More than $1.4bn has been staked on prediction markets for this week’s US midterm elections, according to CNN .

Though a lot of people are about to win – or lose – a lot of money, it’s hard to imagine any wagers as consequential as the election bet that birthed a sporting craze spearheaded by a chancer who walked and talked his way into becoming one of the greatest athletic stars of the 19th century.

Before ultrarunning, there was ultrawalking: pedestrianism. The Victorian-era fad started in the US with laddish banter that got out of hand. A 21-year-old door-to-door bookseller named Edward Payson Weston made a wager with a friend that if Abraham Lincoln were elected president in 1860, Weston would walk 478 miles from the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston to the US Capitol in Washington.…