74: Human Experiments, Trafficked Athletes, and Poisoned Runners: America's First Olympics // Dark Summer Series
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No matter where you're listening to this podcast from, you're probably aware that we're about to start the Summer Olympics. The 33rd Olympics, actually, if we're being technical about it. The Games, which are said to have started some 3,000 years ago, are a time where the world can come together for friendly competition and be amazed at what the human spirit can accomplish. I mean, I can't tell you how many TikToks of Simone Biles I've already cried over.

But would you believe the Olympic Games don't have a squeaky clean history and that there's a lot of questionable decisions, coverups and horrors that have occurred to make the games what they are today? Well, I'm sure you can believe that because this is Heart Starts Pounding. It's what you're here for.

What if I told you that there was one Olympics where a mad scientist was allowed to run wicked experiments on the contestants? Where players didn't just travel from around the world to be there, but they were kidnapped from their homes, dragged to the games, and forced to compete? Where the bodies of those who died at the games were dug up and their brains stolen? I know.

It sounds fake. It sounds like a strange conspiracy theory, but I promise it's all true. Today, I want to peel back the curtain for you a bit and shed light on the 1904 Olympic Games, known as one of the darkest, if not the darkest games in history, even though history has largely forgotten about them.

I've been sitting in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters reading books and old newspaper articles about these games, and I can't wait to share with you what I've found. But first, before we get started, I wanted to give a quick shout out to everyone who has rated and reviewed the podcast. It's very kind of you to do, and it's really helpful for the charts algorithms. I've read through a couple of them in these past few days, and they're so kind.

Someone named McKittens listened on Apple Podcasts and recently wrote, quote, "Me and my sister love to listen to this in her car. I love it so much and it's so great and you should definitely listen." And Zane JT, another Apple Podcasts subscriber,

who used the secret subscriber code in their review, said a lot of nice and wonderful things, including that they, quote, drive over an hour each way for work on top of a 12-hour shift, and a new episode is always something I look forward to while driving. Thank you for listening, Zane. Your words definitely don't go unnoticed.

And I really appreciate you taking the time in your busy schedule to write a review. You have no idea. Zane also said that they like that I never go on and on. So I better get back to the episode. But thank you again to everyone who listens and for your reviews. Now, we're going to get into it after a short break. And as always, listener discretion is advised. This episode is brought to you by Apostrophe.

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Before I tell you about the 1904 Olympic Games, let me give you a brief history of the Olympics. Legend has it that the Olympics were created in Greece by the god Hercules himself, or Heracles as he was known in ancient Greece, around 3,000 years ago as a way to honor his father, the mighty god Zeus. That's why they were put on every four years at the end of the summer during a festival for the deity.

And the original Greek Olympics were fit for the gods. They featured Greece's finest male athletes competing in races, pentathlons, wrestling matches, throwing, chariot races, and even something known as pancration, which has been described as a combination of boxing and wrestling with virtually no rules.

The games were beloved by all, except for married women who were barred from attending them, probably because their out-of-shape husbands didn't want them lusting after Greece's finest athletes. Other than that, though, they were attended by tens to hundreds of thousands of people.

But over time, the influence of the Christian Roman Empire grew. And although the games brought unity and excitement to the people, the new Christian government wasn't stoked about the pagan underpinnings of the event. And so they were banned in the year 393.

And for 1500 years, they were basically forgotten to ancient history until a man named Pierre de Coubertin became obsessed with the Olympics after visiting Athens, Greece and learning about them. He was able to drum up enough excitement around the idea of the games to revive them. And in 1896, he organized the first modern Olympics in Athens, Greece. And that first Olympics inspired the masses.

It brought back all of the glory of the God-sanctioned games from centuries ago. 280 athletes from 13 nations competed in original contests like wrestling, the pentathlon and foot races.

The track and field events were even held in the Panathenaic Stadium, originally built in 330 BC. Runners were instantly transported 2000 years prior and had the same view of 60,000 spectators in the stands as the original Greek athletes saw. Except this time there were married women in the stands, they were actually invited. More events were added like the marathon, swimming, gymnastics, and cycling among others.

And by the end of the first modern Olympics, Coubertin was probably on cloud nine. He had proved that the love he felt for the games was universal and he could bring them back in full swing. This was on its way to being a truly global event, one that would be hosted in all of the greatest cities on earth and the world was on board.

So in 1904, invitations went out inviting participating countries to join Coubertin at the third modern Olympics in, drum roll please, St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis, the countries asked as they opened their invitations. Wow.

