When it comes to Olympic level track and field events, history tends to only remember those who ran the fastest, jumped the farthest and pushed themselves further than their peers. Shizo Kanakuri is an apparent exception to that rule because he’s fondly remembered for having the worst official time of any Olympic marathon runner in history, taking over 54 years to finish a race he started in 1912.
Although mainly known in the west for his aforementioned Olympic record, in his native Japan, Kanakuri is regarded as one of the country’s finest athletes, often being referred to as “the father of the Japanese marathon”. In fact, Kanakuri was such an exceptional athlete that he entered the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm as a firm favourite to win the marathon after it emerged he’d set a possible world record in a qualifying round in Japan the previous year, achieving a time of 2:32:45. (Whether or not this was a true world record is debated as the distance Kanakuri ran was never officially measured and it’s believed by some that he only ran 25 miles instead of the requisite 26.2 for the record. Nevertheless, his long distance running ability was well known and established by the time the 1912 Olympics rolled around.)
One of only two athletes Japan sent to compete in the Olympics that year (the other being a sprinter, Yahiko Mishima, a lot of pressure was placed on Kanakuri to perform well as he, along with his teammate, represented the first Japanese athletes to ever compete in the Olympics.
The journey to Sweden was reportedly an incredibly trying and involved travelling by both boat and rail over the course of about two weeks.
Not wanting their skills to slip, Kanakuri and his teammate reportedly kept themselves in shape by endlessly running laps around the boat, and later when they travelled by rail, jogging around the train station whenever it stopped.Unfortunately, when Japan’s Olympic duo arrived in Sweden, one of the men fell ill, although it’s not clear from surviving records whether it was Kanakuri or Mishima. The local cuisine also didn’t sit well with Kanakuri, further hampering his pre-race preparation.
When the day of the Marathon arrived, the weather in Stockholm was an unseasonably warm 32 °C (almost 90 °F). Beyond the weather being less than ideal, Kanakuri chose to run in traditional Japanese cloth shoes called tabi. He did attempt to reinforce these shoes with rough canvas, but they still proved to be ineffective at protecting his feet from the gravel and debris strewn across the marathon’s path.
Another problem for Kanakuri was his, shall we say, unorthodox running method by modern standards. You see, while running, Kanakuri generally abstained from drinking liquid due to the then widespread belief that sweating made a person more fatigued. While this may seem strange, it was at least an improvement on other marathon running practices of both not drinking anything and taking small doses of strychnine…
In any event, the lack of drinking combined with the heat saw Kanakuri pass out from heatstroke around the halfway mark.
According to Kanakuri, around this time he happened upon a garden party being held in a well-to-do banker’s villa and decided to grab a drink with the host after spying that they were drinking orange juice. After about an hour of recovering, Kanakuri decided to forfeit the race and caught a train to Stockholm where he stayed in a hotel until his boat back to Japan arrived. Upon getting back to…
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