AI transcript
0:00:08 [MUSIC]
0:00:09 Pushkin.
0:00:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:18 Hello, hello, Malcolm Glabo here.
0:00:21 Here at Pushkin, we love the Olympics.
0:00:25 [MUSIC]
0:00:30 One of my strongest childhood memories was the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
0:00:33 My homelands, first Olympic Games.
0:00:34 I was a kid.
0:00:38 My family didn’t have a television, but we rented one just for the occasion.
0:00:42 Two rabbit ears on top of a grainy black and white set.
0:00:46 We put the TV in the fireplace, because there was no other place for it.
0:00:49 And I watched everything.
0:00:53 The Romanian Nadia Cominic bewitching the world in gymnastics.
0:00:54 >> Perfect, yeah, perfect.
0:00:56 >> My running hero, John Walker,
0:01:00 powering away around the final curve to win the men’s 1500 meters.
0:01:02 I still get nervous thinking about that race.
0:01:04 [MUSIC]
0:01:10 Vassivarin’s improbable double in the 5000 meters and the 10,000 meters.
0:01:14 Alberto Wanterina, Cornelia Ender, Don Quarry, and
0:01:19 the women’s 4×100 freestyle relay, maybe the greatest swimming race ever.
0:01:24 [MUSIC]
0:01:28 I was a little kid, and I fell in love with the Olympics.
0:01:29 And I’ve been in love ever since.
0:01:35 There are just so many good Olympic stories to tell.
0:01:40 So this summer, a bunch of Pushkin shows are giving you their unique takes on the games.
0:01:45 Over at the Happiness Lab, Lori Santos will be talking with the coach who coaches
0:01:46 the coaches.
0:01:50 Maya Shankar is going deep with a whole suite of swimmers
0:01:53 talking about their slight change of plans.
0:01:58 And my colleague, Ben Dadaf Haferi, and I have done a nine part series about
0:02:03 the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi Olympics.
0:02:07 And today, I’m sharing a taste of some of my favorite stories from Pushkin’s
0:02:08 Olympic summer.
0:02:12 One from Revisionist History, another from What’s Your Problem.
0:02:17 And to kick us all off, a story from Tim Harford over at Cautionary Tales.
0:02:23 For sheer myth-making about distance running, you can’t beat the marathon.
0:02:29 After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon,
0:02:34 a chap called Philippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the good news.
0:02:37 And then, so the story goes, collapsed and died.
0:02:42 Thus began the legend of the marathon.
0:02:49 This is a race so gruelling, a challenge so overwhelming that it could literally kill you.
0:02:56 Women weren’t allowed to compete in the first Olympics, let alone in the marathon.
0:03:02 If it could kill a man, can you imagine what it would do to the fragile frame of a woman?
0:03:08 The International Olympic Committee were reluctant to let women compete in any events
0:03:15 at all, and when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in 1928,
0:03:18 the longest women’s race was 800 meters.
0:03:21 It was a disaster.
0:03:25 The newspapers of the day reported the disturbing scenes.
0:03:28 The New York Evening Post.
0:03:31 Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women,
0:03:36 five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape.
0:03:43 The Chicago Tribune added that one finisher collapsed into unconsciousness
0:03:44 and required medical attention.
0:03:47 A press syndicate reporter commented,
0:03:52 “It was not a very edifying spectacle to see a group of fine girls running themselves
0:03:54 into a state of exhaustion.”
0:03:59 Other writers described the races as a disgrace or dangerous,
0:04:06 or a pined that 200 meters was surely the maximum distance a woman could attempt,
0:04:11 without premature aging and damage to her reproductive capacity.
0:04:16 But this is all, of course, nonsense.
0:04:21 Not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity, all of it.
0:04:24 There weren’t 11 women in the race, there were nine.
0:04:29 Not only did the gold medalist, Lena Radker-Batshauer, break the world record,
0:04:34 but so did the silver and bronze medalists and the three women behind them,
0:04:39 which is, I suppose, what happens when an event doesn’t have many precedents.
0:04:43 Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor.
0:04:45 No matter.
0:04:51 Rather than celebrating the greatest women’s middle distance race in history,
0:04:55 the pundits wrote whatever sensationalised nonsense they felt like writing.
0:04:59 The International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse
0:05:06 to keep the women’s 800 meters out of the Olympics for the next three decades.
0:05:16 If women couldn’t be allowed to run 800 meters until 1960,
0:05:21 you can imagine what the male-dominated athletic establishment of the 1960s
0:05:24 thought of the idea of women running a marathon.
0:05:29 But there were a few independent-spirited women who liked to run,
0:05:33 and naturally enough their thoughts turned to that iconic distance.
0:05:37 One of those women was Catherine Switzer.
0:05:41 As a girl, she told her father she wanted to be a cheerleader.
0:05:45 “You don’t want to be a cheerleader, honey,” he told her.
0:05:50 “Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you.”
0:05:55 He encouraged her to run a mile each day to get fit for sports, and she did.
0:06:02 She became a journalism student at Syracuse, where there were no women’s sports teams at all,
0:06:05 so she asked to train with a men’s cross-country team.
0:06:07 “Sure,” said the head coach.
0:06:11 And then she heard him laughing with the other coaches behind her back.
0:06:14 That only made her more determined.
0:06:20 More encouraging was volunteer coach Arnie Briggs, the university mailman,
0:06:25 and at 50 years of age, the veteran of 15 Boston marathons.
0:06:31 He was full of stories about the classic marathon, which had first been held in the late 1800s.
0:06:37 And one December night, on a miserable training run through a snowstorm,
0:06:43 as cars skidded and honked around, Catherine had heard one too many of those tales.
0:06:47 “Let’s quit talking about the Boston marathon and run the damn thing.
0:06:53 No woman can run the Boston marathon. Why not? I’m running 10 miles a night.”
0:06:59 Arnie relented. “No dame ever ran the Boston marathon.
0:07:03 If any woman could do it, you could, but you’d have to prove it to me.
0:07:07 If you ran the distance in practice, I’d be the first to take you to Boston.”
0:07:09 “Now you’re talking,” she thought.
0:07:16 A few months later, and three weeks before the marathon, they ran 31 miles in training.
0:07:22 Arnie turned gray and passed out, but Catherine was feeling great.
0:07:26 The next day, at Arnie’s insistence, she signed up for the race,
0:07:31 signing her name, as she always did, K. V. Switzer.
0:07:39 She and Arnie checked the rulebook. There was nothing forbidding women to enter.
0:07:47 Arnie signed up too, as did Catherine’s boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all 235 pounds of him.
0:07:52 He was a promising hammer thrower, had been a serious college football player,
0:07:58 and no, he wasn’t planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and if a girl can
0:08:08 run a marathon, I can run a marathon. On Wednesday, April 19, 1967, race day, it was snowing.
0:08:15 Most of the field were running in track suits. There were 741 entrants, and Catherine
0:08:21 pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride. K. Switzer, 261.
0:08:26 From the other runners, she got a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome.
0:08:29 “Hey, gonna go the whole way?”
0:08:34 “Gosh, it’s great to see a girl here. Can you give me some tips to get my wife to run?
0:08:36 She’d love it if I could just get her started.”
0:08:44 Arnie was beaming. Big Tom, unmissable in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt,
0:08:48 wasn’t happy that Catherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention.
0:08:55 “Take it off,” he said. “I shan’t,” she replied. The crowd of runners squeezed
0:09:03 closer and closer together as they approached the start. And then, they were off and feeling great.
