May 8, 2024 • 51 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 171: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: First of several underemphasized meta-headlines from Stormy Daniels' testimony: Trump’s lawyer Ms. Necklace seems to have made inroads in her effort to convince the jury that Ms. Daniels would say or do almost anything for money. Uh, she’s a pornographic actress. Whether you approve that profession, or abhor it, or like me you’re agnostic: one statement should not be among those you express in shock or dismay or surprise: “Oh no, she’s a pornographic actress, she will do or say almost anything for money.”
Which leads to the next meta headline. My GOD the media, especially the television networks, treated her testimony like they were cicadas and Stormy Daniels was the ring girl who stepped between the ropes to announce the start of year 13. My GOD they all awoke from somnambulance about bank records and cell phone extractions and the testimony of comptrollers and people named RONA and were able to say – at least to themselves – good grief, get a load of those rebuttals.
Which leads into the next meta headline: Stormy Daniels is not on trial here. She’s only incidental to the case. That is NOT what you would have thought if you watched coverage of this case. The sex isn’t illegal, the money isn’t illegal, Trump isn’t illegal, Daniels changing her story isn’t illegal. Buying her story to keep it from becoming public in the weeks before an election and then hiding the payoffs to prevent THEM from becoming public in the weeks before an election – THAT’S illegal and all those boring receipts and records and notations written by hand by a guy named Allan – with TWO L’S – THAT is the case. And denying it as Trump has – LYING about it, as Trump has – is why Stormy Daniels is there. To testify.
I have to admit I was a little surprised by the last headline. If the Monday juxtaposition of Trump Maybe Going To Jail Over The Gag Order and Kristi Noem Quintuples Down On The Idea That Shooting Puppies In The Face Is A Good Thing underscored how MAGA believes it has the right to kill, then YESTERDAY’S juxtaposition of Noem’s disastrous media tour – more on that shortly – and Trump On Trial underscored that these really deeply disturbed, borderline personalities, do NOT do well when confronted with reality from which they cannot run and they cannot hide.
And then there's Noem, who got beaten up on Fox by my old friend Stu Varney and, stunningly, on NewsMax. But it's all right, she still thinks she's killing it. Yeah, the way his presidential roll-out killed it for Greg Stillson.
B-Block (24:33) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL/SPORTS: Seen anything about this week being the 70th Anniversary of Roger Bannister "breaking the 4-Minute mile?" There's one problem.
C-Block (42:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL/SPORTS PART 2: That one problem? Roger Bannister WAS NOT the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. It's a sad story with a lot of bias and even racism in it.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Well
Trump didn't sleep through any of that, did he. There
(00:27):
are a couple of big picture headlines from day one
of Stormy Daniel's testimony that I have not seen mentioned
anywhere else. First of all, Trump's lawyer Ms Necklace, everybody reports,
seems to have made inroads in her effort to convince
the jury that miss Daniels would say or do almost
anything for money. She's a pornographic actress. Whether you approve
(00:53):
of that profession or abhorred, or like me, you're agnostic.
I mean there are a lot of other lines of
work that are way less defensible, like foreclosing on mortgages
or working for Fox News. Whatever your reaction towards people
in the adult entertainment industry, one statement should never be
among those you express in shock or dismay or surprise.
(01:17):
Oh no, she's a portographic actress. She will do or
say almost anything for money if her profession and the
requisite flexibility her experience with a sleezebag like Trump demands
of her A I did sleep with him. B Oh no,
he's suing me. I'm changing my story. I didn't sleep
with him. See, they're willing to pay me a lot
(01:39):
of money for my story and bury it. So yes,
I did sleep with him. D he sued me again,
so I hate him. If that surprises you, have I
got bad news for you about Santa, which leads to
the second meta headline, My god, the media, especially the
(02:00):
television networks, treated her testimony like they were cicadas, and
Stormy Daniels was the ring girl who stepped between the
ropes to announce the start of the thirteenth year. My god,
they all awoke from somnambulance about bank records and cell
phone extractions and the testimony of comptrollers and people named Rona,
(02:25):
and they were able to say, at least to themselves,
good grief. Get a load of those rebuttals. The two
most sex obsessed groups of people in the world, to
my experience in sixty five years on this planet, are
eighth grade boys and reporters, and I am not sure
(02:47):
which one wins. But as I read and watched the coverage,
it was clear yesterday was their day, and today will
be the day they get to relive their day. And tomorrow,
when she goes back on the stands, that could be
an even better day for them. It was so obvious
(03:08):
that when participants in media insist it's not about sex,
what they actually mean is it's only about sex. So
obvious that I swear I saw Wolf Blitzer's face move.
Speaking of CNN, if for those of us old enough
to have been forced to cover it, forced to wade
through it, forced to anchor it, forced to treat it
(03:29):
as if it had not been about sex and only
about sex, yesterday it was a one hundred percent flashback
to the Monica Lewinsky story. And to tie it all together,
who was there anchoring for CNN? Jake Tapper. Jake Tapper
who first bobbed up out of the primordial ocean of
(03:51):
non entities in local Washington twentieth century media, because nine
days after the Clinton Lewinsky scandal broke, he wrote an
article for Washington City Paper called I dated Monica Lewinsky
and got a career out of it. Anyway, more on
that momentarily, especially why I say anyway, the coverage yesterday
(04:16):
was sex, cross examination, sex. There were contradictions, sex tough,
cross sexeminar, I'm sorry, examination sex and sex and sex
and sex, which leads into the fourth meta headline, Stormy
Daniels is not on trial here. Stormy Daniels is incidental
to this case. That is not what you would have
(04:39):
thought if you watched coverage of it yesterday. But the
sex isn't illegal, the money isn't illegal. Trump isn't illegal.
Daniels changing her story isn't illegal. Buying her story to
keep it from becoming public in the weeks before an
election for president, and then hiding those payoffs to prevent
(04:59):
them from becoming public in the weeks before a presidential election,
that's illegal. And all those boring receipts and records and
notations written by hand by a guy named Alan Alan
with two l's, that is the case for the prosecution,
(05:20):
my lord, and denying that there was sex as Trump passed,
lying about that, as Trump has That is why Stormy
Daniels is there to testify that he's lying. And she's
also there, so wolf Blitzer's face moves, which brings me
lastly to the fifth Big Picture headline. And I have
(05:42):
to admit I was a little surprised by this one.
If the Monday juxtaposition of Trump may be going to
jail over the gag order and Christy Nome quintuples down
on the idea that shooting puppies in the face is
a good thing. If that underscored how MAGA believes it
has the right to kill, then yesterday's juxtaposition of Nome's
disastrous media tour more on that debris shortly and Trump
(06:07):
on trial. This underscores that these really deeply disturbed borderline
personalities like Trump and Gnome and all the other MAGA frauds,
they do not do well when confronted with reality from
which they cannot run and they cannot hide. It is sadly,
absolutely possible that Trump does not get convicted. I mean,
(06:31):
it's a trial. OJ Simpson did not get convicted at trial.
But at about the same percentage likelihood is the chance
that Trump will stroke out from embarrassment. First, I know,
he does not seem capable of embarrassment. I mean, he
goes out in public with hair like that every day
(06:51):
and bronzer on it more makeup than Christynome wears. Then again,
I don't think he's ever been metaphorically tied to a
chair this way and been forced to suffer through harassment
for at least two days. While the fate of the
nation rests in part on the shoulders of a woman
who chooses to be called Stormy. The creepiness of him
(07:15):
telling her just before sex that she reminded him of
his daughter, That doesn't surprise anybody. The fact that it
was said under oath and probably made his own lawyers
lean slightly further away from him at the table, that
probably does surprise people. He showed her a picture of
his wife, also a totally natural bit of foreplay, then said,
(07:39):
don't worry about her. They don't even sleep in the
same room. And that's the least shocking shock of all time.
That she said he was so rude she should spank him,
and he acquiesced, all right, judge him if you want to,
But the rest of us are trying to put him
in jail for life. We get the idea. But the
ultimate moment of reality spanking Trump yesterday was when Stormy
(08:03):
Daniels explained but he asked her questions about the adult
entertainment industry. Is their condom use? Are you tested for STDs?
