Not having eaten in 40 hours, he saw a spectator eating two peaches. He asked if he could have the peaches, and the spectator declined. He then stole both peaches and ran away. 

Lol

that wikipedia article is a work of art

That fucking wild!

From then until the end of the race, Hicks received several doses of strychnine – a common rat poison, which stimulates the nervous system in small doses – mixed with brandy and egg white.[3] This was the earliest recorded use of performance-enhancing drugs in the revived Olympic Games.[6] He continued to battle onwards, hallucinating, and was barely able to walk for most of the course. When he reached the stadium, his support team carried him over the line, holding him in the air while he shuffled his feet as if still running.[6] Hicks had to be carried off the track on a stretcher, and might have died in the stadium had he not been treated by four doctors. He lost 8 pounds (3.6 kg) during the course of the marathon.[6]

Are we sure the whole thing wasn't just a skit?

What the fuck, this is hilarious!

Why hasn't anyone made a Death of Stalin style dry satire film from this!?

It would be a fantastic comedy film, but could be seen as too far-fetched.

not movie length but still quite good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4AhABManTw

Today's major film studios couldn't handle it without fucking it up somehow. The 2000s/early '10s would have been the peak time to film this

Correct he was riding with the car for nearly half the race, assuming Wikipedia is correct. I strongly recommend to read the Wikipedia article about this race, but this meme is a good summary of it.

Yeah but he ran like 130 miles, then fought in a battle, and then sprinted another 26 miles.

Which is wild cuz they definitely had horses, and it’s a story from the 1800s

Is amazing that they ever did another marathon in the modern Olympics.

That said the Olympics are just a rich kids talent show at this point, with the possible exception of the generic outliers that happen to be physically perfect for their sport (Bolt, Phelps, etc).

Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games organizers apologize for wrong anthem

Kuwait played the Borat anthem when a Kazakhstani shooter won an international competition there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Dmitriyenko

So do they spin a big wheel-of-fortune type thing to see who gets the rat poison, or do they give every competitor a cocktail of weird stuff, one of which also contains the poison?

Seeing how it coincided with the Worlds Fair in St Louis that was a big success in showcasing America as a modern country while the Olympic competition was all white people and the US got 248 of the 280 medals (the US team was 80% of the athletes because travel sucked), yeah, I can see how the pedo party sees it as the good old days.

I think there is a pretty good episode of the Dollop on it too.

Maybe he was so hungry he ate the dust

Ah, I was looking for Citation Needed in the thread

YES. Jon Bois is amazing