One man's poison

In a brazen and forgotten incident of doping, a dash of strychnine helped an American win the 1904 Olympic marathon

Performance-enhancing drug use so thoroughly pervades the world's sports news that it has become passé, even naive, to wonder when it's all going to end.

But if you sift through history to piece together how this whole pharmacological mess got started, one of the story's most twisted roots traces back to Boston.

While the media currently fixate on a pinstriped athlete from New York, it was a skinny townie from Cambridge whose chemically enhanced victory in the 1904 Olympic Marathon first sparked widespread debate about drugs in sports.

For athletes in the 21st century, the elixir of choice is steroids. More than 100 years ago, Thomas J. Hicks opted for a vile concoction of egg whites and brandy laced with strychnine, the active ingredient in rat poison.

"He must have been a tough old buzzard," said David E. Martin, an Olympic historian who is a fellow in the American College of Sports Medicine. "When you look at the photographs, Hicks has got a terribly blank stare on his face. He was on the verge of collapse."

And while reputed performance boosters from this era range from frighteningly dangerous to downright laughable, it was the supportive attitude of the American public that is most shocking.

"Back in those days, the use of performance-enhancing substances was not the awful thing it is today," said Daniel M. Rosen, the author of "Dope: A History of Performance Enhancement in Sports from the Nineteenth Century to Today."

Rosen said it was not Hicks's chemical consumption that caused the 1904 controversy. Rather, the outrage stemmed from the strychnine cocktails not being available to all Olympic runners in the searing, 90-degree heat.

"Hicks was kind of a hero for doing everything he could to win," Rosen said. "But he damn near killed himself in the process."

For certain, the 29-year-old brass worker who carried the colors of the Cambridgeport YMCA was hardly the first person to ingest a substance that he thought would make him get stronger, go faster, or last longer.

Ancient Romans and Greeks consumed botanical stimulants, and chewing cocoa leaves has been a part of South American culture for centuries. As organized athletics evolved in the 1800s, there were accounts of swimmers and bicyclists drinking cocaine tonics before and during races.

On Dec. 1, 1895, the New York Times published the first widely circulated editorial against stimulant use in sports.

"We feel sure that all true athletes would disdain any such injurious and adventitious aids," the paper proclaimed. "There are no drugs which will help one to win a game that could not be won without them, and the general effect of drug taking . . . is distinctly bad."

Hicks, born in Britain, wasn't yet an athlete when the Times scolded sports dopers. He got his first taste of competitive running in 1899, when as a member of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, he was assigned to assist at the third Boston Marathon. Unimpressed, Hicks declared he could do better, and vowed to prepare for the following year's race, at a time when dedicated training was rare.

Hicks ran sixth in his first Boston Marathon, then sixth again in 1901 with an improved time. He took a job with the telephone company in 1903, and while stationed in Minneapolis, he captained the state champion cross-country team. Upon returning home, Hicks had his big Boston breakout race, a second in the 1904 Marathon. The Cambridgeport YMCA was so pleased that it offered to send him to St. Louis that summer to be the club's representative at the Olympic Games.

The Boston Daily Globe reported that Hicks had only eight "tryouts" before the Olympics, just once exceeding 10 miles. But no training could prepare him for the torturously hot, dust-choked course he would later call "the hardest over which I ever ran."

One constant through the history of sports doping has been the shadowy presence of suppliers and enablers, although it is not quite clear how Hicks became acquainted with Charles J.P. Lucas, the man referred to as his "handler."

A Cambridge resident who told people he graduated from Harvard Medical School, Lucas is mentioned in the annals of amateur athletics as the record-holder for such now-defunct specialties as stone gathering and potato races. He routinely showed up at sporting events claiming some sort of inflated capacity, and the 1904 Olympics were no exception. Accounts differ as to whether Lucas was there as a marathon official or as the manager for Hicks.

St. Louis in August is hardly ideal for long-distance racing, and the broiling heat was accentuated by a 3 p.m. start. The field of 32 filed out of Francis Stadium and into the rural countryside, where the only reported hydration stops were a water tower and a well. The rutted dirt roads were clogged with auto and horse traffic, and as Martin wrote in "The Olympic Marathon," massive clouds of grit caused a number of racers to abandon before the halfway point, including one who fell unconscious by the side of the road.

At 19 miles, Hicks stopped to a walk. Lucas, who had been following in a car, providing water and sponges that he denied to other runners, decided it was time for something stronger.

According to Lucas's account in his book, "The Olympic Games 1904," he administered to Hicks 1/60th of a grain of strychnine (about 1 milligram) tucked inside two egg whites. Hicks jogged on for another mile, but soon became "ashen pale." Lucas determined another dose was in order, this time washed down by a glass of good French brandy.

"In very small concentrations, strychnine raises your neuromuscular sensibilities," said Martin. "But it's pretty tricky stuff. It's rat poison. This was not widely done, but the runners certainly would have known about it."

Hicks had barely enough energy to crest the hill leading back into the stadium. Delirious and miserable, he was probably unaware that the cheering was somewhat subdued. His final time was 3:28:53, but as far as the crowd was concerned, Hicks had finished second.

A surreal Olympic scene became even stranger thanks to a runner named Fred Lorz, who had a reputation as a jokester. Lorz was one of the first to drop out, and he had hitched a ride in an auto. But the car broke down 5 miles from the finish, so he jogged the rest of the way to the stadium, playing to the applauding crowd.

President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice, was about to present the gold medal to Lorz as Hicks appeared. When questioned by fuming Olympic officials, Lorz readily admitted he was just kidding.

Hicks collapsed after the finish and had to be carried into an automobile himself. He later told reporters he had lost 10 pounds, "and you can see that I could not push myself any faster."

Martin said that newspapers did not trumpet the fact that Hicks had taken strychnine, because "it was sort of routine for people to take performance-enhancing substances back in those days." But word got out, and the villain became Lucas, not Hicks, for violating the spirit of the sport. A formal protest over the unfair advantage eventually reached the Olympic Games director, but he refused to consider it, and the results stood.

Lucas practically boasted about his gold-medal assistance. "The marathon race, from a medical standpoint, demonstrated that drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road," he wrote.

Hicks competed in seven more marathons, with his only other win coming at Chicago in 1906. Lorz was initially barred from amateur athletics. But his first race back was the 1905 Boston Marathon, which he won handily, far ahead of the unplaced Hicks.

Over the next several decades, Boston-area universities established themselves at the cutting edge of physiological performance research, which became known as the "anti-fatigue movement." During the 1920s, there were now-humorous experiments involving local rowing teams taking applications of UV rays, or eating pounds of peppermints in efforts to gain an edge.

"This was a peculiar era when people were discovering information, but didn't quite know what to do with it," said Martin.

In 1954, a Springfield College faculty member founded the American College of Sports Medicine, which promoted healthier lifestyles, and it was around that time that attitudes began to shift about what constituted cheating. Global politics played a major role, because when Soviet and East German athletes began to dominate with the aid of synthetic hormones, Americans started associating doping with something the enemy did.

"If they were doing it and winning, then it had to be bad," said Martin, explaining the Cold War mind-set.

Rosen, the author of "Dope," does not fully buy that line of reasoning. He prefers to think of America's attitude change as a "gradual evolution over 50 years."

More likely, Rosen said, even though the official party line was that doping is unethical, the very first coaches who witnessed rival athletes on steroids probably thought, "How can I get some of that stuff for my guys?"