Is there a physician on staff? These are questions about
the adult entertainment industry and film industry that may have
had an ulterior motive When you stop to think about them.
(08:24):
But the one line that will stick to me always
is Stormy Daniels, then insisting that just before they had sex,
Trump asked her do you get health insurance? That is
the greatest awful pickup line I have ever heard. Hey baby,
(08:47):
do you get health insurance? Some other lesser headlines. No,
I want to believe it too, But no, it's not true.
Trump is not skipping his son's high school graduation, after
all that nine days from now to instead go campaign
in Minnesota, rendering the entire self martyrdom of the judge.
(09:09):
Won't let me go into just another confidence trick. The
graduation is at ten am Eastern. The campaign event in
Minnesota is at five Central, sixth Eastern. The flight is
three hours and he has his own plane. Sorry, this
is actually this is actually me defending Trump that day.
(09:30):
But yes, his concierge judge, the former chief hot yoga
correspondent of the Miami Nuevo Herald, Eileen Cannon, she has
delayed the start of the espionage trial in Florida indefinitely.
Because I'm translating this from legal ease, there's too much
stuff for her to think about before she schedules a
(09:50):
start date. Canon has been in the bag for Trump
since before this case began, and if he has not
yet decided to do it, now is time for Jack
Smith to go to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
and ask if there might be any other ex Chief
Hot Yoga correspondence of the Miami Nuevo Herald now serving
(10:11):
as judges who have not violated all legal ethics and
exhausted all possible justifications for running out the clock on
behalf of the creature who appointed her, and also to
start an investigation of this woman Cannon, because at this
rate the question is no longer and if the Trump
documents trial in Florida will end before the twenty twenty
four election, it's whether or not it will end before
(10:31):
the election in twenty twenty eight. Lastly, on Trump on
Legal I promised more of Jake Tapper exploiting his date
with Monica s Lewinsky while pretending he wasn't exploiting his
date with Monica s Lewinsky nine days after the scandal
(10:52):
broke in nineteen ninety eight. My hands are not clean
on this. I did eventually try to get out of
the show I was doing that was basically all about
Lewinsky and Clinton. But for the first couple of weeks,
I enjoyed suddenly having an audience of more than a
million every night when we've been going along with like
ten thousand viewers. My hands are not clean. On the
(11:13):
other hand, they are not this dirty. Let me quote
Jake Tapper's article I Dated Monica Lewinsky January thirtieth, nineteen
ninety eight. I hesitate here because I have no desire
to appear on hard copy or banter with msnbcb's and
essentially I feel bad for poor Monica and feel unclean,
(11:36):
adding my feeble barnacle to her ship of fame. Although
I will admit to an odd weave of loathing and
envy when I watch the blabocracy breathlessly weighing in, Hey,
I think they don't even know this chick. But I
am not jumping in because one dinner with Monica enabled
(11:56):
me to read her mind as she sits with friends
and family at the Watergate hondering her fate. I write
clearly because I want a piece of this story, just
like everybody else. Later quote, Am I drunk? Or is
she cute? I asked maloney, which one, he said, Monica,
(12:19):
I said the one in the black. You're drunk, said Maloney.
A rugby pretty boy. I overruled him. She was cute,
if a little zoftig, and friendly and nice. Later physically
she was pleasant without being overwhelming. She's a little chubby,
(12:41):
but she's leaps and bounds prettier than that vacuous mugshot
beamed all over the world. You know how some photos
of yourself can make you cringe. Imagine if one of
those became a new international icon. We should be allowed
to pick our own pictures at times like these. A
great dresser. She wore some black seventies number kind of
but not in the slightest bit revealing or inappropriate. The
(13:04):
reason and DC quizzlings are hissing about her wacky dresses
because she has a sense of style and this city
simply does not. So a sweet girl nice. Maybe we'll
go out again, I thought, Jake Tapper, I've written cringe
(13:26):
worthy stuff in my life. I've written cringe worthy stuff
from nineteen ninety eight. I've written cringe worthy stuff about
Monica Lewinsky, but nothing that could compete with Jake Tapper,
and just the parts of that article I just read you, Jake,
you win by shutout in all three categories. Yeah, and
(14:02):
then there's Christinome. Three sound bites. First with the X
Fox anchor Eric Bowling on Newsmax. This he actually said
out loud and the studio did not erupt in laughter.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I've also written a couple of books, and I know
how the process works. You write some chapters. You don't
write the whole book at once. You write a chapter
or two, You send it to the editors and they edit,
They read it, they add, they subtract. And here's my
question the editor, the editor, was she possibly a plant?
A liberal plant, because I'm not sure either one of
these stories, the dog story of the North Korea story
(14:41):
seems like the Christinome. I know.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Now the book always stops with me. I take my
own full responsibility. I wrote this book, and I take
the responsibility for what's in it.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
It's a great book.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
No, Eric Bowling, Christy Nomes editor was not a plant.
Eric Bowling. However, Eric Bowling is a plant, a fern,
I think, And it just went downhill from there. This,
believe it or not, is Christy Nooam yesterday on Newsmax
Newsmax the anchor is named Rob Finnerty And I'll just
(15:16):
let you enjoy this, then I'll burst your balloon about
Rob Finderdy.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Governor.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
If you asked me a month ago who's at the
top of the list to run with Donald Trump, I
would have said your name. If you asked me that
same question this morning, I don't even think you're on
the list.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Really, So my question for you, yes, really.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
And it's because of things that have come out in
this book, like your claims that you met Kim Jong un.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
And then over the last week i've been.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
To the DMZ, I've been t every one I said stared.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
On Kim Jong Let me, Governor, one second. I will
give you an opportunity to respond. I just want to
get this out there. So here's the quote from the book.
You say that I remember when I met North Korean
dictator Kim Jong un. I'm sure he underestimated me, having
no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Governor, that never happened.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
But I have said in the book is that when
I became aware of the content that we had, it changed,
and that's the way that it is. So I should
to put that anode in the book that I'm not
going to.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Talk about any case that it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I'm not going to talk about my conversations with world leaders.
I've been involved in policy for thirty years. For thirty years,
I've been traveling the world talking to world leaders, and
that is a conversation that I'm not going to.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
Have in this book.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So I've answered that in other in interviews already. I've
been very forthright, and I think that a typical politician
wouldn't be that honest. As soon as it became my attention,
I asked for the content to be changed, and it
has been.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Governor.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
I'm not asking you about the details of this alleged meeting.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
I'm asking if the meeting actually happened.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
I don't think it did, and I think if it did,
you'd be able to confirm for me that yes, it did.
And here's when it happened. It happens, say at such
and such a date or a month, or.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
You don't have to be talk about I'm not going
to talk about my conversation.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
You're going to continue to have to answer this question. Then,
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So okay that Infinity guy was an actual newscaster in Bakersfield,
in Kansas City and Tampa, and I think for a
second there, I imagine he's still employed. But in twenty
twenty two on Newsmax, he told a startled live guest
that Russia had apparently surrendered to Ukraine, and as the
guests started to turn blue, Finnerty said, oh, you fell
(17:19):
for it. Look at the calendar. It's April first. Still
the stop clocked got it right. And then there's Christy
Nooam on Fox Business with Stuart Varney yesterday. And all
I'll say is that I worked with Stuve Varney forty
three years ago when I started at CNN, and I
cannot think of him even through all that's happened since,
(17:42):
without affection. He was a great guy. They told me
one afternoon that a piece on the seven pm sportscast
on CNN they used to have sportscast on CNN, had
fallen through, and that I had to then write and
read a commentary about Tom sever and New York sports writers,
a thing we'd been discussing as a possible piece, and
they wanted me to turn it into a commentary and
(18:04):
I'd have to do it and read it off the teleprompter.
