Three Times Reality Lost a Bet

Setup: At the 1904 Olympic marathon, American runner Fred Lorz was doing poorly after about nine miles, so he got into his manager’s car and rode for roughly eleven miles.

Escalation: The car broke down, and Lorz rejoined the race on foot. He then crossed the finish line first, waved to the crowd, and was briefly treated as the winner. When officials discovered the automotive assistance, Lorz said it had been a joke, which was apparently not the preferred Olympic training method. He was suspended for a year, then returned to win the Boston Marathon in 1905.

Punchline: The marathon’s silver medalist, Thomas Hicks, had meanwhile been given strychnine and brandy by his handlers during the race. The rules had not yet caught up with either man’s interpretation of “running.”

Setup: In 1932, Australian farmers asked the government for help with a large emu population damaging crops and fencing. The government sent soldiers armed with machine guns.

Escalation: The soldiers discovered that emus were fast, difficult to corner, and inclined to scatter into smaller groups whenever the shooting started. One gun jammed. Another effort involved mounting a machine gun on a truck, which made the truck too awkward to aim and the emus too mobile to worry about it.

Punchline: After several attempts and thousands of rounds, the military withdrew. The official campaign did not produce the desired result, and the emus retained possession of the countryside. Australia later referred to the episode as the Emu War, despite the emus never issuing a declaration.

Setup: In 2012, thieves targeted a Canadian reserve of maple syrup and removed more than 3,000 tonnes from storage, worth about 18.7 million Canadian dollars.

Escalation: The theft went undetected for months because the barrels remained in place. Inspectors eventually noticed that many of them had been drained and refilled with water. The syrup was sold through an elaborate network of middlemen, because apparently liquid pancake topping can have a criminal supply chain.

Punchline: It remains one of the largest food heists in history, proving that somewhere there is a spreadsheet labeled “stolen goods” with a line item reading “maple syrup, industrial quantity.”

This Week in Weird History: The emus kept the land, the marathoner kept running, and the maple syrup thieves kept the barrels.