That's not verbatim what was said, but it captures the spirit. The first games were in Athens, the second in Paris. Why were the third being held in St. Louis, a city that in 1904 was nearly impossible to travel to and hugely underdeveloped?

Coubertin was also not very excited that the games were being held in St. Louis, but he felt backed into a corner. You see, that year, St. Louis was hosting something called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the 1904 World's Fair. And the fair had five major objectives. One, to help the people of St. Louis

to promote the city of St. Louis and demonstrate its sophistication. Two, to make money for stockholders and bring economic development to the Midwest. Three, to demonstrate the superiority of American democracy, capitalism, and culture. Four, to celebrate industrial, social, commercial, and technological progress. And five, to predict the future and see education as a cornerstone in future progress.

The games were supposed to happen at the same time as the fair, but in Chicago. So St. Louis basically threatened to outshine the event. They wanted all the tourism brought to their city, not Chicago, and worried that people would choose the World's Fair over the Olympics, Coubertin conceded and allowed them to be held in St. Louis instead. The problem now, though, was that no one was going to come.

Basically all of Europe backed out of participating and Coubertin himself didn't even wanna go. Would there even be an Olympics if no one went? Well, St. Louis came up with a compromise. How about we absorb the games into the larger World's Fair spectacle? That way everyone who's already at the fair will be able to watch them and it'll be fine.

And it was this decision that forever changed what the 1904 Olympics would be. Because now, the event was not going to be overseen by Coubertin's Olympic Committee. There was no official organization trying to uphold the honor and tradition of the games. They were now basically a sideshow at the World's Fair, an already morally dubious event.

It's that decision that would allow some bad actors to come into the fold who wanted to blend elements of the fair into the Olympics to create a sideshow much more disturbing than anything already being offered by the fair. And the first of these bad actors was a man by the name of James Sullivan.

Sullivan was in charge of, quote, promoting American athleticism at the World's Fair and now the Olympic Games. At the time, he was the leading national authority in amateur sports and had founded the Amateur Athletic Union. He was also the editor of Spalding's official athletic almanac. His role basically meant he would oversee the Olympics that year.

When Sullivan stepped foot on the fairgrounds at the St. Louis World's Fair, he would have seen a landscape unlike anything he had ever witnessed. Massive exhibit halls featured the newest and most exciting inventions from all around the world. Outdoor electric lighting, private automobiles, even a new medical invention known as the X-ray.

There was a natural history exhibit full of dinosaur bones and other fossils. A palace made of corn was on one side and an elephant made out of almonds was on the other. Miniature trains transported guests around the grounds and an exhibit hall known as the Pike was full of games and rides. Animals from around the world were on display, giving Americans a chance to see creatures they had only read about in books like llamas and camels.

But there was one thing at the fair that really caught James's eye. Actually, it was a display that had caught the eyes of many who would run past the animals and fossils to catch a glimpse of something they could really gawk at. Human zoos.

What is a human zoo, you might ask? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like. People from all over the world were collected and transported to the World's Fair for others to gawk at. They were put into exhibitions that embellished their home environment to make them look as uncivilized as possible, all so Westerners could watch them.

Most Westerners had not traveled the world and had never seen people from developing countries. And they viewed these zoos the way we would view going to see a tiger at a zoo. Though in reality, it was basically making a freak show of the rest of the world and reinforcing dangerous stereotypes about foreign people.

But seeing these human zoos sparked something inside of Sullivan. He got an idea. He was afraid the Olympic Games were going to be overshadowed by the fair, so he was looking for interesting ways to combine the two. So what if he took all of the people in the human zoos and made them compete against each other in their own Olympic Games?

That way, the world could laugh at how inept these foreigners were. Perhaps Sullivan's idea wouldn't be such a dark spot on the history of the Olympics if everyone that was in these zoos had come to the fair on their own accord and wanted to participate in the games. But let's take a little bit of a closer look at what was actually happening.

So the zoos at the World Fair consisted of 3,000 people from 75 societies, including the Ainu people from Japan, Mbudi people who at the time were referred to as African Pygmies, people who lived near the Andes Mountains in Chile referred to as Patagonians, members from the 51 First Nations in the Americas, Filipino people, as well as many others.

Sullivan would have walked past the Philippine reservation where the people from the Philippines were kept, and he would have seen over 1,000 scantily clad villagers crowded near tents and campfires. He would have watched as Western women from America and Europe approached the tribesmen to touch them or get a photo. Mostly though, they just stared and whispered in each other's ears. "'Have you ever seen anything like that before?'