Live on the network that night, and I mentioned that
I didn't know how to use a teleprompter, and they said,
find somebody to teach you, and they hung up, And
as I whimpered, Stu Varney heard about it, came over
and said, what's the matter, mate, And I told him,
and he volunteered, and he taught me how to use
(18:25):
a teleprompter in less than ten minutes, in a process
by which I have taught hundreds of people since how
to use a teleprompter. Great guy. And then he got
hit in the head by religion or something. Still, every
once in a while.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Still think that you are in line to be Trump's
vice president. It's up to Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
He's the only person who will decide this true, He's
the only person who will decide.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
And I suppoke, yes, I do speak to him, I asked, Ques,
I said to you about this.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
No, I never tell anybody my personal conversations.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
With the story.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
I talked to President Trump all the time about the dogs,
about a lot of things. And right now I tell
you what. He is being persecuted in a political hunt,
witch hunt in this court case. So I'm proud of
him about how tough he is and how well he
is doing.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Did you bring up yes enough for Stewart?
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Did this interview is ridiculous what you were doing right now,
so you need to stop it is okay, it is
Let's talk about some real topics that Americans care about.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
I'm afraid around of time. Oh well, of course we are.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We do. Thank you for being with us.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I know I pressed hard, but that's what people are
talking about to this day now.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Gotta know, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Watch out, mate,
she knows where all the gravel pits are. So the
gist of this is as Christy Noome continues to try
to sell this bloody book and continues to insist it
was her dog and her gravel pit and her bullets,
(19:50):
and just because she made up a story about meeting
Kim Jong un, she is under no obligation to ever
admit that, especially not since that she has found a
way to remove the story without admitting she made the
story up. All this makes it clear that no may
Or may not still think she could be Trump's VP pick,
(20:12):
but she definitely thinks she is enough of a monster
to someday be Republican president or dictator or whatever we
call the job by then. And I'm just gonna say this,
and if you don't get the reference, I'm going to
suggest you google it or go on to IMDb and
(20:32):
look up the movie The Dead Zone. But if this
is the start of Christy Nomes presidential campaign, it is
the worst presidential rollout since Greg Stilson Stilson S T
(20:53):
I L L S O N S. Also of interest
here this is a mini pod edition. Sorry, lots of
personal stuff going on, nothing wrong, just too much stuff.
Not enough day, not enough Keith. So the rest of
this episode is the story from yesterday. You probably skipped
of how the first man ever to run a mile
in four minutes or less seventy years ago. This week
(21:15):
a moment so epic the New York Times put out
an editorial wondering if anybody would ever do it again,
anybody would ever again run the mile in four minutes
or less? How he actually was not the first man
ever to run a mile in four minutes or less.
Roger Banister, who was probably the four thousandth man to
run a mile in four minutes or less. That's next.
(21:38):
This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. It's
mash up Time, a special edition of Things I Promised
Not To Tell and Sports Central Center. Seventy years ago. Today,
(21:58):
the world was still in disbelief, because the day before
May sixth, nineteen fifty four saw unfold one of the
most famous events in sports history, in fact, in twentieth
century world history, and everything you may have ever heard
about it is wrong. From six zho four pm prevailing
(22:23):
local time in England on the early evening of Thursday
May sixth, nineteen fifty four, continuing until the day the
man died on March third, twenty eighteen, not a day
went by, probably not an hour went by without somebody
congratulating Roger Banister on becoming or having become, or being
(22:46):
or forever being or being immortalized by being the first
human to run a mile in four minutes or less,
the man who broke the four minute mile. Except for
one small detail, he wasn't. We cannot now comprehend what
(23:10):
a big deal this really was. Neil Armstrong, Times, Charles
Lindbergh plus George Washington Maybe. The next day, The New
York Times published ten different stories about Roger Banister breaking
the four minute mile barrier, plus an editorial, an editorial
on the editorial page that asked if anybody in world
(23:34):
history would ever do it again. Roger Gilbert Banister began
the Times on the front page ran a mile in
three minutes fifty nine point four seconds tonight to reach
one of man's hitherto unattainable goals. There's just one problem.
(23:54):
Not only was Roger Banister probably not the first man
to run a mile in less than four minutes, but
there is also a lot of evidence that that record
was broke in May of seventeen seventy by a guy
who sold fruits and vegetables from a push cart on
the streets of London, a guy named Parrot. Sixty nine
(24:25):
years later, and this is still the most famous run
in the history of the world. May sixth, nineteen fifty four,
on an ordinary spring evening at the Ifley Road Track
at Oxford University in England, even as an unfavorable wind
worked against him, Roger Banister ran through the tape in
(24:45):
three point fifty nine to four and ran directly into
not just sports history, but human history. The four minute mile,
the first human ever to run that far that fast,
like the first man on the moon, no matter how
much farther we go, But glory is his in Defaul Forever,
(25:05):
always Eternal, immortal Neil Armstrong, but in shorts or there
had already been a four minute mile run in seventeen seventy,
and Banister has no more claim to immortality than do
you or I. And this is really a story about
bureaucracy supporting bureaucracy, and what the experts call recency bias,
(25:28):
and a lot of racism. And the story should be
about a guy who used to sell fruits and vegetables
on the streets of London, and who ran in his
spare time for money in the decade before the American Revolution.
And his name was Parrot, as in look, Maty, I
know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm
looking at one right now. We begin in the pages
(25:51):
of a British book dated from seventeen ninety four, which
seems to be for you back to the future fans,
a kind of Gray's Sports Almanac. The seventeen ninety four
tome bears an amazingly modern title the sports magazine, and
its chronology of top sports events of recent years past
(26:12):
includes for the year seventeen seventy this quote seventeen seventy
May ninth, James Parrott a costermonger. A costermonger sold fruits
and vegetables from a pushcart on Street. James Parrott, a costuremonger,
ran the length of Old Street viz. From the Charterhouse
wall in Goswell Street to Shoreditch Church Gates, which is
(26:33):
a measured mile, in four minutes. Fifteen guineas to five
were betted he did not run the ground in four
minutes and a half. So that's it. I am besmirching
the immortality of Saint Roger Banister and everything you will
see in the newspapers about him over the weekend because
(26:53):
of fifty one words about some guy racing against an
eighteenth century watch in the year seventeen seventy and the
story wasn't even published until twenty four years later. Seriously, Seriously,
there is nothing else to say about James Parrott. That
snippet from that book is all that researchers have ever
(27:15):
found or found out about James Parrott. No obituary, no nothing,
no four minute mile, no confirmation he ever existed. Besides which,
as every modern sports fan will tell you, the athletes
of today are the great, greater, greatest of all time goats.
If the record book says nobody ran a four minute
mile until nineteen fifty four, of course the record books
(27:36):
are right. Since seventeen seventy, humans have evolved, health has evolved,
training has evolved. Why in seventeen seventy you couldn't even
accurately measure a mile, let alone measure exactly four minutes. Actually,
agricultural chains, designed to resolve who owned what property and
(27:56):
where international borders were had been introduced in sixteen twenty
and have proved to be at worst only off by
a round owned two fifths of an inch over a mile.
And if you're saying agcultural chains, you don't use agricultural
chains in sports, let me ask you this. What do
(28:17):
they use in National Football League games to check whether
or not it's a first down? Okay, we're giving them
the accuracy of the agricultural chains we still use today
in our pro sports. You could measure several blocks of
London in seventeen seventy and say from way back there
to right over here in front of the church, that
(28:37):
is exactly a mile, Guvnor, But how would you time
it four minutes? Exactly what did they use a really
good sundial. No, that has been called a chronometer. The
chronometer was perfected by seventeen sixty one. You may know
the chronometer as a Swiss watch, or as you might
(28:59):
also know it, a rolex. So this parrot runs a mile,
or maybe he runs a mile plus two fifths of
an inch, and he is timed by several guys with rolexes,
and they all have the same score. He did it
in exactly four minutes. If you're still not convinced, if
(29:19):
you're still googling Roger Banister's descendants so they can sue
this idiot Ulderman in his podcast, let me emphasize the
part that convinced me that a man named Parrot did
run a four minute mile two months and four days
after the Boston massacre unleashed the events that would culminate
in the American Revolution. Permit me to reread that last
(29:43):
sentence about James Parrott's run from Gray's Sports Almanac, I'm sorry,
from the Sporting magazine of seventeen ninety four. Quote fifteen
guineas to five were betted he did not run the
ground in four minutes and a half. This guy parrot
bet on himself and three to one odds, and the
(30:07):
five guineas wagered here that would be worth about fifty
five hundred dollars in today's money, meaning this was no
eighteenth century Roger Banister hoping to break a record for
Queen and Country. This was a guy who did this
for money, for the equivalent in winnings of about seventeen
thousand dollars, at least as much as his annual income
(30:29):
might have been selling fruits and vegetables from a cart,
and the way it's phrased in that magazine, we don't know.