0:09:08 Just four miles later, the fun would stop.
0:09:20 Catherine Switzer was running with her little group, including Coach Arnie and boyfriend Big Tom,
0:09:24 feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of the other runners.
0:09:30 At the four-mile mark, the press truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers
0:09:36 a good shot of that dame who was running the marathon. Then, Switzer recalled,
0:09:42 “A man with an overcoat and felt hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking his finger at me.
0:09:46 He said something to me as I passed and reached out for my hand,
0:09:47 catching my glove instead and pulling it off.”
0:09:55 Who was it? A protester? A crank? But he was wearing an official’s ribbon.
0:10:02 Moments later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes coming up fast behind me.
0:10:07 When a runner hears that kind of noise, it’s usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my head
0:10:13 around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man,
0:10:19 with bare teeth, was set to pounce. And before I could react, he grabbed my shoulder and flung
0:10:25 me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.” Catherine was terrified.
0:10:32 She realized she’d wet her pants in fear, and she turned to sprint away as the furious official
0:10:37 tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt. The press truck was still there, the cameras were
0:10:47 whirring and clicking, and then, seemingly from nowhere, 235 pounds of orange-clad college football
0:10:53 player crashed into the official who flew sideways and landed on the roadside in a crumpled heap.
0:11:02 “Oh God,” thought Catherine, “Big Tom’s killed him. We’re in trouble. Run like hell,”
0:11:07 yelled Arnie, and they sprinted away from the scene with the press truck in pursuit,
0:11:14 cameras still clicking. It was an extraordinary scene, and perhaps the strangest thing about it?
0:11:21 Catherine Switzer wasn’t the first woman to run a marathon. She wasn’t the first woman to run the
0:11:28 Boston Marathon. In fact, she wasn’t even the leading woman in this race. A mile ahead of her,
0:11:36 Roberta “Bobby” Gibb, was making serene progress without an irate race official in sight.
0:11:44 There’s so much in this “Cautionary Tales” episode. Two groundbreaking female marathoners
0:11:53 and an epic 268-mile race, 268 miles, along the spine of England. You can find it now in the “Cautionary
0:12:06 Tales” feed. Here are two things that define our era, an absolute obsession with sports and incredible
0:12:14 technological progress. Sylvia Blemker works at their intersection. She’s a professor of biomedical
0:12:21 engineering at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of Springbok Analytics. She figured
0:12:27 out how to combine MRI scans with artificial intelligence to create incredibly detailed
0:12:34 analyses of our muscles. Springbok’s clients include Olympic athletes, major league baseball,
0:12:40 and a bunch of professional basketball and soccer teams. Sylvia Blemker talked about how her work
0:12:47 helps elite athletes and people with neuromuscular diseases. In this interview with Jacob Goldstein,
0:12:54 for “What’s Your Problem?” What’s one surprising thing your work has taught you about elite athletes?
0:13:02 I never thought I would see muscles that were so developed. They broke our scale.
0:13:09 Wow. Yeah. Like it was just too big, the machine, the AI couldn’t figure out what it is?
0:13:13 Well, no. The AI found it, but we’re like our kind of rating system.
0:13:19 Wow. Was there a particular athlete or a particular sport or a particular muscle? What muscle broke
0:13:23 the scale? The gluteus maximus breaks it, a fair amount.
0:13:26 No kidding. Yeah. Fantastic.
0:13:27 Yes. It’s a pain in my butt.
0:13:36 Like because it’s too big? Yeah. Yeah. It’s just so big. The other thing is that they have some tiny
0:13:43 muscles too. They have smaller than a normal person’s muscle. Yes. Much smaller. They put
0:13:48 their muscle where they need it. What’s an example? What muscle is tiny and what kind of athlete?
0:13:58 Calf muscles are small in most fast athletes. You look at a sprinter or a running back.
0:14:07 It’s just all quad, no calf? All thigh, no calf. Yeah. It kind of makes sense because if you’re
0:14:12 trying to run fast, you wouldn’t want to put a lot of mass at the end of your leg. It adds a lot
0:14:18 of inertia to move your leg because the muscles are important for sprinting. That’s the interesting
0:14:26 thing, but they’re small. They’re very small. I’m particularly interested at this moment in the
0:14:36 sports piece of what you do. I’m curious, by the way, do you work with any Olympic teams
0:14:43 or Olympic athletes? Yeah. We’ve actually been working with several different Olympic athletes.
0:14:50 The ones that probably that come to mind most are multiple players on the U.S. Women’s National
0:14:59 Soccer Team. Oh, cool. Tell me the story of that work. They came to you. What did they want
0:15:06 when they came to you? How did that begin? They came to us along with their team. The
0:15:12 technology we provide, an athlete could understand it, but really with their team to help them figure
0:15:19 out how to keep athletes healthy. What did they say when they came to you?
0:15:29 For example, one athlete that’s coming to mind had a known imbalance, side to side,
0:15:34 that based on a history of injury. They really wanted to know where that imbalance was coming
0:15:41 from. The woman had hurt one of her legs, and that leg was, even after she came back, that leg was
0:15:46 weaker, essentially than the other. I mean, is that the sort of gross macro view?
0:15:52 Yeah, exactly. That’s a nice way to put it. And they wanted a sort of finer, like, okay,
0:15:57 but we can see that. But what’s going on on the inside, like muscle by muscle, tell us that?
0:16:03 Yes, exactly. That’s precisely what we do. We go on the inside. Because on the outside,
0:16:11 you see perhaps that her knee extensor or quads seem weaker on one side than the other, but there’s
0:16:17 four quads, quadriceps, four muscles. And so it’s not clear which of those muscles are actually
0:16:23 the culprit for that imbalance and in what way. Good. So this is their question. And then
0:16:33 what happens next? So this first step is an MRI scan. And so with these athletes or teams,
0:16:42 we have ways to connect them with an MRI machine, whether it be through an imaging center that
0:16:50 they partner with, or we’ve even actually brought MRI mobile trucks to sites to make it easier.
0:16:54 So like the players run off the field and get an MRI and go back and keep playing?
0:17:01 Yeah, kind of, yeah. It helps just with the timing of things. But so first we connect them there,
0:17:08 so it takes about 10 minutes. Then they send those pictures up into the cloud, into our server.
0:17:16 And then we crunch through it. And then we send back a report on their muscles. We also have
0:17:23 what we call interactive viewer. And it’s presented in the form of a 3D model, three-dimensional
0:17:28 model. So you actually see your own legs, the muscles and bones, your own muscles and bones
0:17:35 that we’ve identified from the images, going through a process called segmentation, where we
0:17:39 find all the muscles and bones, and then we reconstruct them. So it’s kind of like a digital
0:17:45 twin of that person that they can see on their computer. And so along with it are all these
0:17:54 metrics that helps them understand their balance, the development or strength of the muscles,
0:18:01 and the health of the muscles. And so in the case of this soccer player who came to you, who
0:18:06 knew she had some kind of problem with her quadriceps on one side, but didn’t know what
0:18:13 was going on, what did you find? We found some imbalances, actually not just in those muscles.
0:18:22 It turns out that it’s all connected. So I think there were at least one calf
0:18:27 muscle and then some in the, especially in the deep hip, those were impacted.
