South African athletes first participated in the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, when few foreign athletes arrived and the organisers invited participants of the adjacent 1904 World's Fair to compete. General Piet Cronjé, Len Taunyane, and Jan Mashiani, all Boer War veterans who had been taken prisoner by the British at St. Helena after the Battle of Paardeberg and had reenacted battle scenes at the fair, participated in the men's marathon. Taunyane and Mashiani were the first black Africans to participate in the Olympics, and the only blacks to represent South Africa in the Olympics until the end of apartheid.