If more than one bet of fifteen guineas to five
was placed, he might have won thirty four thousand dollars
or fifty one thousand dollars or five hundred and ten
thousand dollars. Because this was for money, the loser or
(30:50):
losers who bet he could not finish the race in
four and a half minutes had to be satisfied that
he had done it in less than four and a half,
in this case in four. As we know from our
own times, like to claim they didn't lose, and will
go to any length to convince others they did not lose.
But James Parrott got his money, which means that the
(31:13):
loser or losers believed James Parrott really raised a mile
and did it in four minutes. I'm sold antiquated books
and four minute miles run one hundred and eighty three
years before the first four minute mile, and costermongers and
agricultural change. They may come and go and may be
trustworthy or untrustworthy, but money is money, and James Parrott
(31:39):
was given the equivalent of his annual salary at least
once because somebody who thought he could not do it agreed, Yeah,
I was wrong. He really, really, really really did just
run the mile in four minutes. Now, of course, the
whole account in the book could be wrong. I'm old
enough that I was actually on the air doing sportscast
(32:01):
on the radio network of United Press International on April
twenty five, nineteen eighty when Rosie Ruiz quote one unquote
the Boston Marathon. Then it turned out two people had
seen Rosy Ruiz burst out of the crowd of spectators
on Commonwealth Avenue and start running alongside the men runners.
And then it turned out that while she was supposedly
(32:22):
completing the nineteen seventy nine New York Marathon, she had
struck up a conversation with a freelance photographer on the subway,
and the two of them went to the finish line together,
and Rosie Ruiz then told officials she had just finished
the race. And Rosie Ruiz was a total fraud in
two different marathons. Maybe the seventeen seventy four minute mile
(32:44):
of James Parrott was just inaccurate. Maybe it was just
an inside joke or a misheard rumor or a typo,
or he took the subway with Rosie Ruiz, or it
was a joke by whoever wrote the book. I've told
you the story before about the nineteen twelve Saint Louis
(33:04):
Round second baseman named Proctor, and nobody could find anything
about him. And then it turned out Proctor was the
Western Union operator who used to make up all the
official scorecards after each game, and one day he decided
he always wanted to be a Major League ball player,
so he put himself in the scorecard. Maybe James Parrott
was the author of this the sports magazine or his
four minute miles and Monty Python jokes go. Now, that's
(33:27):
what I call a dead parrot. So if it's a mistake,
if it's a typo, if it's his hype job, if
it's Rosie Ruiz, if it's low Proctor, Roger Banister is safe.
Now he's not because there was also a runner named Powell,
and Powell in seventeen eighty seven said he could run
(33:48):
a mile in four minutes, and he wasn't messing around.
He bet a thousand guineas that he could do it,
one point one million dollars in today's money. And not
only that, but he ran on a famous English running
track near Hampton Court, and five days before Christmas of
seventeen eighty seven he ran a time trial so that
the gamblers could all come over and see what shape
(34:08):
he was in and whether they should bet for him
or bet against him. And he did it in the
time trial in four minutes and three seconds. And when
Powell said the betters could see what shape he was in,
he really meant it. He was dedicated to his cause.
Five days before Christmas and this guy ran a mile naked.
(34:31):
All that was in the papers. What happened to the
actual race, We don't know that. Nobody has ever found
that newspaper. Nobody's ever found an account of the race,
only the time trial, so we have to go under
the assumption that Powell never did better than four to three.
But once again, Roger Banister's four minute mile has withstood
(34:52):
the test of time. Uh kinda bah, No, Actually it hasn't.
There's also another guy named Weller. Weller was famous enough
as a professional runner of the time that when he
said he could run a mile on the Banbury Road
in Oxford, the newspapers of the day all showed up
to preview it, to talk about his two brothers, who
were also professional runners, and to cover his attempt on
(35:14):
October tenth, seventeen ninety six. And there it is in
the papers. Weller of Oxford runs a mile in three
minutes fifty eight seconds, not only one hundred and fifty
eight years before Roger Banister, but a second and a
half faster than Roger Banister. So here's the thing. If
(35:39):
somebody really ran a mile in three fifty nine or
three fifty eight at the time of the American Revolution,
wouldn't that stand out as such an impossible performance, then,
such an anomaly so startling that it would be viewed
in the same way we would view news coming up
on Monday that somebody now had just run the mile
in three minutes flat. I mean, if somebody ran the
(36:01):
mile in three minutes flat, we would check to see
if the guy was a space ala or a time traveler.
Wouldn't they have been amazed on October tenth, seventeen ninety six,
disbelieving what they had heard, not at all. And that's
the second half of the story of the day. Roger
Banister did not break the four minute barrier. Research and
(36:22):
computers and simulations show that people in the seventeen eighties
were consistently running the mile in four minutes and eighteen seconds,
four minutes and twenty seconds, four minutes and fifteen seconds,
if the info about Weller is right, three minutes and
fifty eight seconds. All the time, these numbers were being
put up by all kinds of runners. So a four
(36:43):
minute mile would have been great, but not out of context,
not in seventeen ninety six. And then you have to ask,
if it happened, where are all those records? Who were
all those four minute eighteen guys and four minute three
second guys and three fifty eight guys. What happened to
(37:04):
the record words. Well, see, that's another scandal. Those eighteenth
century records were erased in the nineteenth century because richer,
slower people in the nineteenth century wanted to say they
held the records, they erased the record book. That part
(37:25):
of the story, and the additional sad truth that much
of the claims about Roger Banister are really really racist. Next,
we know Roger Banister really did run a three minute
(37:47):
and fifty nine second mile on May sixth, nineteen fifty
four in England. It was timed and announced to a
waiting crowd by no less a figure than Norris mcwerder,
who was later the founder or co founder of the
Guinness Book of World Records. And everybody who was there
saw history and was part of an impossible dream coming true.
(38:09):
And as I mentioned earlier, the next day, the New
York Times actually had an editorial asking whether or not
anybody would ever do it again. There is considerable evidence,
as I've laid out here, that it was done before,
like two hundred years before. But if you were still
not convinced that, no, no matter what else, it was
(38:30):
Roger Banister's three minute, fifty nine point four second mile
on May sixth, nineteen fifty four was not the first
four minute mile. If James Parrott and the naked runner
Powell of Hampton Court and Weller seventeen ninety six don't
convince you there is also this. There is a sports
historian named Peter Radford, himself the bronze medalist in two
(38:51):
sprints at the nineteen sixty Olympics in Rome, and he
brought the story of Parrot and Powell and Weller to
the forefront in the British press nearly twenty years ago.
This man found them because he was looking for and
finding the records of more than six hundred running races
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Running against the clock,
(39:11):
against each other, usually for money, was not only the
most popular professional sport in Britain at that time, it
was also probably the first. And with so many races
and especially winning and losing times recorded, Peter Radford had
data to work with. When guys didn't run a four
minute mile, how fast did they run it? How fast
(39:33):
were these professionals going the average ones over other distances
in say seventeen eighty nine, what was the range of times?
And his computer looked at all of these races six
hundred or so, and all of the times and all
of the speeds, and it spit out this conclusion. Factoring
in the margin of error, Radford wrote, the best possible
(39:54):
one mile time would be anywhere between four minutes thirteen
seconds and exactly four minutes. So no, you cannot say
James Parrott ran the first four minute mile in seventeen seventy,
and Weller ran the first sub four minute mile in
seventeen ninety six, not with certainty, but I think you
can say with certainty that somebody did it before the
(40:18):
year eighteen hundred, and that when Roger Banister crashed through
the tape at Oxford at six oh four Greenwich meantime
on the evening of Thursday May sixth, nineteen fifty four,
and the track announcer Norris McWhorter announced that Roger Banister's
time in the mile was and he gave it a
desperately long pause by all accounts, three minutes fifty I
(40:41):
an unfall ten seconds the moment that happened, Roger Banister
became at best the second man to run a mile
in four minutes or less, but more likely he was
like the twenty second or the two hundred and twenty second.