0:18:36 So yeah, it kind of shows up everywhere. To what extent can trainers or strength coaches
0:18:44 develop programs that are sufficiently kind of fine-grained to match the kind of fine-grained
0:18:50 findings you’re having, right? Like for example, if you find, as I understand you did, that a
0:18:56 soccer player has one particular quadricep that is weak. Are there workouts that target a single
0:19:01 quadricep and not the others? Yep, there are. That’s cool. For whichever quadricep you just,
0:19:09 just for fun, give me an example. One way that it’s very simple is using something called biofeedback.
0:19:18 So you can measure whether you use something called EMG, which is a way to measure how much
0:19:23 electrical activity is a muscle, and then you can see which muscles you’re using for a given task.
0:19:28 So if you give people the feedback of which of those muscles they’re using and say,
0:19:33 “Oh, no, you’re not using this one. Use this one more,” that actually works very effectively.
0:19:40 Oh, really? So you can basically use your brain if you’re getting the feedback to focus on which
0:19:45 quadricep you’re training. Exactly. Yeah. And there’s other ways you can give the feedback
0:19:50 in other different ways. But yeah, our brains are very good at that once they get feedback. They’re
0:19:55 very good at learning. That’s cool, especially somehow to think of with elite athletes, right,
0:20:00 because they’re already presumably super dialed in in terms of the relationship between their brain
0:20:05 and their body at this very elite level. Exactly. Yeah, the other, I was going to mention,
0:20:14 a lot of players and teams use this not just one time, but over time. So they’ll get a scan,
0:20:21 figure out a plan, work on that for maybe three months or six months, and then do another scan
0:20:26 and see how things are progressing and adjust accordingly. So that’s definitely another way
0:20:32 to, in the long term, see if what they’re doing is resulting in the change that they’re hoping to see.
0:20:38 So what happened with that soccer player who had the weak quadricep and other related
0:20:46 pros? Yeah, no, I think she’s doing great, like staying healthy and, you know, getting ready.
0:20:50 Yeah, so I know you can’t tell us her name, but will we see her in the Olympics this summer?
0:20:57 Yes, yeah. You can hear more from that interview and a bunch of other stories from people who are
0:21:04 creating groundbreaking new technologies on what’s your problem. I’ll be back in a minute
0:21:08 with the final leg of this relay race through Pushkin’s Olympic Summer.
0:21:26 Our last story today is one from Revisionist History’s series about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
0:21:33 The series is all about why America chose to compete in the games when it was already clear
0:21:41 who Hitler was and what the Nazis stood for. Ben Nadeff-Haffrey takes everyone’s favorite story
0:21:48 from the Berlin Olympics about two athletes making good on the promise of the games and breaks it wide
0:22:03 open. About 4,000 athletes competed in the 1936 Olympic Games. Jesse Owens is the one
0:22:18 people remember. Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
0:22:26 self-effacing, soft-spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In 1935, as a 21-year-old, he’d already
0:22:32 set three world records in a single day, all in the same hour, with a bad back.
0:22:44 And in 1936, even the Germans were expecting something great from him.
0:22:56 It’s the desire of every athlete to win a first place in the Olympic Games.
0:23:01 In 1936, he was slated to compete in three events.
0:23:18 100 meters, 200 meters, and the broad jump. Later, they added a fourth event,
0:23:26 the four by 100 meter relay. He would win gold in all four, the only person to win four gold medals
0:23:33 in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you know the name Jesse Owens. But it all could have turned
0:23:42 out differently. Because of that broad jump. You’ve seen a broad jump before. Today, it’s called
0:23:47 the long jump. And it’s one of the more dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers sprint down the runway,
0:23:53 hit a takeoff board, and they look like they’re flying. And then they land in a huge spray of sand.
0:24:00 So, the morning of August 4th, 1936, 10.30 a.m., in the Reichsportfeld,
0:24:07 it’s the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers go on to the final. Owens had just run
0:24:13 his heat in the 200 meters. Immediately after, he headed over to the pit. It was the third day of
0:24:19 the Games. And by then, he already had his first gold medal. So, it was a surprise when he botched
0:24:25 his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it was a practice run. Notice what though,
0:24:31 he had two more tries. So, he lined himself back up and started jogging down the runway.
0:24:40 He took off and came up short. He had one jump left. If he screwed up that last jump,
0:24:45 he’d have been out of the contest. And he’d have gone from being the only athlete to win
0:24:52 four gold medals in 1936 to one of three athletes who’d won three golds, right up there with Conrad
0:24:58 Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek, who actually would have had more total medals than him. And I ask you,
0:25:05 be honest. Have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek? No. And probably,
0:25:11 if he’d missed that final qualifying jump, you wouldn’t have heard of Jesse Owens either.
0:25:22 So, after the first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then, something miraculous happened.
0:25:29 Something that changed the course of Jesse Owens’ life and made him a legend.
0:25:36 It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled in over the stadium.
0:25:43 Around 100,000 people were in the stands watching. In America’s most famous athlete,
0:25:52 Jesse Owens was screwing up. Badly. Which makes no sense. All he had to do was jump 7.15 meters to
0:25:58 qualify. He already had a world record for jumping a meter farther than that. So, what was going wrong?
0:26:06 Malcolm and I decided to ask an expert. A legend, actually. It was about 10 years ago or so,
0:26:13 at the age of 65, I think. And I jumped further than my high school mark. Is that right? Yeah.
0:26:16 And you’re the first American to jump 57 feet. Yeah.
0:26:22 One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time. Milan Tiff.
0:26:28 I actually jumped 60 feet, but they wouldn’t recognize it, because I jumped out of the pit.
0:26:36 And where did you do that? Right here, you see, wow. And I completely jumped over the sand pit
0:26:39 and landed on the grass. I had grass stains all over the back of me.
0:26:48 Going to see Milan was Malcolm’s idea. So, when I was in high school, starting at the age of 12,
0:26:53 I became a competitive runner. And I was obsessed with track and field. And I
0:27:01 subscribed to track and field news, the Bible of the sport, as it’s called. And Milan Tiff was
0:27:07 this extraordinary… First of all, he was astonishing looking. He looked, there was something
0:27:13 kind of ethereal about him. And he had, as a kid, he couldn’t walk, because he had, I think,
0:27:19 polio or something. And he was also an artist. Really, really bright colors and kind of wildly
0:27:26 imaginative and a little bit psychedelic. But I was just obsessed with him as this kind of like,
0:27:33 this strange otherworldly figure. And he was a favorite in 1980. Had we not boycotted the
0:27:40 1980 games, he might well have won a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He’s going to be a little
0:27:47 bit… He might be a little… I don’t know, but I have a sense that he might be a little out there.
0:27:53 This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff, I felt like I had taken
0:27:58 some kind of intense psychedelic, the effects of which I’ve yet to wear off. The first humans,
0:28:04 some believable. I understood that to walk is just to take a number of tiny long jumps.
0:28:10 I found myself transfixed by an actually gorgeous painting of Milan’s portraying a pair of empty,
0:28:16 tidy whiteies suspended in a blue abstract space called mysteriously Palm Springs.
0:28:22 And the birds and the trees would all fly down. They’re just tapped into the same frequency as I
0:28:27 have when I’m running and jumping. We flew out to Los Angeles where he lives so he could take us out
0:28:32 to the UCLA track. And when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above us the
0:28:37 whole time, which only made everything a little more surreal. And Olympic legends just walking
0:28:44 up to him, literally bowing down. This, I think, because they wouldn’t normally see him. He told
0:28:55 us he prefers to run in the morning, by which he meant 3am. Tiff took us out to the broad jump pit
0:29:01 to help us get inside Jesse Owens’s mind, which we thought he could do because he’s a master of
0:29:07 the approach. The part Jesse Owens was screwing up. But also because… So you actually knew Jesse
0:29:14 Owens when you were a kid? Yeah, yeah. You know, we, that’s it. And he tells the stories. Yeah.
