variety. Lazaro, the Portuguese marathoner, meanwhile, was a fit as a fiddle. He was thin and tanned. And looking forward to his prospects.
None of the athletes seemed unduly perturbed that the Olympic Marathon fell on a desperately hot Swedish summer’s day in the middle of July. They hared off in the direction of the town of Sollentuna on an “out-and-back” course, followed by a group of men wearing boaters riding bicycles.
Notions of diet, training, hydration and running equipment in 1912 were primitive by today’s standards. Some believed that coffee, a stimulant, should be drunk in copious amounts before a race.
Others thought nothing of consuming a gulp or two of alcohol on their run, or gurgling with brandy. Some thought water more trouble than it was worth, because – wait for this – it weighed you down.
Opinion was divided as to what – and what not – should be eaten before a race, while no sustenance, other than water, was provided during the race itself.
The Irish-American athlete, Johnny Hayes, seemed to have got things right when, on the day of the 1908 Olympic marathon four years previously, he had a light meal of toast and beef with a little tea. Hayes had spent much of the previous two days in bed, resting up. In Stockholm four years later, he was present not as an athlete but as the manager of the American team.
The rest-and-drink-tea strategy has served millions for millennia (and continues to do so) and it served Hayes pretty well in 1908. He finished in silver medal place before the Italian, Dorando Pietri, was disqualified, because he was so exhausted officials needed to help him cross the line.
Film of the closing stages of the 1908 marathon shows Pietri, who worked in a confectionery shop, disoriented as he comes into the stadium in Shepherd’s Bush for his last lap. He turns one way, and another. He falls down four or five times before he is manhandled across the finish line.
The Americans lodged an official appeal and Hayes’ medal was upgraded to gold after he finished second. His American teammates stumbled on a novel way of celebrating – they carried him around the Shepherd’s Bush Stadium on a table. No biting of the medal for Hayes.
Christian Gitsham (in some sources, Gitsam), who ran with his fellow South African, Kennedy “Ken” McArthur, in the 1912 Stockholm Marathon, ran without a hat. Some put hankies doused in water on their heads. Many ran in white canvas plimsolls with thin rubber soles. Many ran in socks.
The sun beat down as the competitors left Stockholm and her outlying suburbs. They reached a gravel road, which took them to Sollentuna. Somewhere along the route, tragedy struck. Lazaro, the Portuguese carpenter we heard about earlier, collapsed.
He was taken to hospital, where he died the following day. Perhaps he died of heat exhaustion? Or hyperthermia? Some sources put down his death to an electrolyte imbalance.
The further from the city of Stockholm the athletes were, the fewer course officials there seemed to be. The race continued. The two South Africans – McArthur was of Northern Irish descent but had become naturalised – went into the lead.
Kanakuri, meanwhile, was struggling. The cumulative effects of poor diet and intermittent training were catching up with him. And the day was punishingly hot – only seeming to get hotter.
Eventually, beside himself with fatigue, Kanakuri experienced a “stuff it” moment, and wandered into the home of a Swedish family whose house lined the marathon route. He had thrown in the towel. Waved the white flag. Called it a day.
It is said that he spent an hour with the family, who were in the midst of throwing a garden party, demurely sipping orange juice, but this has subsequently been rejected by historians.
It is more likely, in the words of the Washington Post, that he was fed raspberry juice and cinnamon rolls by the Petra family, whose farm lined the Olympic marathon route. They befriended him, gave him a place to sleep for the night and provided new clothes.
Not wanting to admit to either his fellows in the Japan team or the Swedish organisers that he didn’t complete the race, Kanakuri slunk back to Japan, where he became a teacher. Written a day or two after he walked off the course, his diary records that he was deeply ashamed, and would strive to do better in the future.
The disappearing marathoner mystery remained a mystery for 54 years, until an enterprising Swedish journalist managed to track the Japanese athlete down. This might not have been as difficult as it seemed, given that although Kanakuri returned quietly to Japan after the Stockholm Olympics, he did participate in subsequent Olympic marathons, like that in Antwerp in 1920. He can’t have been that difficult to find.
Having been found, he was flown to Sweden. He was encouraged to complete the race. Although an old man, this he did, although whether he ran or walked the route, I’m not entirely sure. “We now conclude all the events for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics,” said an announcer afterwards with a smile and no hint whatsoever of being exceptionally pleased with himself.
For a largely unknown athlete presumed missing by the Swedes, Kanakuri had a pretty long run. Eventually he finished the Marathon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, the 36th athlete to do so.
He did so in an Olympic record time of 54 years, eight months, six days, five hours, 32 minutes, 20. 2 seconds. In finishing in the slowest time ever recorded for the marathon, the Japanese athlete was in elite company. Let none say otherwise.
The majority of those who started the marathon on that hot, scalding day in Sweden, a day when even the gravel seemed to levitate and sweat scalded your eyes, didn’t finish at all. Kanakuri took his time about it, fathering children and welcoming grandchildren into the world, but finish he eventually did.
