Vintage Athletes - Part 45

Marathon

Today's post celebrates the legendary ancient Greek runner Pheidippides.  In 490 BC, the Persian Empire invaded Greece.  Athens sent a runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta, the major military power in Greece, to ask for soldiers.  Pheidippides ran the 150 miles to Sparta in two days.  The Spartans were holding a religious festival and said they couldn't send help until their festival ended 6 days later at the full moon.  Pheidippides ran the 150 miles back to Athens with the bad news.

The Persian army met the Athenian army near the town of Marathon, 26 miles from Athens.  The Greeks, who were outnumbered 6 to 1, defeated the Persians, an amazing victory, but a Persian ship was seen slipping away toward Athens, perhaps to claim a false victory and raid the city.

Pheidippides was sent to run from Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians that the Greeks had won. (Above, a National Geographic illustration by Tom Lovell)

Arriving in Athens after running 26 miles, he reportedly cried "νικῶμεν" (we win), or, as in Robert Browning's poem: "Rejoice, we conquer!" and then collapsed and died. (Painting by Luc-Olivier Merson, 1869)

This is a copy of an 1881 statue of Pheidippides by German sculptor Max Kruse.

And this 1906 postcard shows acrobat and strongman Willi Olympier posing nude as the Max Kruse statue.

Despite the legend of Pheidippides' run, the ancient Greeks did not run marathon races.  They did run other races, as shown above, and like all ancient Greek athletes, the runners were naked.

The modern marathon race began when the modern Olympics began in 1896.  It was a male-only event.  The length of the race, after some minor adjustment, was set at 26 miles and 385 yards, which was believed to be the length that Pheidippides ran in 490 BC.

The first non-Olympic marathon race was held in Boston in 1897, which makes the Boston Marathon the world's oldest such race.  The marathon race in Košice, Slovakia, where a marathon runner statue was erected in 1959 (above), is the oldest in Europe, dating from 1924.

Of course, modern marathon runners don't run naked ... or do they?  Here's a runner wearing a tiny Borat costume in the 2008 London marathon.

Here's Australian comic Tommy Little (second from right) with fellow Aussies Lachlan Spark, Justin Quill and Campbell Brown after running the Antarctic Ice Marathon in 2018.  They didn't run naked in the -20 degree Celsius weather; they just posed naked afterwards.

For actual naked marathons, there's nothing like the Nakukymppi race in Finland (above), held a week before Midsummer's Day.  Contestants run back and forth several times along the course, and depending on how many times, they can run a 10-kilometer race or a full marathon.  All contestants are naked.  Click here to see my previous post about this race.