The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Arguably the biggest loser of the day was Felix Carvajal, a postman from Cuba. Carvajal qualified for the Olympic marathon, but almost penniless and with no Olympic Committee to sponsor him, he decided to pay his own way to the Games. Carvajal walked, ran and hitch-hiked up the Mississippi River to St Louis, where he lined up for the marathon wearing the clothes he had travelled in – woollen trousers, a linen shirt, street shoes and a felt beret. The race was delayed while a friendly American discus thrower cut Carvajal’s trousers down to fashion a pair of running shorts.

  He had no trouble at all keeping pace with the leaders and, despite the brutal conditions, appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself, laughing, joking, running backwards and practising his broken English on bystanders. He looked the freshest in the field by far and would undoubtedly have finished among the medals (and probably would have won) if he hadn’t decided to take a detour through an orchard to eat some unripe apples – the organizers hadn’t bothered to lay on any refreshments for the runners. Badly afflicted by stomach cramps, Carvajal could only finish fourth. He did not appear in international competition again and it was seventy-two years before Cuba had another entrant in the Olympic marathon.

  The London 1908 Olympic marathon was originally supposed to start from a street outside Windsor Castle, but Queen Alexandra wanted her children to watch, so the start was moved by a few hundred yards to inside the castle grounds, just outside the nursery window. Those extra 385 yards, as it turned out, were very important.

  The race favourite, Canadian Tom Longboat, collapsed after nineteen miles, possibly because his helpers had been plying him with champagne during the race. The Canadian team later claimed he had been drugged.

  The first half of the race was dominated by two Englishmen, Thomas Jack – then Jack Price – then in the later stages by a South African, Charles Hefferon. He was still leading at the twenty-four-mile post, but fading fast and with just two miles to go he was passed by the Italian Dorando Pietri,9 a twenty-two-year old pastry chef. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was doing a spot of freelance journalism for the Daily Mail because it got him a free ticket into the stadium, described him as “a tiny boy-like creature”.

  A hundred thousand people had crammed into the stadium at White City in London to witness the finish of the marathon, with an estimated one million locked outside. If the amount of interest in viewing just the last 400 yards might seem a little strange, it was fully justified. Pietri staggered into the stadium first and was poised to win but was clearly in some distress, suffering badly from dehydration and exhaustion. In his disoriented, confused state, he started to run the wrong way round the track. When the officials redirected him, he fell down. Some officials helped him up and, after several more falls, they could bear to watch no longer and they carried Pietri across the finish line, thereby destroying his chance of gold.

  In second place, the American Johnny Hayes, a sales assistant in Bloomingdale’s department store in New York, completed the final circuit and his team promptly lodged a protest (at this point the Americans had been averaging at least one official protest a day). The appeal was upheld; Pietri was disqualified and Hayes claimed the gold medal. Pietri was thought to have taken some mid-race strychnine, but he blamed his diet; his failure to complete the race, he said later, was because he had eaten too much steak for breakfast.10

  He might have been all right if the race hadn’t been lengthened by 385 yards at the behest of Queen Alexandra. In placing the finish line directly in front of the queen, the organizers extended the length of the marathon, which had previously been randomly set at between 25 and 26 miles, to 26 miles and 385 yards, which remains the official distance to this day.

  The Olympic marathon took inspiration from the legend of Pheidippides in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the finishing line and, with a wave of triumph, collapsed and died. The modern Olympic event had to wait until 1912 for its first death. Portugal’s very first involvement at the Olympics came to a sticky end during the marathon in Stockholm. They were represented by twenty-one-year-old Francisco Lazaro, who prepared for the race by covering most of his body with beeswax to keep him cool and prevent sunburn. It had completely the opposite effect because his body couldn’t cool down. He collapsed and died at the eighteen-mile mark with a body temperature of 41ºC.

  Longest Time Taken to Complete an Olympic Marathon

  Hailed in his homeland for his prowess in track events and known as “father of the marathon”, the Japanese long-distance runner Shizo Kanakuri qualified for the marathon in the 1912 Olympics by setting a new world record, making him the favourite for the event in Stockholm.

  After a gruelling eighteen-day journey to the Games involving sea travel and a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Shizo was not at his best when he lined up for the event. Early in the race, he was overcome by heat exhaustion and passed out. He managed to drag himself into a family garden party near the marathon course and was given orange juice and a chance to recover. Deeply ashamed at his failure to complete the race, Kanakuri hung around the party for an hour or so and then returned directly to his hotel and departed for Japan the next day without notifying anybody. As far as the Swedish authorities were concerned, he was a missing person for the next fifty years before discovering that he was living in Japan.11

  In 1966, he was contacted by Swedish television and offered the chance to complete his run. He accepted and completed the marathon in a time of fifty-four years, eight months, six days, eight hours, thirty-two minutes and twenty seconds.