So why why didn't anybody know this? Why did Roger
(41:05):
Banister live a life of unceasing, undiminished and sorry, undeserved fame?
And that guy Weller who may have run the race
a second faster and one hundred and fifty eight years earlier,
why don't we even know Weller's first name? All sports
are based on history. Records are made to be broken.
(41:28):
The older the record, the louder the break. Who screwed
this up? How did we lose Weller in the nooks
and crannies of history. We didn't lose him. It wasn't
an error. It was deliberate. And that's where this gets
to be a crime. Our historian and ex Olympic runner
(41:49):
mister Radford quoted another ancient book, British Rural Sports by J. H. Walsh,
which was published in eighteen eighty eight, and in it,
all the dozens of speed and distant events had two
sets of records. One for professionals like Parrot and Powell
and Weller, the ones who ran for money, the ones
(42:10):
on whom people bet, the ones who bet on themselves.
There was that set of records, and then another set
of records which was given far more weight and far
more importance for the amateurs. By the early twentieth century,
Radford wrote, the professional records had been erased from these books, expunged,
not forgotten, removed. Why because the professionals were far better
(42:35):
than the amateurs. No amateur held the record in the mile.
It was all professionals, but the amateurs were in charge.
They were the British upper class. They rased not for money,
but for sport. So the amateurs simply did what the
upper class always does in this situation. They erased the
records of all the professionals. And oh, by the way,
(42:56):
they also erased all records set by women. The British
obsession with the superiority of the amateurs over the professional
If you've ever seen the movie Chariots a Fire, you
already know exactly what I mean. It spread throughout the
world through the Olympics. That's why Jim Thorpe lost all
his gold medals from the nineteen twelve Games. Why the
(43:18):
greatest all around athlete ever died in poverty because he
had once played minor league baseball to make some money
in the summer, and everybody knew about it, and nobody
thought they'd hold it against it, but then they held
it against him. He was a professional, so his records
did not count like James Parrott or fill in the
blank here, Powell or I don't remember his first name Weller.
(43:44):
So the world record in the mile as of the
year eighteen sixty one was credited to a man, an
amateur named Matthew Green. Matthew Green was the fastest man
in human history four minutes and forty six seconds, four
minutes and forty six seconds. In my twenties, I might
(44:06):
have come close to that number. By nineteen thirteen, the
International Amateur Athletics Federation had taken over, and it recognized
a runner from Cornell, not me, a different runner from Cornell,
as the all time outdoor record holder in the mile
four minutes and thirteen seconds, John Paul Jones, one hundred
and forty three years after James Parrot. The indoor record
(44:29):
in the mile was then held by a man named
Abel Kiviat four eighteen and two I met Abel Kiviat.
I interviewed him when he was ninety. I wish I
had known about James Parrott. Then I didn't. Abel, and
I talked about his roommate at the nineteen twelve Olympics,
Jim Thorpe, got to tell you that story sometime too,
(44:50):
But boy Able Kiviat and I could have had a
conversation about amateurs versus professionals and whether or not his
record was actually a record. Anyway, you can see where
this is all going, and we are almost at our
proverbial finish line. Not only did his we forget the
great athletes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Parrot
and Powell and Weller, who if they did not break
the four minute mile, they came damn close and did
(45:12):
a lot better than my friend Abel Kiveat did, or
my Cornell guy John Paul Jones, to say another, of
Matthew Green four minutes and forty six seconds, What did
you do stop for lunch? Not only were the remarkable
athletes like Parrot and Powell and Weller forgotten, they were
buried deliberately. It makes the subject of the Roger Banister
(45:36):
four minute mile that everybody celebrates with almost undiminished astonishment
every year at this time. It makes all this a
little less trivial and a little bit more nefarious and
wrong and ugly. Speaking of ugly and Banister there is
(45:57):
one other component to this story. In the nineteen nineties,
having been the god of the four minute mile for
four decades, having been celebrated every day for breaking a
record that was probably broken one hundred and eighty three
years before, Roger Banister was asked about the new generation
of runners, those of African descent on September twelfth, nineteen
(46:18):
ninety five, Sir Roger Banister explained, quote, it's certainly obvious
when you see an all black sprint final that there
must be something rather special about their anatomy or physiology
which produces these outstanding successes. And indeed there may be,
but we don't know quite what it is. Some countries
have the good fortune to have a high proportion of
(46:40):
black sprinters and hurdlers. End quote. Nineteen years later, Banister
was still driving right into the Eugenics lane, sounding just
enough like Jimmy the Greek Snyder to make you squirm.
I love watching people like Usain Bolt, Banister said. The
West Africans, of course, have an inbuilt advantage, having been
(47:02):
transported as slaves to the way Indies. Only the toughest endured.
They have astonishing muscle composition with those fast fibers and
superior genes. I will leave it to you and to
his maker, an assessment of how much of Roger Banister
was patronizing, how much was him trying to rationalize how
(47:24):
his time had been bettered by nearly ten percent, and
how much of it was just sheer racism. But I
will note that in what Banister said is another reason
to believe that the idea that he was the first
human to run a four minute mile is laugh out
loud ridiculous. What about all of the runners of color
(47:49):
over the centuries, over the millennia, in Africa and South
America and elsewhere on this globe. By Banister's own disturbing logic,
certainly some of them must have beaten him to break
the four minute tape. No, let me close with this.
(48:11):
I don't know for certain who ran the first four
minute mile or when. For all we know, it was
broken two thousand years ago, and for that matter, so
was the present world record of three point forty three
point thirteen. Might have been James Parrott or Powell or Weller,
whose first names we don't know, or someone so lost
to history that we don't know their first name, or
(48:32):
their last name, or their country. We don't know who
it was. But no matter what you hear, or see
or read in this Weekend Ahead, it's sure as hell
was not Roger Banister, which brings us lastly to missus
Roger Banister, Moira Elva Jacobson Banister, daughter of a Swedish economist.
(48:56):
According to Roger Banister, his wife didn't know a lick
about sports, let alone about running, let alone about him
running four time. Roger Banister once said, my wife thought
I had run four miles in one minute. You know,
(49:18):
as I've been thinking about this and researching that story,
you might as well go with that four miles in
one minute. It's no more ridiculous than thinking that Roger
Banister was the first man to run one mile in
four minutes. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(49:56):
Thank you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and
John Phillip Scheneil arranged, produced and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on the guitars, base and drums, and
mister Shaneil handled orchestration and keyboards, and was produced by
Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions
arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The
(50:16):
sports music is the Alderman theme from ESPN two, written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical
and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss. The best
baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend Dennis Leary,
and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's
countdown for this the one hundred and eighty second day
until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the two hundred
(50:40):
and nineteenth day since Defendant J Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use
the mental health system, use the not regularly given elector
objection option, use the justice system to stop him from
doing it again while we still can. The next scheduled
(51:02):
countdown is tomorrow Boalton's as a new warrant. Still then,
I'm Keith Ulremman. Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(51:35):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Well
Trump didn't sleep through any of that, did he. There
(00:27):
are a couple of big picture headlines from day one
of Stormy Daniel's testimony that I have not seen mentioned
anywhere else. First of all, Trump's lawyer Ms Necklace, everybody reports,
seems to have made inroads in her effort to convince
the jury that miss Daniels would say or do almost
anything for money. She's a pornographic actress. Whether you approve
(00:53):
of that profession or abhorred, or like me, you're agnostic.
I mean there are a lot of other lines of
work that are way less defensible, like foreclosing on mortgages
or working for Fox News. Whatever your reaction towards people
in the adult entertainment industry, one statement should never be
among those you express in shock or dismay or surprise.