The way people were brought to these human zoos varied. People from the Philippines were put on a month-long boat ride across the Pacific in packed quarters. Some of them didn't even realize they were going to America. Upon arrival, they were immediately stuck on near-freezing trains for the rest of the journey. Conditions were so bad that the fair had graves pre-dug on the grounds for those who didn't survive the trip.

Native Americans, however, were usually lured by the promise of tips from spectators. With few exceptions, they weren't actually paid for any of their work though. To acquire Mabuti people from Congo, one of the fair workers contacted a man who traveled often to Africa, Samuel Verner, and paid him $8,500 to acquire 12 people that met the fair's specifications.

They also wanted, quote, four red Africans and two other ethnic types of his choosing. One of the men he purchased was a 20-year-old named Ota Banga. Ota stood at just 4 feet 11 inches or 150 centimeters when he was brought to the fair. Werner paid just a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth for him.

He had this boyish look, having just left his teen years and not having shed the baby weight in his face. When he was brought to the fair, the head of the anthropology department and man in charge of the zoos, W.J. McGee, rejoiced.

See, Ota had a sweet disposition and would do this thing where he smiled when he didn't really understand something, which happened a lot because he didn't speak any English. And it was this smile that made McGee see dollar signs. As a child, Ota's teeth had been filed into sharp points in a ritual that was common amongst Mabuti people.

And McGee knew spectators would line up to see the boy. "'Where did you find this boy?' McGee asked Werner. "'I rescued him from a clan of cannibals,' Werner proudly proclaimed." That was not true. Ota had previously been captured by an enemy tribe and Werner purchased him from them. And yet, Ota was labeled as a cannibal and put on display for everyone to see. So one of the many, many,

many problems with these human zoos was that people from around the world weren't really encouraged to live how they actually lived. They were encouraged to behave in ways that made them look barbaric to Westerners. For instance, during the Chicago World's Fair a few years prior,

An indigenous group from Canada, the Kwaki Udall, were encouraged to partake in a cannibalism ritual that they did not practice in Canada. The promise of being able to watch these people eat other people boosted ticket sales immensely, and it encouraged all other exhibitions around the country to do the same.

So at the fair in St. Louis, McGee had heard that the people of the Philippines ate dog during certain religious ceremonies. So he forced the people at the Philippine reservation to eat as many as 20 dogs in front of spectators. Fair planners made the group butcher the animals every day, which they would later go on to say was degrading to them and their culture.

Oda, who quickly became a fan favorite at the fair due to his playful demeanor and sharp teeth, was not spared from this cultural degradation.

He was kept in huts on the grounds with ample viewing areas for people to watch him. He had been brought to the fair in the late spring and wasn't prepared for the cold. But on days that he huddled with the other men from his tribe in the huts for warmth, spectators threw rocks at him, beckoning him to come out so they could get a good look at his teeth. But for how bad these displays were, it was nothing compared to what was about to happen.

Because in the shadows of the fair, Sullivan was working on putting together the Olympic Games involving these indigenous people. And not just to give the audience something else to gawk at. No, he was going to use these games to prove definitively a theory that he held deep down for a very long time, that white people were superior to anyone else when it came to athletics.

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On August 11th, 1904, the World's Fair had already been going on for three and a half months, but the Olympics portion was just getting started. Athletes from mostly America traveled into the fairgrounds to prepare for their events. Remember, Europe didn't want to come to St. Louis and most other countries weren't invited, so the majority were American contestants.

August 11th was the day when Sullivan started his strange and unethical experiment. He was going to call the two-day event the Anthropology Days. This offshoot of the Olympics was given that name because Sullivan was going to prove a now very outdated anthropological belief that white athletes were superior to athletes of other races.

To do this, he put together a list of Olympic sports that the native people in the human zoos would definitely fail at. Swimming, tennis, water polo, javelin, essentially any sport that just wasn't available in other countries. There was weightlifting because Sullivan wanted to test the strength of white people versus natives. He wanted there to be running because Native Americans were known to be runners and he thought it would be even more impactful when they lost against the white contestants.

The plan was to run these games within the Olympics for two days so spectators could see how indigenous people performed compared to the white athletes. And records were not kept very well for these anthropology days. Hmm, I wonder why. But we do have a partial list of the participants. And there, the last name on the list of the Mabuti athletes is Otabanga.

He would have been ordered to leave his hut one day and head down to the fields where the events were taking place. There, he would have been told in English, which he did not speak, the rules of the race he was participating in.

