The 1904 St Louis Marathon

Had you found yourself on the starting line that day, you’d have been in for a bit of a shock.

Just eight years prior, the inaugural modern Olympics were a resounding success for Athens, with the marathon forming the pinnacle of the program. An unparalleled opportunity for the world’s finest sports men to display their athletic prowess (it would be a lifetime later before the International Olympic Committee thought to let women have a crack at it in 1984), the bar had firmly been set for the pièce-de-résistance of modern sport.

Not the case for St Louis. At 3pm on August 30^th 1904, a hodge-podge ensemble of running legends, amateurs and a Cuban postman trundled their way to the start. The conditions were suboptimal, with 32-degree heat and an army of race official automobiles doing an excellent job of stirring up the dirt road course, suffocating the runners with clouds of dust.