Stories, as we all know, never come to an end, they simply come to a temporary halt, and the 1912 Olympic marathon has furnished us with several more. The two South Africans, one of them running without hat or cap, apparently came to a gentleman’s agreement that both would stop for water at the same time during the second half of the race. Gitsham duly stopped.
As he slaked his thirst, he was perturbed to find that McArthur either tricked him or – the charitable interpretation – changed his mind. Before Gitsham could recover, McArthur was hundreds of yards in front, a mere spec on the horizon.
It was a lead he didn’t surrender, as the South African of Irish descent took the gold medal and Gitsham, as Shakespeare would have said, a cuckolded man, brought home the silver.
In the old days the Olympics were rough and ready affairs. There was something, for example, called the “home-town decision”, in which officials of the host nation tended to give decisions in favour of host-nation athletes.
The standard of adjudication and officiating at London in 1908, for example, was so bad that the Americans spent much time in London protesting – which wasn’t yet an Olympic sport. Slowly neutral officials began to be used.
Things seemed to be better in Sweden four years later, although that obviously didn’t extend to policing the outer reaches of the marathon course. This was a place, as we’ve come to see, where Japanese marathoners went walkabout in search of cinnamon rolls and Portuguese athletes became so de-hydrated they died in hospital the following day.
So, the Olympics were pretty strange way back when, and didn’t always have the cachet they have today. The Los Angeles Games in 1932 was poorly attended because of the Depression, although athletes did clamour for an audience with one of the starlets of the day, actress Mary Pickford, who lived in nearby Hollywood.
With a small cast of competing nations, competition was sometimes less than cut-throat. Take the field hockey in LA. There were only three competing nations, including the hosts, who lost 24-1 to India and 9-2 to Japan but still won the bronze medal.
Rope climbing was a sport in the early years, since discontinued, in which a competitor standing on the ground shimmied up a rope suspended from a beam way above him as quickly as he could.
And let’s not forget the plunge, in which you took the plunge, quite literally. And of what did the plunge consist? Well, it was a strange event, neither swimming nor diving. You dived into the pool and, without moving your arms or legs, saw how far your momentum took you.
A secret: you didn’t go very far. As you took quite a long time to go not very far, the plunge was pulled from the pool forthwith. As an Olympic sport it was decidedly lacking in televisual and spectator appeal, although some said it was pretty relaxing in a quietly meditative way.
Important question: How did one train for the plunge? And how did commentators describe the long seconds, devoid of technique, the seemed to last forever after you had taken the plunge and dived in?
Back in the day the Olympic was not only a sporting but a pan-cultural event. There were medals to be gained in everything from town-planning to sculpture and architecture. Music and painting medals were also given between 1912 and 1948, with sport as the theme.
Gold medal artists include Luxembourg’s Jean Jacoby, who won gold in 1928 with a drawing entitled simply “Rugby”, not then an Olympic sport, incidentally, and artist, Alex Diggelmann, who was Swiss. Diggelmann probably deserves the title of the Carl Lewis of Olympic artists, for he won three Olympic medals for art, including two at the 1948 London Games.
In the years after the founding of the modern Games in 1896, there were also medals given for literature. Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern games, had a go at penning some verse of his own and wrote a poem under not one but two pseudonyms called Ode to Sport in 1912.
Ode to Sport contains nine tiresomely tendentious verses. I shall show mercy to my listeners and not bother you with all nine. It is necessary, however, to offer a sample of the Baron’s poetic ability, just so you can judge for yourself without too much prompting from sniffy podcasters like me.
Take verse seven, which I will quote in full: “O Sport, you are Fecundity! You strive directly and nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity. And you fill the athlete with a desire to see his sons grow up agile and strong around him to take his place in the arena and, in their turn, carry off the most glorious trophies.”
Without wanting to be presumptuous, I’m sure many listeners to the poem will have found his sentiments comforting. All that stuff about the perfection of the race and giving birth to only sons. All those sentiments about the fecundity of sport striving towards “the perfection of the race” and “destroying unhealthy seed”. Perhaps De Coubertin wanted only Olympians in his midst, and couldn’t be bothered with those who strayed too far from the bodily ideal.
What if, like me, you had big ears and found yourself disturbingly short-sighted. What would the Baron have of made of people who weren’t white?
We do know that the Baron was a small man, 5 foot three, to be precise. Perhaps his stature accounts for all those big opinions on race purity and eugenics? Perhaps it was a healthy case of frantic over-compensation, although, come to think of it, over-compensation served him well.
History tells us that the literary judges were kind to De Coubertin, which surely had nothing to do with the fact that he was an Olympic insider and so were they.
They were so kind that his poem, Ode to Sport, earned the gold medal for literature at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The Nobel, I think it is safe to assume, was some years away.
The early Olympic years were full of gold-medal characters, and there was no more characterful a character than the Swedish shooter, Oscar Swahn. Age was but a number for Oscar because he participated in three consecutive Olympics – 1908, 1912 and 1920, there was no Olympics during the First World War – as a shooter and as an increasingly old man.