Mind you, Ota came from a culture where waiting for your friends was common and polite. But he watched as the spectators in the stands laughed at him as he slowed his running to make sure his friends didn't fall far behind him during the sprints.

He also was forced to participate in multiple games per day, something that Olympic athletes are typically not made to do. By the end of the first day, he was made to do an event called loaded running, where he had to carry 25% of his body weight on his back while he ran. He and the other contestants were desperately tired.

Ota also had to run a relay race, which was a disaster because no one understood what to do with the baton. And don't even get me started on the hurdles. I mean, I ran track and field in high school and I can't even get over a hurdle. So I can't imagine what it was like for people who had never seen one before.

And on top of that, Ota was short. How could he have been expected to compete against say the Kokapa men from the Mexican tribe who were often over six feet tall?

But I will say the whole competition wasn't just the natives losing. It's interesting to note here that every single person from the human zoo that participated in the event called the Pole Climb, where participants literally just climbed a pole for speed, beat the white world champions time and not by a little, by at least 10 seconds. This win never made it into the final score, however.

And along with winning competitions, records showed that some of the games were enjoyable for the contestants. Many of these people had been kept in the zoo enclosures for months at that point. And being out in the sun playing with the friends they had made was better in comparison. I mean, the bar was so low. One of the events in particular, the long distance baseball throw was a fan favorite.

Contestants lined up to participate and laughed at each other as they tried to figure out the correct way to throw a baseball. There was also some downtime where the Native Americans taught Ota and his tribe how to play shinny, which is kind of like field hockey. Now, if they knew that the results of their failures were being written down as proof they were inferior to their white counterparts...

it would have been an entirely different story. But in the moment when they had no idea what they were competing for, they enjoyed themselves when they could. All of that fun would be over, however, once it came time for the marathon. On one of the hottest days that August, Sullivan announced that the marathon would begin shortly. Now, this was going to count towards the actual Olympic Games, and the winner of the marathon would win a gold medal,

Therefore, most of the contestants this day were American men, though a few Native American men were allowed to participate, as well as two South African men who were wrongly classified as being from the Zulu tribe and were given made-up African-sounding names to participate. Their real names were Len Tau and Jan Mashiani, and they were the first Black Africans to ever participate in a modern Olympic event.

Other contestants included Felix Carvajal, a runner from Cuba who hitchhiked to the games, as well as experienced marathon runners like Americans Michael Spring and Thomas Hicks. Sullivan didn't really think through the course when he chose where they would run. The 25-mile long track went directly through traffic and included 300-foot hills with brutal inclines.

But he wasn't really concerned with how fast athletes could run this track. Instead, Sullivan wanted to use this event for another one of his twisted experiments. He wanted to see how well athletes would fare in extreme conditions.

So to start, Sullivan began the race at 3:00 PM, the hottest part of the day when temperatures were in the low 90s or 33 degrees Celsius. He also intentionally did not put water stops along the track.

No, one of the leading thoughts in sports science at the time was that hydration actually hindered performance. And Sullivan wanted to test and see if extreme dehydration actually helped the runners. So there was one water stop about halfway through the race. To start this race, a dozen men on horseback ran ahead to clear the course, releasing a big cloud of dirt.

The gun fired and the athletes ran straight into it, coughing as they swatted at the cloud to get some fresh air. And it only got worse from there. Pretty early into the run, a dog chased Len Tao off of the course,

Other runners turned back to see him screaming and flailing his arms as he ran in the wrong direction and out of sight. Perhaps they silently celebrated one runner down, naively thinking that the rest of the path would be fine.

But soon, they found themselves in the middle of traffic. The horse riding men didn't clear out the center of town for the runners. And now they had to dodge cable cars, trolleys, and thick plumes of exhaust. The unpaved roads meant even more dirt kicked into the air, and it was nearly impossible for any of the runners to breathe.

William Garcia seemed to be the most affected by this, and he collapsed about eight miles from the finish line, clutching his stomach and screaming. The dust and smog had coated his esophagus and ripped his stomach lining, causing a hemorrhage.

Carvajal, desperate for hydration, stopped by an apple orchard during the run to eat a few apples, which probably would have helped him had they not been rotten. He also fell to the ground clutching his stomach and proceeded to take a nap in the middle of an Olympic event.

One man was cramping so much from the dehydration that he just gave up. Another hitched a ride on a wagon for a portion of the track and Len Tao miraculously emerged after being chased off by that dog and actually started passing people.