0:29:19 And I hear all the stories. And, you know, he talked about his experience in Berlin.
0:29:26 You know. We asked him to tell us about how you’re supposed to approach a jump. Yeah. You gotta have
0:29:31 a giddy-up first. That kind of rocking. You have to have some, or jiggle, where you will call it. Yeah.
0:29:36 You have to have a jiggle or a giddy-up before you even get into your run. Yeah. That adjusts
0:29:41 your run. Is that why this is obviously the broad jump? But Luz Long, I notice, he does this sort
0:29:45 of like hitch in his leg before he starts running. Is that what the giddy-up is? Yeah. It’s like a
0:29:51 dance. It’s like a preparation. Can you show us what your giddy-up was? Well, it’s like a one, two,
0:29:57 three, four, five. Then you start your run. Yeah. And I taught it to Williams Banks. Uh-huh. No,
0:30:05 yeah. World record. Yeah. I taught it to BikePile World Record. We gave it a shot on the track where,
0:30:09 at the very same time, actual Olympic athletes were practicing for this year’s games.
0:30:16 Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did we set a world record? Not even close.
0:30:21 Did we become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied. But this is the kind
0:30:28 of dedication that deep historical investigations demand. What was – did Jesse Owens have a giddy-up?
0:30:35 No. He had a stand start because he was a sprinter. You see? Yeah. That’s why he was losing the steps
0:30:40 all the time. He didn’t have a jiggle. Well, he didn’t have a jiggle. No. He didn’t have a jiggle
0:30:46 or a giddy-up. Yeah. And it took his competitor to say, “Man, come on. You got to do something first.”
0:30:54 Jesse Owens’ competitor, facing down the pit at the Reichsportfeld, Lutz Long.
0:31:01 Lutz Long was Germany’s champion broad jumper, Hitler’s champion. And he looked the part,
0:31:08 a fine aquiline nose, framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As Owens wrote later,
0:31:13 Hitler was in the stadium that morning to watch. Owens knew that he’d like nothing better than
0:31:21 to see a black man lose to an Aryan. The thought was nagging at him, messing up his focus. And then
0:31:26 he’d looked up at the box where Hitler had been watching the games and saw that when Owens’ turn
0:31:35 came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil. That’s why he was fouling out. He was psyched
0:31:40 out by all of it, distracted. And when he saw how amazing Lutz Long was at the broad jump,
0:31:46 he began to wonder if there was something true about all this Aryan stuff. He was down
0:31:54 to his last jump. And then came the miracle. In an autobiography he published in 1978,
0:31:59 Owens wrote, “Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lutz Long.”
0:32:05 “Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What has taken your goat?”
0:32:07 “Obviously we had to reenact this.”
0:32:13 “I had to smile a little in spite of myself, hearing his mixed up American idiom.
0:32:19 Nothing, I said. You know how it is. He was silent for a few seconds.”
0:32:26 “Yes,” he said finally. “I know how it is, but I also know you are a better jumper than this.
0:32:34 Now, what has taken your goat?” I laughed out loud this time. But I couldn’t tell him,
0:32:39 him above all. I glanced over at the broad jump pit. I was about to be called.
0:32:44 Lutz didn’t waste words, even if he wasn’t sure of which ones to use.
0:32:51 “Is it what Reichkanzer Hitler did?” he asked. I was thunderstruck that he’d say it.
0:33:01 I started to answer, but I didn’t know what to say. “I see,” he said. “Look, we talk about that later.
0:33:06 Now you must jump, and you must qualify. But how?” I shot back.
0:33:13 “I have thought,” he said. “You are like I am. You must do it one hundred percent, correct?”
0:33:20 I nodded. “Yet you must be sure not to foul.” I nodded again, this time in frustration.
0:33:27 And as I did, I heard the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. “Then you do both things,
0:33:34 Jesse. You re-measure your steps. You take off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as hard
0:33:41 as you can, but you need not fear to foul. All at once, the panic emptied out of me like a cloud burst.”
0:33:47 Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel to mark where Long had told him to jump.
0:33:55 He lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on his jersey, and then he ran.
0:34:01 One step, two steps closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit that mark on the towel,
0:34:07 leapt into the air. “And when he finally got that.” He qualified, and later that day,
0:34:13 with Hitler back in the stands, in the medal event itself, “World record.” He set an Olympic record.
0:34:21 And that’s when Lutz Long, the Aryan poster child who had just lost to Jesse Owens,
0:34:27 hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler. “And the Hitler was first, man.”
0:34:35 But Long didn’t just embrace him. According to Jesse Owens, later that night,
0:34:43 they met up in the Olympic village. The hours ticked on, and they stayed up late talking about
0:34:49 their lives, the state of the world, and the uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had
0:34:55 been formed between the men that day, because then the next day, they did it again. And after that,
0:35:03 again, and again, and again. Every single night of the games, they met up to talk.
0:35:10 They became friends. The dream of the Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable
0:35:15 gap between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
0:35:21 After the games, when Owens was back in America, and Lutz Long was still in Nazi Germany,
0:35:26 they wrote letters to each other, even after Long was serving in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army,
0:35:35 back and forth across the Atlantic for years. They kept coming until right before Lutz Long
0:35:42 was killed in the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa. On some lonely desert
0:35:49 hour, he sat down to write one last letter to his friend. “I am here, Jesse, where it seems
0:35:56 there is only the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse.
0:36:03 I fear for my woman who was at home and my young son, Carl, who has never really known his father.”
0:36:11 “My heart tells me, if I be honest with you, that this is the last letter I shall ever write.
0:36:22 If it is so, I ask you something. It is something so very important to me. It is you go to Germany
0:36:30 when this war is done, someday find my Carl and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse,
0:36:38 what times were like when we were not separated by war? I am saying, tell him how things can be
0:36:40 between men on this earth.”
0:36:52 There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone. This story is a big part of the legend of Jesse
0:37:00 Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the Encyclopedia Britannica, there’s the story.
0:37:05 When they made a star-studded Hollywood film about Jesse Owens’ life, Lutz Long and that
0:37:11 qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would help launch the career of the
0:37:16 greatest Olympic documentarian of all time, Bud Greenspan. And I’m not an auctioneer,
0:37:23 but I think it is the reason why Lutz Long’s silver medal sold for nearly half a million dollars
0:37:29 two years ago, about five times the amount earned for any other silver medal at auction.
0:37:36 It’s arguably the most important story in Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic dream. It made
0:37:41 the case that it was good that America went to the Berlin Games, because it made possible this
0:37:50 improbable friendship that transcended even the Second World War. A story that was just too good to be
0:37:54 true.
0:38:05 You can hear the rest of this episode and the whole Hitler’s Olympics series
0:38:11 by following revisionist history. And if you’re looking for more Olympic content,
0:38:17 take a look at Happiness Lab, slight change of plans, and other Pushkin shows. This summer,
0:38:22 we’re all going to the Olympics. Thanks for help with this special episode,
0:38:31 goes to Sarah Nix, Sophie Crane, Sarah Bruguere, and Nina Lawrence.
0:38:31 you
0:38:37 you
0:38:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:09 Pushkin.