(01:17):
Oh no, she's a portographic actress. She will do or
say almost anything for money if her profession and the
requisite flexibility her experience with a sleezebag like Trump demands
of her A I did sleep with him. B Oh no,
he's suing me. I'm changing my story. I didn't sleep
with him. See, they're willing to pay me a lot
(01:39):
of money for my story and bury it. So yes,
I did sleep with him. D he sued me again,
so I hate him. If that surprises you, have I
got bad news for you about Santa, which leads to
the second meta headline, My god, the media, especially the
(02:00):
television networks, treated her testimony like they were cicadas, and
Stormy Daniels was the ring girl who stepped between the
ropes to announce the start of the thirteenth year. My god,
they all awoke from somnambulance about bank records and cell
phone extractions and the testimony of comptrollers and people named Rona,
(02:25):
and they were able to say, at least to themselves,
good grief. Get a load of those rebuttals. The two
most sex obsessed groups of people in the world, to
my experience in sixty five years on this planet, are
eighth grade boys and reporters, and I am not sure
(02:47):
which one wins. But as I read and watched the coverage,
it was clear yesterday was their day, and today will
be the day they get to relive their day. And tomorrow,
when she goes back on the stands, that could be
an even better day for them. It was so obvious
(03:08):
that when participants in media insist it's not about sex,
what they actually mean is it's only about sex. So
obvious that I swear I saw Wolf Blitzer's face move.
Speaking of CNN, if for those of us old enough
to have been forced to cover it, forced to wade
through it, forced to anchor it, forced to treat it
(03:29):
as if it had not been about sex and only
about sex, yesterday it was a one hundred percent flashback
to the Monica Lewinsky story. And to tie it all together,
who was there anchoring for CNN? Jake Tapper. Jake Tapper
who first bobbed up out of the primordial ocean of
(03:51):
non entities in local Washington twentieth century media, because nine
days after the Clinton Lewinsky scandal broke, he wrote an
article for Washington City Paper called I dated Monica Lewinsky
and got a career out of it. Anyway, more on
that momentarily, especially why I say anyway, the coverage yesterday
(04:16):
was sex, cross examination, sex. There were contradictions, sex tough,
cross sexeminar, I'm sorry, examination sex and sex and sex
and sex, which leads into the fourth meta headline, Stormy
Daniels is not on trial here. Stormy Daniels is incidental
to this case. That is not what you would have
(04:39):
thought if you watched coverage of it yesterday. But the
sex isn't illegal, the money isn't illegal. Trump isn't illegal.
Daniels changing her story isn't illegal. Buying her story to
keep it from becoming public in the weeks before an
election for president, and then hiding those payoffs to prevent
(04:59):
them from becoming public in the weeks before a presidential election,
that's illegal. And all those boring receipts and records and
notations written by hand by a guy named Alan Alan
with two l's, that is the case for the prosecution,
(05:20):
my lord, and denying that there was sex as Trump passed,
lying about that, as Trump has That is why Stormy
Daniels is there to testify that he's lying. And she's
also there, so wolf Blitzer's face moves, which brings me
lastly to the fifth Big Picture headline. And I have
(05:42):
to admit I was a little surprised by this one.
If the Monday juxtaposition of Trump may be going to
jail over the gag order and Christy Nome quintuples down
on the idea that shooting puppies in the face is
a good thing. If that underscored how MAGA believes it
has the right to kill, then yesterday's juxtaposition of Nome's
disastrous media tour more on that debris shortly and Trump
(06:07):
on trial. This underscores that these really deeply disturbed borderline
personalities like Trump and Gnome and all the other MAGA frauds,
they do not do well when confronted with reality from
which they cannot run and they cannot hide. It is sadly,
absolutely possible that Trump does not get convicted. I mean,
(06:31):
it's a trial. OJ Simpson did not get convicted at trial.
But at about the same percentage likelihood is the chance
that Trump will stroke out from embarrassment. First, I know,
he does not seem capable of embarrassment. I mean, he
goes out in public with hair like that every day
(06:51):
and bronzer on it more makeup than Christynome wears. Then again,
I don't think he's ever been metaphorically tied to a
chair this way and been forced to suffer through harassment
for at least two days. While the fate of the
nation rests in part on the shoulders of a woman
who chooses to be called Stormy. The creepiness of him
(07:15):
telling her just before sex that she reminded him of
his daughter, That doesn't surprise anybody. The fact that it
was said under oath and probably made his own lawyers
lean slightly further away from him at the table, that
probably does surprise people. He showed her a picture of
his wife, also a totally natural bit of foreplay, then said,
(07:39):
don't worry about her. They don't even sleep in the
same room. And that's the least shocking shock of all time.
That she said he was so rude she should spank him,
and he acquiesced, all right, judge him if you want to,
But the rest of us are trying to put him
in jail for life. We get the idea. But the
ultimate moment of reality spanking Trump yesterday was when Stormy
(08:03):
Daniels explained but he asked her questions about the adult
entertainment industry. Is their condom use? Are you tested for STDs?
Is there a physician on staff? These are questions about
the adult entertainment industry and film industry that may have
had an ulterior motive When you stop to think about them.
(08:24):
But the one line that will stick to me always
is Stormy Daniels, then insisting that just before they had sex,
Trump asked her do you get health insurance? That is
the greatest awful pickup line I have ever heard. Hey baby,
(08:47):
do you get health insurance? Some other lesser headlines. No,
I want to believe it too, But no, it's not true.
Trump is not skipping his son's high school graduation, after
all that nine days from now to instead go campaign
in Minnesota, rendering the entire self martyrdom of the judge.
(09:09):
Won't let me go into just another confidence trick. The
graduation is at ten am Eastern. The campaign event in
Minnesota is at five Central, sixth Eastern. The flight is
three hours and he has his own plane. Sorry, this
is actually this is actually me defending Trump that day.
(09:30):
But yes, his concierge judge, the former chief hot yoga
correspondent of the Miami Nuevo Herald, Eileen Cannon, she has
delayed the start of the espionage trial in Florida indefinitely.
Because I'm translating this from legal ease, there's too much
stuff for her to think about before she schedules a
(09:50):
start date. Canon has been in the bag for Trump
since before this case began, and if he has not
yet decided to do it, now is time for Jack
Smith to go to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
and ask if there might be any other ex Chief
Hot Yoga correspondence of the Miami Nuevo Herald now serving
(10:11):
as judges who have not violated all legal ethics and
exhausted all possible justifications for running out the clock on
behalf of the creature who appointed her, and also to
start an investigation of this woman Cannon, because at this
rate the question is no longer and if the Trump
documents trial in Florida will end before the twenty twenty
four election, it's whether or not it will end before
(10:31):
the election in twenty twenty eight. Lastly, on Trump on
Legal I promised more of Jake Tapper exploiting his date
with Monica s Lewinsky while pretending he wasn't exploiting his
date with Monica s Lewinsky nine days after the scandal
(10:52):
broke in nineteen ninety eight. My hands are not clean
on this. I did eventually try to get out of
the show I was doing that was basically all about
Lewinsky and Clinton. But for the first couple of weeks,
I enjoyed suddenly having an audience of more than a
million every night when we've been going along with like
ten thousand viewers. My hands are not clean. On the
(11:13):
other hand, they are not this dirty. Let me quote
Jake Tapper's article I Dated Monica Lewinsky January thirtieth, nineteen
ninety eight. I hesitate here because I have no desire
to appear on hard copy or banter with msnbcb's and
essentially I feel bad for poor Monica and feel unclean,
(11:36):
adding my feeble barnacle to her ship of fame. Although
I will admit to an odd weave of loathing and
envy when I watch the blabocracy breathlessly weighing in, Hey,
I think they don't even know this chick. But I
am not jumping in because one dinner with Monica enabled
(11:56):
me to read her mind as she sits with friends
and family at the Watergate hondering her fate. I write
clearly because I want a piece of this story, just
like everybody else. Later quote, Am I drunk? Or is
she cute? I asked maloney, which one, he said, Monica,
(12:19):
I said the one in the black. You're drunk, said Maloney.
