I did not know this!!!!

Olympics-Marathon runners 

may curse Sherlock Holmes 

creator

By Steven Downes

LONDON, Aug 2 (Reuters) - As exhausted runners enter the
final stages of men's and women's marathons at the London
Olympics they may silently curse Arthur Conan Doyle,
 the creator of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and a pastry chef who
was disqualified from the race in 1908.

While Greek soldier Phidippides only had to run 25 miles
from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C., they will have to keep
going for 26 miles and 385 yards, a distance first covered in
the 1908 London Olympics.

For much of the 1908 race, pastry chef Dorando Pietri led as
more than half his rivals gave up long before the finish line.
As the Italian entered the stadium, however, he stumbled and
fell to the cinder track before being helped across the
finishing line by concerned officials.

Pietri was disqualified. Unwittingly, he had received
"outside assistance", a rule which can still be applied under
the International Association of Athletics Federation's modern
rule book.

The Italian forfeited the gold medal, which was presented
instead to the runner-up, Johnny Hayes of the United States.
Pietri did, though, accept a silver cup presented to him the
following day by Queen Alexandra.

Conan Doyle, working as a journalist, turned the gallant
Pietri into a hero through his writing about the race for
London's Daily Mail.

The public clamour for such sporting melodrama saw the first
global marathon boom, with Pietri and Hayes running races as a
professionals for the next four years.

Peter Matthews, the former editor of the Guinness Book of
Records and one of the specialist athletics commentators working
at the third London Olympic Games, acknowledges that the
marathon race may have been as much a Conan Doyle creation as
was Sherlock Holmes.

"Clearly the Dorando story captured public imagination,"
Matthews told Reuters, referring to the tale which is known by
the Italian's first name.

The marathon was part of the programme at the first modern
Games in 1896 and was staged on the ancient road from the scene
of the battle of Marathon to Athens, around 25 miles.


ROYAL REQUESTS

But in 1908, royal requests were taken into account. The
race started at Windsor Castle, beneath the royal nursery
bedroom, and it demanded a lap of the track in the White City
Stadium in west London to finish beneath the Royal Box. It all
added up to 26 miles and 385 yards.

The distance of the race varied slightly during the next few
Olympics. It was permanently fixed from the 1924 Paris Olympics
when they opted for the distance of London's storied race.

The following are excerpts from Conan Doyle's report in the
Daily Mail on July 25, 1908.

"The great Olympic cheer for which everybody had been
waiting was throttled at its birth. Through the doorway crawled
a little, exhausted man... He seemed bewildered by the immensity
of the crowd.

"He trotted for a few exhausted yards like a man galvanised
into life; then the trot expired into a slow crawl, so slow that
the officials could scarcely walk slow enough to keep beside
him.

"Good Heavens, he has fainted; is it possible that even at
this last moment the prize may slip through his fingers? Every
eye slides round to that dark archway. No second man has yet
appeared. Then a sigh of relief goes up. I do not think in all
that great assembly any man would have wished victory to be torn
at the last instant from this plucky little Italian...

"He was within a few yards of my seat. Amid stooping figures
and grasping hands I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow
face, the glazed, expressionless eyes, the lank black hair
streaked across the brow.

"It is horrible, and yet fascinating, this struggle between
a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame." 

(Editing by Nigel Hunt)

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