0:00:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:18 Hello, hello, Malcolm Glabo here.
0:00:21 Here at Pushkin, we love the Olympics.
0:00:25 [MUSIC]
0:00:30 One of my strongest childhood memories was the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
0:00:33 My homelands, first Olympic Games.
0:00:34 I was a kid.
0:00:38 My family didn’t have a television, but we rented one just for the occasion.
0:00:42 Two rabbit ears on top of a grainy black and white set.
0:00:46 We put the TV in the fireplace, because there was no other place for it.
0:00:49 And I watched everything.
0:00:53 The Romanian Nadia Cominic bewitching the world in gymnastics.
0:00:54 >> Perfect, yeah, perfect.
0:00:56 >> My running hero, John Walker,
0:01:00 powering away around the final curve to win the men’s 1500 meters.
0:01:02 I still get nervous thinking about that race.
0:01:04 [MUSIC]
0:01:10 Vassivarin’s improbable double in the 5000 meters and the 10,000 meters.
0:01:14 Alberto Wanterina, Cornelia Ender, Don Quarry, and
0:01:19 the women’s 4×100 freestyle relay, maybe the greatest swimming race ever.
0:01:24 [MUSIC]
0:01:28 I was a little kid, and I fell in love with the Olympics.
0:01:29 And I’ve been in love ever since.
0:01:35 There are just so many good Olympic stories to tell.
0:01:40 So this summer, a bunch of Pushkin shows are giving you their unique takes on the games.
0:01:45 Over at the Happiness Lab, Lori Santos will be talking with the coach who coaches
0:01:46 the coaches.
0:01:50 Maya Shankar is going deep with a whole suite of swimmers
0:01:53 talking about their slight change of plans.
0:01:58 And my colleague, Ben Dadaf Haferi, and I have done a nine part series about
0:02:03 the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi Olympics.
0:02:07 And today, I’m sharing a taste of some of my favorite stories from Pushkin’s
0:02:08 Olympic summer.
0:02:12 One from Revisionist History, another from What’s Your Problem.
0:02:17 And to kick us all off, a story from Tim Harford over at Cautionary Tales.
0:02:23 For sheer myth-making about distance running, you can’t beat the marathon.
0:02:29 After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon,
0:02:34 a chap called Philippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the good news.
0:02:37 And then, so the story goes, collapsed and died.
0:02:42 Thus began the legend of the marathon.
0:02:49 This is a race so gruelling, a challenge so overwhelming that it could literally kill you.
0:02:56 Women weren’t allowed to compete in the first Olympics, let alone in the marathon.
0:03:02 If it could kill a man, can you imagine what it would do to the fragile frame of a woman?
0:03:08 The International Olympic Committee were reluctant to let women compete in any events
0:03:15 at all, and when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in 1928,
0:03:18 the longest women’s race was 800 meters.
0:03:21 It was a disaster.
0:03:25 The newspapers of the day reported the disturbing scenes.
0:03:28 The New York Evening Post.
0:03:31 Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women,
0:03:36 five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape.
0:03:43 The Chicago Tribune added that one finisher collapsed into unconsciousness
0:03:44 and required medical attention.
0:03:47 A press syndicate reporter commented,
0:03:52 “It was not a very edifying spectacle to see a group of fine girls running themselves
0:03:54 into a state of exhaustion.”
0:03:59 Other writers described the races as a disgrace or dangerous,
0:04:06 or a pined that 200 meters was surely the maximum distance a woman could attempt,
0:04:11 without premature aging and damage to her reproductive capacity.
0:04:16 But this is all, of course, nonsense.
0:04:21 Not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity, all of it.
0:04:24 There weren’t 11 women in the race, there were nine.
0:04:29 Not only did the gold medalist, Lena Radker-Batshauer, break the world record,
0:04:34 but so did the silver and bronze medalists and the three women behind them,
0:04:39 which is, I suppose, what happens when an event doesn’t have many precedents.
0:04:43 Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor.
0:04:45 No matter.
0:04:51 Rather than celebrating the greatest women’s middle distance race in history,
0:04:55 the pundits wrote whatever sensationalised nonsense they felt like writing.
0:04:59 The International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse
0:05:06 to keep the women’s 800 meters out of the Olympics for the next three decades.
0:05:16 If women couldn’t be allowed to run 800 meters until 1960,
0:05:21 you can imagine what the male-dominated athletic establishment of the 1960s
0:05:24 thought of the idea of women running a marathon.
0:05:29 But there were a few independent-spirited women who liked to run,
0:05:33 and naturally enough their thoughts turned to that iconic distance.
0:05:37 One of those women was Catherine Switzer.
0:05:41 As a girl, she told her father she wanted to be a cheerleader.
0:05:45 “You don’t want to be a cheerleader, honey,” he told her.
0:05:50 “Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you.”
0:05:55 He encouraged her to run a mile each day to get fit for sports, and she did.
0:06:02 She became a journalism student at Syracuse, where there were no women’s sports teams at all,
0:06:05 so she asked to train with a men’s cross-country team.
0:06:07 “Sure,” said the head coach.
0:06:11 And then she heard him laughing with the other coaches behind her back.
0:06:14 That only made her more determined.
0:06:20 More encouraging was volunteer coach Arnie Briggs, the university mailman,
0:06:25 and at 50 years of age, the veteran of 15 Boston marathons.
0:06:31 He was full of stories about the classic marathon, which had first been held in the late 1800s.
0:06:37 And one December night, on a miserable training run through a snowstorm,
0:06:43 as cars skidded and honked around, Catherine had heard one too many of those tales.
0:06:47 “Let’s quit talking about the Boston marathon and run the damn thing.
0:06:53 No woman can run the Boston marathon. Why not? I’m running 10 miles a night.”
0:06:59 Arnie relented. “No dame ever ran the Boston marathon.
0:07:03 If any woman could do it, you could, but you’d have to prove it to me.
0:07:07 If you ran the distance in practice, I’d be the first to take you to Boston.”
0:07:09 “Now you’re talking,” she thought.
0:07:16 A few months later, and three weeks before the marathon, they ran 31 miles in training.
0:07:22 Arnie turned gray and passed out, but Catherine was feeling great.
0:07:26 The next day, at Arnie’s insistence, she signed up for the race,
0:07:31 signing her name, as she always did, K. V. Switzer.
0:07:39 She and Arnie checked the rulebook. There was nothing forbidding women to enter.
0:07:47 Arnie signed up too, as did Catherine’s boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all 235 pounds of him.
0:07:52 He was a promising hammer thrower, had been a serious college football player,
0:07:58 and no, he wasn’t planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and if a girl can
0:08:08 run a marathon, I can run a marathon. On Wednesday, April 19, 1967, race day, it was snowing.
0:08:15 Most of the field were running in track suits. There were 741 entrants, and Catherine
0:08:21 pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride. K. Switzer, 261.
0:08:26 From the other runners, she got a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome.
0:08:29 “Hey, gonna go the whole way?”
0:08:34 “Gosh, it’s great to see a girl here. Can you give me some tips to get my wife to run?
0:08:36 She’d love it if I could just get her started.”
0:08:44 Arnie was beaming. Big Tom, unmissable in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt,
0:08:48 wasn’t happy that Catherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention.
0:08:55 “Take it off,” he said. “I shan’t,” she replied. The crowd of runners squeezed
0:09:03 closer and closer together as they approached the start. And then, they were off and feeling great.
0:09:08 Just four miles later, the fun would stop.