A rugby pretty boy. I overruled him. She was cute,
if a little zoftig, and friendly and nice. Later physically
she was pleasant without being overwhelming. She's a little chubby,
(12:41):
but she's leaps and bounds prettier than that vacuous mugshot
beamed all over the world. You know how some photos
of yourself can make you cringe. Imagine if one of
those became a new international icon. We should be allowed
to pick our own pictures at times like these. A
great dresser. She wore some black seventies number kind of
but not in the slightest bit revealing or inappropriate. The
(13:04):
reason and DC quizzlings are hissing about her wacky dresses
because she has a sense of style and this city
simply does not. So a sweet girl nice. Maybe we'll
go out again, I thought, Jake Tapper, I've written cringe
(13:26):
worthy stuff in my life. I've written cringe worthy stuff
from nineteen ninety eight. I've written cringe worthy stuff about
Monica Lewinsky, but nothing that could compete with Jake Tapper,
and just the parts of that article I just read you, Jake,
you win by shutout in all three categories. Yeah, and
(14:02):
then there's Christinome. Three sound bites. First with the X
Fox anchor Eric Bowling on Newsmax. This he actually said
out loud and the studio did not erupt in laughter.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I've also written a couple of books, and I know
how the process works. You write some chapters. You don't
write the whole book at once. You write a chapter
or two, You send it to the editors and they edit,
They read it, they add, they subtract. And here's my
question the editor, the editor, was she possibly a plant?
A liberal plant, because I'm not sure either one of
these stories, the dog story of the North Korea story
(14:41):
seems like the Christinome. I know.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Now the book always stops with me. I take my
own full responsibility. I wrote this book, and I take
the responsibility for what's in it.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
It's a great book.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
No, Eric Bowling, Christy Nomes editor was not a plant.
Eric Bowling. However, Eric Bowling is a plant, a fern,
I think, And it just went downhill from there. This,
believe it or not, is Christy Nooam yesterday on Newsmax
Newsmax the anchor is named Rob Finnerty And I'll just
(15:16):
let you enjoy this, then I'll burst your balloon about
Rob Finderdy.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Governor.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
If you asked me a month ago who's at the
top of the list to run with Donald Trump, I
would have said your name. If you asked me that
same question this morning, I don't even think you're on
the list.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Really, So my question for you, yes, really.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
And it's because of things that have come out in
this book, like your claims that you met Kim Jong un.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
And then over the last week i've been.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
To the DMZ, I've been t every one I said stared.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
On Kim Jong Let me, Governor, one second. I will
give you an opportunity to respond. I just want to
get this out there. So here's the quote from the book.
You say that I remember when I met North Korean
dictator Kim Jong un. I'm sure he underestimated me, having
no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Governor, that never happened.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
But I have said in the book is that when
I became aware of the content that we had, it changed,
and that's the way that it is. So I should
to put that anode in the book that I'm not
going to.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Talk about any case that it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I'm not going to talk about my conversations with world leaders.
I've been involved in policy for thirty years. For thirty years,
I've been traveling the world talking to world leaders, and
that is a conversation that I'm not going to.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
Have in this book.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So I've answered that in other in interviews already. I've
been very forthright, and I think that a typical politician
wouldn't be that honest. As soon as it became my attention,
I asked for the content to be changed, and it
has been.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Governor.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
I'm not asking you about the details of this alleged meeting.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
I'm asking if the meeting actually happened.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
I don't think it did, and I think if it did,
you'd be able to confirm for me that yes, it did.
And here's when it happened. It happens, say at such
and such a date or a month, or.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
You don't have to be talk about I'm not going
to talk about my conversation.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
You're going to continue to have to answer this question. Then,
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So okay that Infinity guy was an actual newscaster in Bakersfield,
in Kansas City and Tampa, and I think for a
second there, I imagine he's still employed. But in twenty
twenty two on Newsmax, he told a startled live guest
that Russia had apparently surrendered to Ukraine, and as the
guests started to turn blue, Finnerty said, oh, you fell
(17:19):
for it. Look at the calendar. It's April first. Still
the stop clocked got it right. And then there's Christy
Nooam on Fox Business with Stuart Varney yesterday. And all
I'll say is that I worked with Stuve Varney forty
three years ago when I started at CNN, and I
cannot think of him even through all that's happened since,
(17:42):
without affection. He was a great guy. They told me
one afternoon that a piece on the seven pm sportscast
on CNN they used to have sportscast on CNN, had
fallen through, and that I had to then write and
read a commentary about Tom sever and New York sports writers,
a thing we'd been discussing as a possible piece, and
they wanted me to turn it into a commentary and
(18:04):
I'd have to do it and read it off the teleprompter.
Live on the network that night, and I mentioned that
I didn't know how to use a teleprompter, and they said,
find somebody to teach you, and they hung up, And
as I whimpered, Stu Varney heard about it, came over
and said, what's the matter, mate, And I told him,
and he volunteered, and he taught me how to use
(18:25):
a teleprompter in less than ten minutes, in a process
by which I have taught hundreds of people since how
to use a teleprompter. Great guy. And then he got
hit in the head by religion or something. Still, every
once in a while.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Still think that you are in line to be Trump's
vice president. It's up to Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
He's the only person who will decide this true, He's
the only person who will decide.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
And I suppoke, yes, I do speak to him, I asked, Ques,
I said to you about this.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
No, I never tell anybody my personal conversations.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
With the story.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
I talked to President Trump all the time about the dogs,
about a lot of things. And right now I tell
you what. He is being persecuted in a political hunt,
witch hunt in this court case. So I'm proud of
him about how tough he is and how well he
is doing.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Did you bring up yes enough for Stewart?
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Did this interview is ridiculous what you were doing right now,
so you need to stop it is okay, it is
Let's talk about some real topics that Americans care about.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
I'm afraid around of time. Oh well, of course we are.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
We do. Thank you for being with us.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I know I pressed hard, but that's what people are
talking about to this day now.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Gotta know, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Watch out, mate,
she knows where all the gravel pits are. So the
gist of this is as Christy Noome continues to try
to sell this bloody book and continues to insist it
was her dog and her gravel pit and her bullets,
(19:50):
and just because she made up a story about meeting
Kim Jong un, she is under no obligation to ever
admit that, especially not since that she has found a
way to remove the story without admitting she made the
story up. All this makes it clear that no may
Or may not still think she could be Trump's VP pick,
(20:12):
but she definitely thinks she is enough of a monster
to someday be Republican president or dictator or whatever we
call the job by then. And I'm just gonna say this,
and if you don't get the reference, I'm going to
suggest you google it or go on to IMDb and
(20:32):
look up the movie The Dead Zone. But if this
is the start of Christy Nomes presidential campaign, it is
the worst presidential rollout since Greg Stilson Stilson S T
(20:53):
I L L S O N S. Also of interest
here this is a mini pod edition. Sorry, lots of
personal stuff going on, nothing wrong, just too much stuff.
Not enough day, not enough Keith. So the rest of
this episode is the story from yesterday. You probably skipped
of how the first man ever to run a mile
in four minutes or less seventy years ago. This week
(21:15):
a moment so epic the New York Times put out
an editorial wondering if anybody would ever do it again,
anybody would ever again run the mile in four minutes
or less? How he actually was not the first man
ever to run a mile in four minutes or less.
Roger Banister, who was probably the four thousandth man to
run a mile in four minutes or less. That's next.
(21:38):
This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. It's
mash up Time, a special edition of Things I Promised
Not To Tell and Sports Central Center. Seventy years ago. Today,
(21:58):
the world was still in disbelief, because the day before
May sixth, nineteen fifty four saw unfold one of the
most famous events in sports history, in fact, in twentieth
century world history, and everything you may have ever heard
about it is wrong. From six zho four pm prevailing
(22:23):
local time in England on the early evening of Thursday
May sixth, nineteen fifty four, continuing until the day the
man died on March third, twenty eighteen, not a day
went by, probably not an hour went by without somebody
congratulating Roger Banister on becoming or having become, or being
(22:46):
or forever being or being immortalized by being the first
human to run a mile in four minutes or less,
the man who broke the four minute mile. Except for
one small detail, he wasn't. We cannot now comprehend what
(23:10):
a big deal this really was. Neil Armstrong, Times, Charles
Lindbergh plus George Washington Maybe. The next day, The New
York Times published ten different stories about Roger Banister breaking
the four minute mile barrier, plus an editorial, an editorial
on the editorial page that asked if anybody in world
(23:34):
history would ever do it again. Roger Gilbert Banister began
the Times on the front page ran a mile in
three minutes fifty nine point four seconds tonight to reach
one of man's hitherto unattainable goals. There's just one problem.
