The whole article reads like a remake of the earliest history of racing, just slightly modernised with GPS, transponders and Instagram. Road cycling history is full of stories of who took a train where in what race and how did he get caught. Entertaining stuff.
A tangent of the article also mentions the use of an invented marathon to fill a gap in the achievement list of an ambitious runner. In the early boom years of road cycling, claiming wins in bogus races was so commonplace that avoiding that kind of CV hacking was the main driver in the formation of official regulations and organizations like UCI, afaik.
Almost more extraordinary is the story of the winner after Lorz was disqualified for his 'joke'. The trainers for the eventual winner, Thomas Hicks, injected him with drugs _during_ the race. Twice!
While Lorz had used a car as a quick fix, Hicks had used, well, a quick fix. His trainer afterwards admitted they had decided "to inject him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine and to make him drink a large glass brimming with brandy". Hicks then "set off again as best he could". But one hit was not enough. "He needed another injection four miles from the end to give him a semblance of speed and to get him to the finish."
Hicks kept his medal, a decision possibly influenced by the embarrassment Lorz had already caused. The leniency also reflected the fact that doping, and strychnine abuse in particular, was commonplace at the time. Now the drug seems so archaic that Hicks's story has a certain twisted humour. But the ramifications of its use were just as obnoxious as those of HGH and steroids are today.
A tangent of the article also mentions the use of an invented marathon to fill a gap in the achievement list of an ambitious runner. In the early boom years of road cycling, claiming wins in bogus races was so commonplace that avoiding that kind of CV hacking was the main driver in the formation of official regulations and organizations like UCI, afaik.