0:09:20 Catherine Switzer was running with her little group, including Coach Arnie and boyfriend Big Tom,
0:09:24 feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of the other runners.
0:09:30 At the four-mile mark, the press truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers
0:09:36 a good shot of that dame who was running the marathon. Then, Switzer recalled,
0:09:42 “A man with an overcoat and felt hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking his finger at me.
0:09:46 He said something to me as I passed and reached out for my hand,
0:09:47 catching my glove instead and pulling it off.”
0:09:55 Who was it? A protester? A crank? But he was wearing an official’s ribbon.
0:10:02 Moments later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes coming up fast behind me.
0:10:07 When a runner hears that kind of noise, it’s usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my head
0:10:13 around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man,
0:10:19 with bare teeth, was set to pounce. And before I could react, he grabbed my shoulder and flung
0:10:25 me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.” Catherine was terrified.
0:10:32 She realized she’d wet her pants in fear, and she turned to sprint away as the furious official
0:10:37 tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt. The press truck was still there, the cameras were
0:10:47 whirring and clicking, and then, seemingly from nowhere, 235 pounds of orange-clad college football
0:10:53 player crashed into the official who flew sideways and landed on the roadside in a crumpled heap.
0:11:02 “Oh God,” thought Catherine, “Big Tom’s killed him. We’re in trouble. Run like hell,”
0:11:07 yelled Arnie, and they sprinted away from the scene with the press truck in pursuit,
0:11:14 cameras still clicking. It was an extraordinary scene, and perhaps the strangest thing about it?
0:11:21 Catherine Switzer wasn’t the first woman to run a marathon. She wasn’t the first woman to run the
0:11:28 Boston Marathon. In fact, she wasn’t even the leading woman in this race. A mile ahead of her,
0:11:36 Roberta “Bobby” Gibb, was making serene progress without an irate race official in sight.
0:11:44 There’s so much in this “Cautionary Tales” episode. Two groundbreaking female marathoners
0:11:53 and an epic 268-mile race, 268 miles, along the spine of England. You can find it now in the “Cautionary
0:12:06 Tales” feed. Here are two things that define our era, an absolute obsession with sports and incredible
0:12:14 technological progress. Sylvia Blemker works at their intersection. She’s a professor of biomedical
0:12:21 engineering at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of Springbok Analytics. She figured
0:12:27 out how to combine MRI scans with artificial intelligence to create incredibly detailed
0:12:34 analyses of our muscles. Springbok’s clients include Olympic athletes, major league baseball,
0:12:40 and a bunch of professional basketball and soccer teams. Sylvia Blemker talked about how her work
0:12:47 helps elite athletes and people with neuromuscular diseases. In this interview with Jacob Goldstein,
0:12:54 for “What’s Your Problem?” What’s one surprising thing your work has taught you about elite athletes?
0:13:02 I never thought I would see muscles that were so developed. They broke our scale.
0:13:09 Wow. Yeah. Like it was just too big, the machine, the AI couldn’t figure out what it is?
0:13:13 Well, no. The AI found it, but we’re like our kind of rating system.
0:13:19 Wow. Was there a particular athlete or a particular sport or a particular muscle? What muscle broke
0:13:23 the scale? The gluteus maximus breaks it, a fair amount.
0:13:26 No kidding. Yeah. Fantastic.
0:13:27 Yes. It’s a pain in my butt.
0:13:36 Like because it’s too big? Yeah. Yeah. It’s just so big. The other thing is that they have some tiny
0:13:43 muscles too. They have smaller than a normal person’s muscle. Yes. Much smaller. They put
0:13:48 their muscle where they need it. What’s an example? What muscle is tiny and what kind of athlete?
0:13:58 Calf muscles are small in most fast athletes. You look at a sprinter or a running back.
0:14:07 It’s just all quad, no calf? All thigh, no calf. Yeah. It kind of makes sense because if you’re
0:14:12 trying to run fast, you wouldn’t want to put a lot of mass at the end of your leg. It adds a lot
0:14:18 of inertia to move your leg because the muscles are important for sprinting. That’s the interesting
0:14:26 thing, but they’re small. They’re very small. I’m particularly interested at this moment in the
0:14:36 sports piece of what you do. I’m curious, by the way, do you work with any Olympic teams
0:14:43 or Olympic athletes? Yeah. We’ve actually been working with several different Olympic athletes.
0:14:50 The ones that probably that come to mind most are multiple players on the U.S. Women’s National
0:14:59 Soccer Team. Oh, cool. Tell me the story of that work. They came to you. What did they want
0:15:06 when they came to you? How did that begin? They came to us along with their team. The
0:15:12 technology we provide, an athlete could understand it, but really with their team to help them figure
0:15:19 out how to keep athletes healthy. What did they say when they came to you?
0:15:29 For example, one athlete that’s coming to mind had a known imbalance, side to side,
0:15:34 that based on a history of injury. They really wanted to know where that imbalance was coming
0:15:41 from. The woman had hurt one of her legs, and that leg was, even after she came back, that leg was
0:15:46 weaker, essentially than the other. I mean, is that the sort of gross macro view?
0:15:52 Yeah, exactly. That’s a nice way to put it. And they wanted a sort of finer, like, okay,
0:15:57 but we can see that. But what’s going on on the inside, like muscle by muscle, tell us that?
0:16:03 Yes, exactly. That’s precisely what we do. We go on the inside. Because on the outside,
0:16:11 you see perhaps that her knee extensor or quads seem weaker on one side than the other, but there’s
0:16:17 four quads, quadriceps, four muscles. And so it’s not clear which of those muscles are actually
0:16:23 the culprit for that imbalance and in what way. Good. So this is their question. And then
0:16:33 what happens next? So this first step is an MRI scan. And so with these athletes or teams,
0:16:42 we have ways to connect them with an MRI machine, whether it be through an imaging center that
0:16:50 they partner with, or we’ve even actually brought MRI mobile trucks to sites to make it easier.
0:16:54 So like the players run off the field and get an MRI and go back and keep playing?
0:17:01 Yeah, kind of, yeah. It helps just with the timing of things. But so first we connect them there,
0:17:08 so it takes about 10 minutes. Then they send those pictures up into the cloud, into our server.
0:17:16 And then we crunch through it. And then we send back a report on their muscles. We also have
0:17:23 what we call interactive viewer. And it’s presented in the form of a 3D model, three-dimensional
0:17:28 model. So you actually see your own legs, the muscles and bones, your own muscles and bones
0:17:35 that we’ve identified from the images, going through a process called segmentation, where we
0:17:39 find all the muscles and bones, and then we reconstruct them. So it’s kind of like a digital
0:17:45 twin of that person that they can see on their computer. And so along with it are all these
0:17:54 metrics that helps them understand their balance, the development or strength of the muscles,
0:18:01 and the health of the muscles. And so in the case of this soccer player who came to you, who
0:18:06 knew she had some kind of problem with her quadriceps on one side, but didn’t know what
0:18:13 was going on, what did you find? We found some imbalances, actually not just in those muscles.
0:18:22 It turns out that it’s all connected. So I think there were at least one calf
0:18:27 muscle and then some in the, especially in the deep hip, those were impacted.