  “People are becoming too intelligent ever to have another war. Statesmen have not anything like the prestige they had years ago, and what is educating the ordinary people against war is that they are mixing so much. The motorcar, radio and such things are the great ‘mixers’. I believe the last war was too much an educator for there ever to be another on a large scale.”

  Henry Ford, 1928

  Worst Olympic Team Performance

  The Tunisian team competing in the 1960 Olympic Modern Pentathlon finished a historic last in every single event and, in some cases, failed to score a single point.

  First up was the show-jumping section, during which the entire team of three fell off their horses. In the next event, swimming, one of their competitors came very close to drowning.

  The third event was the shooting; one of the team nearly shot an official and they were ordered from the shooting range for fear that they were endangering lives. When it came to the fencing, they were handicapped by the fact that only one member of their team could actually fence. Hoping nobody would notice, they sent the same team member up three times with his mask on. One of his opponents recognized him as the man he had just fought and the Tunisian was disqualified. The final event was the cross-country run, in which they scored their highest tally of 1,758 points, but still finished in last place.

  The total score for Team Tunisia was 5,126, a massive 10,000 points behind the next to last, marking the worst performance by a team in Olympic history.

  “If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.”

  Dr W. C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954

  Worst Olympic Track-and-Field Team

  Olmeus Charles was one of several Haitian athletes sent to the Olympic Games by the “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime during the 1970s–80s, mostly picked from among Duvalier’s personal friends, who gained notoriety by setting record worst times, many of which are still held.

  Charles set an Olympic record at the Montreal Games in 1976 by finishing last in the 10,000 metres by the biggest margin ever recorded. He was so far behind the rest of the field that, as he was completing his solo run of the last six laps, an argument broke out among the track officials as to whether he should be allowed to finish the course because he was holding up the other track events. He eventually completed the course in the slow-motion time of forty-two minutes eleven seconds, fourteen minutes behind the heat win
ner Carlos Lopes of Portugal. He was lapped by everyone in the race at least three times, including the next to last, Canadian Chris McCubbins.

  Other notable Haitian under-performers include Anilus Joseph who started his 1972 10,000 metres qualifying heat in a sprint, then dropped out when he was already a mile behind the leaders and Dieudonne Lamothe who completed a unique double by finishing last in both the 5,000 metres in 1976 and the 1984 marathon. Lamothe revealed later that he’d only found out about his selection for the event a couple of weeks before the finals: Baby Doc’s Olympic selection committee had offered to kill him if he didn’t take part.

  “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”

  Albert Einstein, 1932

  Least Harmonious Display of Sporting Unity

  The Summer Olympics are supposed to embody the very essence of fair play and sporting brotherhood. The Games of 1908 would test this theory to destruction. The event was originally to have been held in Rome but, in 1906, Mount Vesuvius erupted, causing widespread devastation in Naples. Italy pulled out, blaming the cost of reconstruction work, although everyone suspected that this was an excuse, a suspicion that the Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gioletti did little to dispel when he said that the Olympic Games were “a complete waste of money”.

  The IOC had to find another venue quickly. Luckily, an Anglo-French exhibition was being planned at Shepherd’s Bush, London. The organizers agreed to incorporate a sports stadium into their arrangements in return for a cut of the takings, so the IOC was able to announce that London would now host the games.

  Right from the opening ceremony, the 1908 Games lurched from one disaster to another.12 Unlike the three previous Olympics, it had been decided that athletes would compete in national teams rather than as individuals, so flags of all the competing nations were posted around the new White City stadium. Unfortunately, someone forgot to fly the Swedish and American flags. The Swedes stormed out of the stadium in protest while the Americans refused to dip their flag when they walked past the Royal Box. The Finns, who had been told to carry a Russian flag, marched without one. Some of the Irish competitors, who had been told to parade under a British flag, refused to march at all.

  The actual sport kicked off with the tennis event at Queen’s Club in West London. Every single Olympic entry was British. The final between E. B. Noel and H. M. Leaf was cancelled when Leaf injured his hand. Noel won gold without hitting a ball.

  The motor-boating was literally a washout. Gales blasted the Solent course, which attracted five British boats and one French. In the first heat, a race between the Duke of Westminster and Lord Howard de Walden, both boats had to withdraw for fear of sinking.

  The rugby was similarly farcical. Only one team, Australia, turned up to contest the gold medal, only to find that Britain’s top rugby players had actually set off for a tour of Australia.

  On the plus side, there was the first purpose-built Olympic swimming pool. Unfortunately, the fishing competition was also in the same Olympic pool and the water was not changed. The pool became so murky that competitors complained that they couldn’t see more than six inches in front of them. This at least was an improvement on the Paris Olympics of 1900 where the competitors had had to race through sewage in the River Seine. The night before the three-mile race, the French favourite Jean Bouin was arrested for brawling in a London pub and failed to show for the event.

