In August 1904, the St. Louis Olympics hosted a marathon so catastrophic it nearly got the event permanently banned from international competition. Thirty-two men ran into a 90-degree dirt bowl with exactly one water stop. The winner was fueled by rat poison, the runner-up hitched a ride in a car, and a South African competitor was chased a mile off course by feral dogs. It was less a test of athletic endurance than a rolling, 26.2-mile medical emergency.

The disaster was entirely engineered. The chief organizer of the games, James E. Sullivan, wanted to use the marathon to test the limits of “purposeful dehydration.” He scheduled the race for 3:00 p.m. during a suffocating St. Louis heatwave. The course consisted of unpaved, deeply rutted country roads that were still open to traffic. To make his dehydration experiment work, Sullivan allowed exactly one water source on the entire course: a well at the 11-mile mark.

The race did not go well.

Almost immediately, the competitors were choked by thick clouds of dust kicked up by the fleet of newly invented automobiles driving ahead of the runners to clear the course. William Garcia of San Francisco inhaled so much dust that it coated his esophagus and ripped his stomach lining. He was found unconscious on the side of the road, coughing up blood, and nearly died.

The first man to cross the finish line was an American named Fred Lorz. He was greeted with roaring applause and Alice Roosevelt (the president’s daughter) was stepping forward to place the gold wreath on his head when someone ruined the party. Lorz had dropped out of the race at mile nine due to cramps. He hitched a ride in one of the escort cars for eleven miles, waving at spectators, until the car broke down. Feeling refreshed, he jogged the rest of the way into the stadium. He claimed it was just a practical joke. He was banned for life.

With Lorz disqualified, the actual winner was Thomas Hicks. Hicks did not run so much as he chemically vibrated across the finish line.

At mile 14, Hicks begged his handlers for water. Instead, they gave him a sponge to rinse his mouth and a dose of strychnine—a highly toxic alkaloid commonly used as rat poison, which in small, highly dangerous doses stimulates the nervous system. As he began to hallucinate and lose the ability to lift his legs, his handlers fed him more strychnine, mixed with egg whites and a flask of brandy. He was practically carried across the finish line by two men, his feet moving in a running motion without touching the ground. He lost eight pounds during the race and required emergency medical attention.

The rest of the field fared no better. Félix Carvajal, a Cuban postman, had lost all his money gambling in New Orleans and hitchhiked to St. Louis. He arrived at the starting line in heavy street shoes, a long-sleeved shirt, and trousers. He cut his pants off at the knees with a knife just before the gun fired. During the race, he stopped to chat with spectators, practiced his English, and ate some rotten apples from a roadside orchard. He got severe stomach cramps, took a nap by the side of the road, woke up, and still somehow finished in fourth place.

Then there was Len Taunyane, a South African who had been working at the World’s Fair Boer War exhibit. He was running a fantastic race until a pack of aggressive St. Louis street dogs chased him more than a mile off the course into a cornfield. Despite the detour, he finished ninth.

Out of the 32 starters, only 14 finished. It remains the slowest winning time in Olympic marathon history, at just under three and a half hours.

The International Olympic Committee was so horrified by the spectacle that they strongly considered abolishing the marathon entirely. St. Louis had managed to invent a sporting event where surviving the organizers was significantly harder than running the race.