0:18:36 So yeah, it kind of shows up everywhere. To what extent can trainers or strength coaches
0:18:44 develop programs that are sufficiently kind of fine-grained to match the kind of fine-grained
0:18:50 findings you’re having, right? Like for example, if you find, as I understand you did, that a
0:18:56 soccer player has one particular quadricep that is weak. Are there workouts that target a single
0:19:01 quadricep and not the others? Yep, there are. That’s cool. For whichever quadricep you just,
0:19:09 just for fun, give me an example. One way that it’s very simple is using something called biofeedback.
0:19:18 So you can measure whether you use something called EMG, which is a way to measure how much
0:19:23 electrical activity is a muscle, and then you can see which muscles you’re using for a given task.
0:19:28 So if you give people the feedback of which of those muscles they’re using and say,
0:19:33 “Oh, no, you’re not using this one. Use this one more,” that actually works very effectively.
0:19:40 Oh, really? So you can basically use your brain if you’re getting the feedback to focus on which
0:19:45 quadricep you’re training. Exactly. Yeah. And there’s other ways you can give the feedback
0:19:50 in other different ways. But yeah, our brains are very good at that once they get feedback. They’re
0:19:55 very good at learning. That’s cool, especially somehow to think of with elite athletes, right,
0:20:00 because they’re already presumably super dialed in in terms of the relationship between their brain
0:20:05 and their body at this very elite level. Exactly. Yeah, the other, I was going to mention,
0:20:14 a lot of players and teams use this not just one time, but over time. So they’ll get a scan,
0:20:21 figure out a plan, work on that for maybe three months or six months, and then do another scan
0:20:26 and see how things are progressing and adjust accordingly. So that’s definitely another way
0:20:32 to, in the long term, see if what they’re doing is resulting in the change that they’re hoping to see.
0:20:38 So what happened with that soccer player who had the weak quadricep and other related
0:20:46 pros? Yeah, no, I think she’s doing great, like staying healthy and, you know, getting ready.
0:20:50 Yeah, so I know you can’t tell us her name, but will we see her in the Olympics this summer?
0:20:57 Yes, yeah. You can hear more from that interview and a bunch of other stories from people who are
0:21:04 creating groundbreaking new technologies on what’s your problem. I’ll be back in a minute
0:21:08 with the final leg of this relay race through Pushkin’s Olympic Summer.
0:21:26 Our last story today is one from Revisionist History’s series about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
0:21:33 The series is all about why America chose to compete in the games when it was already clear
0:21:41 who Hitler was and what the Nazis stood for. Ben Nadeff-Haffrey takes everyone’s favorite story
0:21:48 from the Berlin Olympics about two athletes making good on the promise of the games and breaks it wide
0:22:03 open. About 4,000 athletes competed in the 1936 Olympic Games. Jesse Owens is the one
0:22:18 people remember. Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
0:22:26 self-effacing, soft-spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In 1935, as a 21-year-old, he’d already
0:22:32 set three world records in a single day, all in the same hour, with a bad back.
0:22:44 And in 1936, even the Germans were expecting something great from him.
0:22:56 It’s the desire of every athlete to win a first place in the Olympic Games.
0:23:01 In 1936, he was slated to compete in three events.
0:23:18 100 meters, 200 meters, and the broad jump. Later, they added a fourth event,
0:23:26 the four by 100 meter relay. He would win gold in all four, the only person to win four gold medals
0:23:33 in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you know the name Jesse Owens. But it all could have turned
0:23:42 out differently. Because of that broad jump. You’ve seen a broad jump before. Today, it’s called
0:23:47 the long jump. And it’s one of the more dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers sprint down the runway,
0:23:53 hit a takeoff board, and they look like they’re flying. And then they land in a huge spray of sand.
0:24:00 So, the morning of August 4th, 1936, 10.30 a.m., in the Reichsportfeld,
0:24:07 it’s the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers go on to the final. Owens had just run
0:24:13 his heat in the 200 meters. Immediately after, he headed over to the pit. It was the third day of
0:24:19 the Games. And by then, he already had his first gold medal. So, it was a surprise when he botched
0:24:25 his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it was a practice run. Notice what though,
0:24:31 he had two more tries. So, he lined himself back up and started jogging down the runway.
0:24:40 He took off and came up short. He had one jump left. If he screwed up that last jump,
0:24:45 he’d have been out of the contest. And he’d have gone from being the only athlete to win
0:24:52 four gold medals in 1936 to one of three athletes who’d won three golds, right up there with Conrad
0:24:58 Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek, who actually would have had more total medals than him. And I ask you,
0:25:05 be honest. Have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek? No. And probably,
0:25:11 if he’d missed that final qualifying jump, you wouldn’t have heard of Jesse Owens either.
0:25:22 So, after the first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then, something miraculous happened.
0:25:29 Something that changed the course of Jesse Owens’ life and made him a legend.
0:25:36 It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled in over the stadium.
0:25:43 Around 100,000 people were in the stands watching. In America’s most famous athlete,
0:25:52 Jesse Owens was screwing up. Badly. Which makes no sense. All he had to do was jump 7.15 meters to
0:25:58 qualify. He already had a world record for jumping a meter farther than that. So, what was going wrong?
0:26:06 Malcolm and I decided to ask an expert. A legend, actually. It was about 10 years ago or so,
0:26:13 at the age of 65, I think. And I jumped further than my high school mark. Is that right? Yeah.
0:26:16 And you’re the first American to jump 57 feet. Yeah.
0:26:22 One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time. Milan Tiff.
0:26:28 I actually jumped 60 feet, but they wouldn’t recognize it, because I jumped out of the pit.
0:26:36 And where did you do that? Right here, you see, wow. And I completely jumped over the sand pit
0:26:39 and landed on the grass. I had grass stains all over the back of me.
0:26:48 Going to see Milan was Malcolm’s idea. So, when I was in high school, starting at the age of 12,
0:26:53 I became a competitive runner. And I was obsessed with track and field. And I
0:27:01 subscribed to track and field news, the Bible of the sport, as it’s called. And Milan Tiff was
0:27:07 this extraordinary… First of all, he was astonishing looking. He looked, there was something
0:27:13 kind of ethereal about him. And he had, as a kid, he couldn’t walk, because he had, I think,
0:27:19 polio or something. And he was also an artist. Really, really bright colors and kind of wildly
0:27:26 imaginative and a little bit psychedelic. But I was just obsessed with him as this kind of like,
0:27:33 this strange otherworldly figure. And he was a favorite in 1980. Had we not boycotted the
0:27:40 1980 games, he might well have won a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He’s going to be a little
0:27:47 bit… He might be a little… I don’t know, but I have a sense that he might be a little out there.
0:27:53 This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff, I felt like I had taken
0:27:58 some kind of intense psychedelic, the effects of which I’ve yet to wear off. The first humans,
0:28:04 some believable. I understood that to walk is just to take a number of tiny long jumps.
0:28:10 I found myself transfixed by an actually gorgeous painting of Milan’s portraying a pair of empty,
0:28:16 tidy whiteies suspended in a blue abstract space called mysteriously Palm Springs.
0:28:22 And the birds and the trees would all fly down. They’re just tapped into the same frequency as I
0:28:27 have when I’m running and jumping. We flew out to Los Angeles where he lives so he could take us out
0:28:32 to the UCLA track. And when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above us the
0:28:37 whole time, which only made everything a little more surreal. And Olympic legends just walking
0:28:44 up to him, literally bowing down. This, I think, because they wouldn’t normally see him. He told
0:28:55 us he prefers to run in the morning, by which he meant 3am. Tiff took us out to the broad jump pit
0:29:01 to help us get inside Jesse Owens’s mind, which we thought he could do because he’s a master of
0:29:07 the approach. The part Jesse Owens was screwing up. But also because… So you actually knew Jesse
0:29:14 Owens when you were a kid? Yeah, yeah. You know, we, that’s it. And he tells the stories. Yeah.
