1904 Summer Olympics / Water polo

With the III. Olympics 1904 in St. Louis , a competition was in the water polo played. There were three US clubs with seven players each. It is unclear whether the water polo tournament was an Olympic competition. This is supported by the fact that the tournament was advertised for amateurs and that foreigners could have participated if they had belonged to the same club. However, they did not do it because the American water polo game at that time was more of a kind of volleyball and deviated from European rules.

The water polo tournament was held at the Life Saving Exhibition Lake on the Louisiana Purchase Exposition site. It was an artificial lake in which the United States Coast Guard , the American Coast Guard , usually demonstrated lifeguard exercises.

The lake was traversed by a stream and was heavily polluted by fertilizer residues and the cattle manure from the neighboring agricultural exhibition, which is why numerous water polo athletes fell ill during and after the competitions. The water polo players who stayed in the water the longest were particularly affected: four of them died within a few months of a typhoid fever caused by Escherichia bacteria .

Classification

space	country	Athletes
1	United States	New York Athletic Club David Bratton , George van Cleaf , Leo Goodwin , Louis Handley , David Hesser , Joseph Ruddy , James Steen
2	United States	Chicago Athletic Association Rex Beach , David Hammond , Charles Healy , Frank Kehoe , Jerome Steever , Edwin Swatek , William Tuttle
3	United States	Missouri Athletic Club St. Louis Gwynne Evans , Augustus Goessling , John Meyers , William Orthwein , Amedee Reyburn , Fred Schreiner , Manfred Toeppen

Date: September 5th and 6th, 1904

There were only two games. The New York Athletic Club initially won against the Missouri Athletic Club 5-0, in the "final" against the Chicago Athletic Club 6-0.