The Longest Marathon

Is it too late for one last Olympic story? Here’s a great one, a century old, about Shizo Kanaguri, Japan’s representative in the 1912 Mens’ Marathon in Stockholm.

The day of the race was sweltering hot, and many of the athletes were struggling. When Kanaguri passed the garden of a Swedish family having a picnic, he couldn’t resist their invitation to take a break and join them. After refreshing himself with raspberry juice, he also accepted their offer of a bed to take a nap. By the time he woke up, it was far too late to re-join the race, so he quietly caught a boat back to Japan and disappeared.

33 runners failed to finish that day because of the extreme heat, and the authorities wanted to check they were all right. They managed to account for all the others, but they had to call in the police to help trace Kanaguri. The police couldn’t find him either, and he was formally declared a missing person.

Kanaguri subsequently became a household name in Sweden, like Lord Lucan in the UK, with numerous jokes based on supposed sightings of him. So fifty years after the race, in 1962, a Swedish newspaper sent a journalist to Japan to see if they could track him down. He was alive and well, teaching  geography in Kumamoto Prefecture, and totally unaware of his cult status in Sweden. In 1967, at the age of 76, he was flown over to Stockholm to open a new department store. From there he was taken on to the Olympic stadium, where to the delight of the Swedish media, he finally jogged over the finish line, 55 years after the start of the race. He commented “It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and ten grandchildren.”

I am indebted to Geoff Tibballs’ book “The Olympics’ Strangest Moments” for this delightful story.