It would have been interesting, I admit, if Oscar had participated in three consecutive Olympics spanning 12 years as an increasingly young man, now that would have been something but, despite his eagle-eye accuracy with a rifle, this was beyond even evergreen Oscar’s capabilities.
Born in 1847, Swahn was 60 when he arrived at the London Olympics in 1908. Shooting was all the rage in the Olympics at the time, with a dizzy variety of disciplines including “disappearing target small-bore rifle”, and the “individual trap” and “running deer double shot”.
Although live pigeons had been used in shooting events at the Paris Olympics in 1904, the “running deer” in the competition were, I’m happy to assure you, cut-outs sliding through the undergrowth in a pretty poor approximation of running deer.
As a marksman, Oscar was a dab hand. He bagged bronze in the running deer double shot in London and followed it up with gold medals in the single shot running deer events, both as an individual and as a member of the Swedish team.
It was – to coin a phrase – a bullseye London games for the Swedish 60-year-old with the beard as long as Moses. And he took home three medals: two golds and one bronze. Perhaps he used the bronze medal for target practice?
Oscar bagged two medals at the 1912 Stockholm Games, the Games that featured the famous disappearing Japanese marathon runner we referred to earlier, a gold and a bronze, but arguably his finest moment came after the war.
The first post-war Olympics was in the Belgian city of Antwerp in 1920. Baron de Coubertin was not there to read his latest poem thankfully, but the gunslinging granddad, Oscar Swahn, certainly was. At the tender age of 72 Oscar grabbed silver in the double shot running deer competition. It is a record that still stands.
As Oscar well knew, shooting running deer was all about precision. Indeed, much about the Olympics is about precision, in execution as well as timing. Races used to be timed using a handheld stopwatch (or several stopwatches, actually) until the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, where photo finishes were introduced for the first time.
In an entirely predictable case of reality following technology’s ever more sinister ability to record it, the Los Angeles Games served up the first recorded instance of film being used to decide the outcome of a race. The race concerned was the men’s 100-meter final, contested on the afternoon of the 1st of August, 1932.
Two American sprinters, Eddie Tolan, also known as “Midnight Express” and Ralph Metcalfe finished the race in first place together, literally neck-and-neck as they crossed the line.
The seven judges couldn’t decide with the naked eye who had won the gold medal, so they reverted to the available technology. The film was printed – this took and agonizingly long time – and the results were duly made public.
Despite the two recording exactly the same times, it was adjudged that Tolan had won gold because more of his body had crossed the line at the moment when the tape was reached. Metcalfe found the judge’s decision impossible to accept.
Until his dying day he maintained that he should have won gold in Los Angeles. Here he is, many years later, saying his bit.
Feeling aggrieved, Metcalfe stayed in the sport until the next Olympics – at Berlin in 1936. Here he had the misfortune of encountering Jesse Owens, who beat him into second place in the 100-meter final. Luck and accident play far greater parts in sport than we feel comfortable acknowledging. Metcalfe was not lucky. Whether he was unlucky, which is something different, we shall never know.
Tolan, who chewed gum while he raced, might have won two gold medals in the Los Angeles Olympics (he also won gold in the men’s 200-meter event) but this didn’t prevent him from falling onto skid row. A year after his Olympic victories and he was struggling to get a job. A syndicated columnist of the time said of him shortly after his two golds in LA, “the heady wine of victory had turned to vinegar overnight”.
Tolan teamed up with the vaudevillian and tap dancer, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, famous throughout the 1930s and forties with his dancing routines alongside actress Shirley Temple. For this violation of the amateur ethos, he was temporarily prevented from running, although, after finding work as an assistant registrar of deeds in a county office, he ran in Australia, although, frankly, he might have run away to Australia.
After his cameo on vaudeville with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one wag in the press said the two made a perfect pair. Tolan was the fastest man alive running forward, while Bojangles was a dab hand at running backwards.
That isn’t a turn of phrase. Robinson, apparently, held world records in the 50-yard, 75-yard and 100-yard running backwards sprints. The two must have put on a fine show, although syncopation would have been difficult, as both were heading off in different directions.
When life returned to normal after the end of the Second World War, Tolan went back to clerical work in the deed’s office. After that he found work in a Detroit high school as a physical training instructor. He was a figure, I suggest, about whom much was written but little known. He never married.
Many photographs taken of him in the 1930s show the arms of his glasses taped together. He looks like a man bemused by his talent. And slightly bemused by the terrible indifference of the world.
Metcalfe, ironically, had an altogether more successful post athletic life, despite being overshadowed by Owens in 1936. He became a Congressman. And complained – not without justification – that he had been robbed in broad Californian daylight in 1932.
He might have had a point. Should today’s rules have been applied in 1932, today’s rules being that the winner’s medal is awarded to the athlete who passes over the finish line with any part of his body, Metcalfe would surely have taken gold.
