Sportsfrog.com

Not a good idea. But once upon a time, used as such, by 1904 Olympic Marathon winner Thomas Hicks. During the race. Courtesy of a shadowy associate (we call them “cousins” nowadays). Really great read for a Sunday morning from the Boston Globe on the story of Hicks and a brief overview on just how long athletes have sought chemical help to boost performance. It has gone on awhile. From the Globe:

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.

Where did the outrage stem? From the unlevel playing field, apparently:

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.”

The other thing worth reading the article for is the description of the marathon race itself. August in St. Louis with a 3:00 pm start? It’s like they wanted runners to die. Plus, there was confusion at the finish with a runner who had dropped out of the race who grabbed a cab and then jogged the last five miles to the finish as a “joke” in first while Hicks staggered into the stadium half dead.

Great read.