  Almost as soon as the athletics event started, a distracted judge walked into the path of a flying javelin, necessitating urgent medical attention. In the shot-put, an American contestant was accused of nobbling his British opponent by dropping the shot on his foot.

  Bad feelings between the American and British teams marred proceedings to the extent that the Games were dubbed the “Battle of Shepherd’s Bush”. Right from the opening ceremony, the American team made daily protests about the British, including a complaint about the boots worn by the British tug-of-war team, but their biggest complaint was about the officials. In 1908, as at all previous Games, they were provided by the host nation. The US team manager James E. Sullivan was incensed by “biased and snobbish” British refereeing. He may have had a point: Johnny Douglas, Britain’s gold medallist in the middleweight boxing division, was awarded a split decision by the contest’s referee, who happened to be Douglas’s father.

  It all came to a head in a highly controversial men’s 400-metre race. The event was not yet run in lanes, so the race could often be a rough and tumble affair. In the USA, interference with another runner by pushing, blocking or jostling was considered fair game. In England, however, the organizers had a different idea of what constituted fair play.

  The Americans were confident of success, having won all the sprint events in the previous Games. When it came to the final, three Americans – John Taylor, William Robbins and John Carpenter – lined up against a solitary British runner, Wyndham Halswelle. On the final bend, just as Halswelle was making his move for the finish line, the American trio appeared to block him, forcing him off the track. On the run-in, just before Carpenter and Robbins were set to finish first and second, two British judges rushed on to the track and cut the tape. After some confusion, the British judges disqualified Carpenter for “blocking” and ordered a re-run.

  The Americans refused to run again in protest, so the British runner Halswelle ran the race alone to win the gold, the only walkover in Olympic history. Beneath the headline “BAD LOSERS”, the New York Press reported sourly, “Our uncousinly competitors have to learn how to win from American athletes, and they still more need to learn how to lose.”

  The gold medal winner Halswelle was equally disgusted by the whole affair and gave up running. On 31 March 1915, while serving in France during the First World War, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet.

  Least Harmonious Display of Sporting Unity: Runner-Up

  The Islamic Solidarity Games were founded in 2005 to strengthen ties among fifty-seven Islamic countries, a “Muslem Olympics” to be held every four years. The second games were due to be held in Tehran in 2009. The event ran into trouble when the host nation Iran insisted on calling the section of the Indian Ocean separating it from Arabia the “Persian Gulf” on all its medals. Fellow Arab countries begged to differ and insisted it was called the “Arabian Gulf”. In the end, no one could agree what to call it so the whole event was cancelled.

  “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

  Sir William Preece, engineer-in-chief for the British Post Office, 1876

  Most Generous Use of the Term “Sprinter”

  In 2001, the American Samoan shot-putter Trevor Misipeka arrived in Edmonton, Canada, to take part in the World Championships, only to find that a rule change to limit numbers had forced him out of his event.

  Undeterred, the tattooed twenty-one-stone giant signed up for the 100-metre sprint, taking on the best in Olympic champion speedsters, Maurice Greene, Ato Boldon and Donovan Bailey.

  Wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt bought from a street market and ordinary street trainers, he grunted and spluttered through the finish line in 14.28 seconds, a full four seconds behind the winner – the slowest ever seen at a World Championships.

  “Trevor the tortoise” said he was delighted with his performance, a personal best. It would be: he had never run the distance before. “I was the biggest guy out there by 150 lbs,” Eric noted after the race. “If I was the same weight as them, I’d have been a contender.”

  Worst Professional Football Team

  As every football fan knows, you win some, you lose some. But not if you support the Belgian fourth-division side SSA Antwerpen – you lose some then you lose more. They had the worst season in football history in 1995/96, ending their thirty-game campaign with this record: played 30, won 0, drew 0, lost 30, goals for 12, goals against 271, points 0.

  Relegated w
ithout a single point, SSA Antwerpen conceded a goal every ten minutes during league play. At least they managed to score four away from home.

  “The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.”

  Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio founder, 1916

  Least Successful Attempt to Treat an Injured Player

  The first ever FIFA World Cup finals were staged in Uruguay in 1930. During the semi-final game between the USA and Argentina, the American physio Jack Coll ran on to the pitch to tend to an injured player. Tossing his first aid bag on the ground, he accidentally broke a bottle of chloroform and while stooping to pick it up, inhaled the fumes and knocked himself out.

  While the physio had to be stretchered off the pitch by his teammates, the injured player recovered without any treatment. Argentina went on to trounce their opponents 6-1.

  “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

  H. M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927

  Worst Goalkeeping Début

  Crewe Alexandra goalkeeper Dennis Murray hoped to make a good impression on his professional début in 1951. It didn’t go entirely to plan; he let in nine goals and made only one further appearance for the club.