The man in the front of the pack, though, Thomas Hicks, was in really bad shape. By the 10-mile mark, he was begging for water, but was refused. His coach started getting really worried about him, though. He was keeping good pace, but he looked like death. So seven miles from the finish line, he intervened and fed Hicks some egg whites and strychnine.

You may recognize strychnine by its use today, rat poison. When ingested by humans, it can cause severe muscle spasms and eventually asphyxiation. But back in 1904, really low doses of strychnine were given as stimulants. See, the poison makes your neurotransmitters fire even when there's no stimulus, and it's this firing that causes a jolt of nervous energy.

And that initially worked, but a few miles later, Hicks looked pale and deathly once again. So his trainers gave him more egg whites, another dose of strychnine, and some brandy to wash it down. Just a quick reminder that he wouldn't have needed any of this if Sullivan had just allowed him to drink water during the race.

Doped up on two hits of rat poison and some alcohol, Hicks was revived, though barely. He was described by a witness as, quote, "'running mechanically, like a well-oiled piece of machinery. His eyes were dull, lusterless. The ashen color of his face and skin had deepened. His arms appeared as weights, well tied down, and he could scarcely lift his legs while his knees were almost stiff.'"

Apparently, he had begun hallucinating and he thought that the finish line was still 20 miles away. He was begging for water or something to eat, but instead he was just given more brandy.

By the last mile, he was still in the lead. And the St. Louis dispatch described his state as, quote, "'His lower jaw was hanging as in imbecility. His eyes stared blankly, but his pitiful expression didn't change.'" Eventually, Hicks' two coaches came to his side and carried him over the finish line.

And even so, he was still considered the winner. It took four doctors and one hour to get him up off the ground. And he had lost eight pounds during the race. This episode is sponsored by Fume.

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Everything Sullivan had attempted during the Olympics had been a disaster and everyone knew it. Anthropologists declared his anthropology days useless. None of the data could extrapolate anything about fitness or race, though Sullivan tried to convince them that it did, but it was ordered that the results be trashed. And as for the marathon, Sullivan refused to accept that dehydration had anything to do with the performance of the athletes.

He insisted that strychnine was the reason Hicks was in horrible shape at the finish line, which sure, he wasn't wrong about that, but his conclusion that water hinders athletic performance was dangerous and untrue. Coubertin, the head of the Olympic Committee, was embarrassed by how the games had went and publicly called Sullivan's anthropology days inhumane and a mistake.

But though the games were over and later that year, the fair would pack up its horses and leave town, its effects on the people and anthropology as a whole would linger for a while.

Take, for instance, the Philippine reservation. Many Filipino people died of pneumonia in the early days of the fair due to the horrible conditions of the travel it took to get there. One of them was an 18-year-old girl named Maura. Her dying wish was that her body be brought back to the Philippines for a proper burial. But instead, she was buried on the fairgrounds.

Her community tried to do a burial in honor of her culture, but only a Christian burial was permitted for fear of paganism. After Maura was buried, a predatory scientist named Eilish Herlichka came to the fairgrounds with a mission. He wanted to prove that the brains of white people and non-white people were fundamentally different.

It wasn't just the athleticism that Sullivan spoke about. It went deeper than that. And under the cover of night, he dug up bodies from the Philippine reservation and stole their brains for research. And some of those brains are still in the archives of the Smithsonian Museum today. Then there's Otabenga,

Ota was brought back to Africa, but he felt like he didn't fit in anymore. He had spent so much time away from his culture that he didn't feel Mabuti. So he opted to go back to America where he was kept in the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan.

Spectators would come and ogle at Ota as he interacted with the monkey, his only protection along spear, until one day when Ota decided he was done being watched and he turned the spear on the crowd, throwing it in their direction to hit one of them. Ota spent the rest of his life in America, living in the margins between sideshow and free man,

A reverend paid for his sharp teeth to be capped and gave him American style clothes. He was also put in tutoring where he learned English and American customs. It seemed like he was acclimating, but of course we don't have any writings from Ota himself. We just have what others said about him. We don't even really know that he chose to come back to America.

And one day in 1916, Ota lit a large ceremonial fire, symbolically chipped off all of the caps on his teeth, exposing the sharp ones underneath and shot himself in the chest. He would rather die an Mbuti man than live as an American.

It is really intense to think of how far the modern games have come since their early days. And as you're watching this year, remember Ota and the other indigenous people who were made to compete for false science and spectators. This history has been largely lost, but there are a few historians who are working to keep the native people's legacy alive. So,

No matter which country you're rooting for, enjoy the games and may the best athlete win.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kalen Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Head to heartstartspounding.com. And until next time, stay curious.

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