0:29:19 And I hear all the stories. And, you know, he talked about his experience in Berlin.
0:29:26 You know. We asked him to tell us about how you’re supposed to approach a jump. Yeah. You gotta have
0:29:31 a giddy-up first. That kind of rocking. You have to have some, or jiggle, where you will call it. Yeah.
0:29:36 You have to have a jiggle or a giddy-up before you even get into your run. Yeah. That adjusts
0:29:41 your run. Is that why this is obviously the broad jump? But Luz Long, I notice, he does this sort
0:29:45 of like hitch in his leg before he starts running. Is that what the giddy-up is? Yeah. It’s like a
0:29:51 dance. It’s like a preparation. Can you show us what your giddy-up was? Well, it’s like a one, two,
0:29:57 three, four, five. Then you start your run. Yeah. And I taught it to Williams Banks. Uh-huh. No,
0:30:05 yeah. World record. Yeah. I taught it to BikePile World Record. We gave it a shot on the track where,
0:30:09 at the very same time, actual Olympic athletes were practicing for this year’s games.
0:30:16 Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did we set a world record? Not even close.
0:30:21 Did we become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied. But this is the kind
0:30:28 of dedication that deep historical investigations demand. What was – did Jesse Owens have a giddy-up?
0:30:35 No. He had a stand start because he was a sprinter. You see? Yeah. That’s why he was losing the steps
0:30:40 all the time. He didn’t have a jiggle. Well, he didn’t have a jiggle. No. He didn’t have a jiggle
0:30:46 or a giddy-up. Yeah. And it took his competitor to say, “Man, come on. You got to do something first.”
0:30:54 Jesse Owens’ competitor, facing down the pit at the Reichsportfeld, Lutz Long.
0:31:01 Lutz Long was Germany’s champion broad jumper, Hitler’s champion. And he looked the part,
0:31:08 a fine aquiline nose, framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As Owens wrote later,
0:31:13 Hitler was in the stadium that morning to watch. Owens knew that he’d like nothing better than
0:31:21 to see a black man lose to an Aryan. The thought was nagging at him, messing up his focus. And then
0:31:26 he’d looked up at the box where Hitler had been watching the games and saw that when Owens’ turn
0:31:35 came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil. That’s why he was fouling out. He was psyched
0:31:40 out by all of it, distracted. And when he saw how amazing Lutz Long was at the broad jump,
0:31:46 he began to wonder if there was something true about all this Aryan stuff. He was down
0:31:54 to his last jump. And then came the miracle. In an autobiography he published in 1978,
0:31:59 Owens wrote, “Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lutz Long.”
0:32:05 “Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What has taken your goat?”
0:32:07 “Obviously we had to reenact this.”
0:32:13 “I had to smile a little in spite of myself, hearing his mixed up American idiom.
0:32:19 Nothing, I said. You know how it is. He was silent for a few seconds.”
0:32:26 “Yes,” he said finally. “I know how it is, but I also know you are a better jumper than this.
0:32:34 Now, what has taken your goat?” I laughed out loud this time. But I couldn’t tell him,
0:32:39 him above all. I glanced over at the broad jump pit. I was about to be called.
0:32:44 Lutz didn’t waste words, even if he wasn’t sure of which ones to use.
0:32:51 “Is it what Reichkanzer Hitler did?” he asked. I was thunderstruck that he’d say it.
0:33:01 I started to answer, but I didn’t know what to say. “I see,” he said. “Look, we talk about that later.
0:33:06 Now you must jump, and you must qualify. But how?” I shot back.
0:33:13 “I have thought,” he said. “You are like I am. You must do it one hundred percent, correct?”
0:33:20 I nodded. “Yet you must be sure not to foul.” I nodded again, this time in frustration.
0:33:27 And as I did, I heard the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. “Then you do both things,
0:33:34 Jesse. You re-measure your steps. You take off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as hard
0:33:41 as you can, but you need not fear to foul. All at once, the panic emptied out of me like a cloud burst.”
0:33:47 Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel to mark where Long had told him to jump.
0:33:55 He lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on his jersey, and then he ran.
0:34:01 One step, two steps closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit that mark on the towel,
0:34:07 leapt into the air. “And when he finally got that.” He qualified, and later that day,
0:34:13 with Hitler back in the stands, in the medal event itself, “World record.” He set an Olympic record.
0:34:21 And that’s when Lutz Long, the Aryan poster child who had just lost to Jesse Owens,
0:34:27 hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler. “And the Hitler was first, man.”
0:34:35 But Long didn’t just embrace him. According to Jesse Owens, later that night,
0:34:43 they met up in the Olympic village. The hours ticked on, and they stayed up late talking about
0:34:49 their lives, the state of the world, and the uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had
0:34:55 been formed between the men that day, because then the next day, they did it again. And after that,
0:35:03 again, and again, and again. Every single night of the games, they met up to talk.
0:35:10 They became friends. The dream of the Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable
0:35:15 gap between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
0:35:21 After the games, when Owens was back in America, and Lutz Long was still in Nazi Germany,
0:35:26 they wrote letters to each other, even after Long was serving in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army,
0:35:35 back and forth across the Atlantic for years. They kept coming until right before Lutz Long
0:35:42 was killed in the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa. On some lonely desert
0:35:49 hour, he sat down to write one last letter to his friend. “I am here, Jesse, where it seems
0:35:56 there is only the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse.
0:36:03 I fear for my woman who was at home and my young son, Carl, who has never really known his father.”
0:36:11 “My heart tells me, if I be honest with you, that this is the last letter I shall ever write.
0:36:22 If it is so, I ask you something. It is something so very important to me. It is you go to Germany
0:36:30 when this war is done, someday find my Carl and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse,
0:36:38 what times were like when we were not separated by war? I am saying, tell him how things can be
0:36:40 between men on this earth.”
0:36:52 There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone. This story is a big part of the legend of Jesse
0:37:00 Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the Encyclopedia Britannica, there’s the story.
0:37:05 When they made a star-studded Hollywood film about Jesse Owens’ life, Lutz Long and that
0:37:11 qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would help launch the career of the
0:37:16 greatest Olympic documentarian of all time, Bud Greenspan. And I’m not an auctioneer,
0:37:23 but I think it is the reason why Lutz Long’s silver medal sold for nearly half a million dollars
0:37:29 two years ago, about five times the amount earned for any other silver medal at auction.
0:37:36 It’s arguably the most important story in Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic dream. It made
0:37:41 the case that it was good that America went to the Berlin Games, because it made possible this
0:37:50 improbable friendship that transcended even the Second World War. A story that was just too good to be
0:37:54 true.
0:38:05 You can hear the rest of this episode and the whole Hitler’s Olympics series
0:38:11 by following revisionist history. And if you’re looking for more Olympic content,
0:38:17 take a look at Happiness Lab, slight change of plans, and other Pushkin shows. This summer,
0:38:22 we’re all going to the Olympics. Thanks for help with this special episode,
0:38:31 goes to Sarah Nix, Sophie Crane, Sarah Bruguere, and Nina Lawrence.
0:38:31 you
0:38:37 you
0:38:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks to entrepreneurs and engineers about how they’ll change the world — once they solve a few problems. Coming March 17th.
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