(23:54):
Not only was Roger Banister probably not the first man
to run a mile in less than four minutes, but
there is also a lot of evidence that that record
was broke in May of seventeen seventy by a guy
who sold fruits and vegetables from a push cart on
the streets of London, a guy named Parrot. Sixty nine
(24:25):
years later, and this is still the most famous run
in the history of the world. May sixth, nineteen fifty four,
on an ordinary spring evening at the Ifley Road Track
at Oxford University in England, even as an unfavorable wind
worked against him, Roger Banister ran through the tape in
(24:45):
three point fifty nine to four and ran directly into
not just sports history, but human history. The four minute mile,
the first human ever to run that far that fast,
like the first man on the moon, no matter how
much farther we go, But glory is his in Defaul Forever,
(25:05):
always Eternal, immortal Neil Armstrong, but in shorts or there
had already been a four minute mile run in seventeen seventy,
and Banister has no more claim to immortality than do
you or I. And this is really a story about
bureaucracy supporting bureaucracy, and what the experts call recency bias,
(25:28):
and a lot of racism. And the story should be
about a guy who used to sell fruits and vegetables
on the streets of London, and who ran in his
spare time for money in the decade before the American Revolution.
And his name was Parrot, as in look, Maty, I
know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm
looking at one right now. We begin in the pages
(25:51):
of a British book dated from seventeen ninety four, which
seems to be for you back to the future fans,
a kind of Gray's Sports Almanac. The seventeen ninety four
tome bears an amazingly modern title the sports magazine, and
its chronology of top sports events of recent years past
(26:12):
includes for the year seventeen seventy this quote seventeen seventy
May ninth, James Parrott a costermonger. A costermonger sold fruits
and vegetables from a pushcart on Street. James Parrott, a costuremonger,
ran the length of Old Street viz. From the Charterhouse
wall in Goswell Street to Shoreditch Church Gates, which is
(26:33):
a measured mile, in four minutes. Fifteen guineas to five
were betted he did not run the ground in four
minutes and a half. So that's it. I am besmirching
the immortality of Saint Roger Banister and everything you will
see in the newspapers about him over the weekend because
(26:53):
of fifty one words about some guy racing against an
eighteenth century watch in the year seventeen seventy and the
story wasn't even published until twenty four years later. Seriously, Seriously,
there is nothing else to say about James Parrott. That
snippet from that book is all that researchers have ever
(27:15):
found or found out about James Parrott. No obituary, no nothing,
no four minute mile, no confirmation he ever existed. Besides which,
as every modern sports fan will tell you, the athletes
of today are the great, greater, greatest of all time goats.
If the record book says nobody ran a four minute
mile until nineteen fifty four, of course the record books
(27:36):
are right. Since seventeen seventy, humans have evolved, health has evolved,
training has evolved. Why in seventeen seventy you couldn't even
accurately measure a mile, let alone measure exactly four minutes. Actually,
agricultural chains, designed to resolve who owned what property and
(27:56):
where international borders were had been introduced in sixteen twenty
and have proved to be at worst only off by
a round owned two fifths of an inch over a mile.
And if you're saying agcultural chains, you don't use agricultural
chains in sports, let me ask you this. What do
(28:17):
they use in National Football League games to check whether
or not it's a first down? Okay, we're giving them
the accuracy of the agricultural chains we still use today
in our pro sports. You could measure several blocks of
London in seventeen seventy and say from way back there
to right over here in front of the church, that
(28:37):
is exactly a mile, Guvnor, But how would you time
it four minutes? Exactly what did they use a really
good sundial. No, that has been called a chronometer. The
chronometer was perfected by seventeen sixty one. You may know
the chronometer as a Swiss watch, or as you might
(28:59):
also know it, a rolex. So this parrot runs a mile,
or maybe he runs a mile plus two fifths of
an inch, and he is timed by several guys with rolexes,
and they all have the same score. He did it
in exactly four minutes. If you're still not convinced, if
(29:19):
you're still googling Roger Banister's descendants so they can sue
this idiot Ulderman in his podcast, let me emphasize the
part that convinced me that a man named Parrot did
run a four minute mile two months and four days
after the Boston massacre unleashed the events that would culminate
in the American Revolution. Permit me to reread that last
(29:43):
sentence about James Parrott's run from Gray's Sports Almanac, I'm sorry,
from the Sporting magazine of seventeen ninety four. Quote fifteen
guineas to five were betted he did not run the
ground in four minutes and a half. This guy parrot
bet on himself and three to one odds, and the
(30:07):
five guineas wagered here that would be worth about fifty
five hundred dollars in today's money, meaning this was no
eighteenth century Roger Banister hoping to break a record for
Queen and Country. This was a guy who did this
for money, for the equivalent in winnings of about seventeen
thousand dollars, at least as much as his annual income
(30:29):
might have been selling fruits and vegetables from a cart,
and the way it's phrased in that magazine, we don't know.
If more than one bet of fifteen guineas to five
was placed, he might have won thirty four thousand dollars
or fifty one thousand dollars or five hundred and ten
thousand dollars. Because this was for money, the loser or
(30:50):
losers who bet he could not finish the race in
four and a half minutes had to be satisfied that
he had done it in less than four and a half,
in this case in four. As we know from our
own times, like to claim they didn't lose, and will
go to any length to convince others they did not lose.
But James Parrott got his money, which means that the
(31:13):
loser or losers believed James Parrott really raised a mile
and did it in four minutes. I'm sold antiquated books
and four minute miles run one hundred and eighty three
years before the first four minute mile, and costermongers and
agricultural change. They may come and go and may be
trustworthy or untrustworthy, but money is money, and James Parrott
(31:39):
was given the equivalent of his annual salary at least
once because somebody who thought he could not do it agreed, Yeah,
I was wrong. He really, really, really really did just
run the mile in four minutes. Now, of course, the
whole account in the book could be wrong. I'm old
enough that I was actually on the air doing sportscast
(32:01):
on the radio network of United Press International on April
twenty five, nineteen eighty when Rosie Ruiz quote one unquote
the Boston Marathon. Then it turned out two people had
seen Rosy Ruiz burst out of the crowd of spectators
on Commonwealth Avenue and start running alongside the men runners.
And then it turned out that while she was supposedly
(32:22):
completing the nineteen seventy nine New York Marathon, she had
struck up a conversation with a freelance photographer on the subway,
and the two of them went to the finish line together,
and Rosie Ruiz then told officials she had just finished
the race. And Rosie Ruiz was a total fraud in
two different marathons. Maybe the seventeen seventy four minute mile
(32:44):
of James Parrott was just inaccurate. Maybe it was just
an inside joke or a misheard rumor or a typo,
or he took the subway with Rosie Ruiz, or it
was a joke by whoever wrote the book. I've told
you the story before about the nineteen twelve Saint Louis
(33:04):
Round second baseman named Proctor, and nobody could find anything
about him. And then it turned out Proctor was the
Western Union operator who used to make up all the
official scorecards after each game, and one day he decided
he always wanted to be a Major League ball player,
so he put himself in the scorecard. Maybe James Parrott
was the author of this the sports magazine or his
four minute miles and Monty Python jokes go. Now, that's
(33:27):
what I call a dead parrot. So if it's a mistake,
if it's a typo, if it's his hype job, if
it's Rosie Ruiz, if it's low Proctor, Roger Banister is safe.
Now he's not because there was also a runner named Powell,
and Powell in seventeen eighty seven said he could run
(33:48):
a mile in four minutes, and he wasn't messing around.
He bet a thousand guineas that he could do it,
one point one million dollars in today's money. And not
only that, but he ran on a famous English running
track near Hampton Court, and five days before Christmas of
seventeen eighty seven he ran a time trial so that
the gamblers could all come over and see what shape
(34:08):
he was in and whether they should bet for him
or bet against him. And he did it in the
time trial in four minutes and three seconds. And when
Powell said the betters could see what shape he was in,
he really meant it. He was dedicated to his cause.
Five days before Christmas and this guy ran a mile naked.
(34:31):
All that was in the papers. What happened to the
actual race, We don't know that. Nobody has ever found
that newspaper. Nobody's ever found an account of the race,
only the time trial, so we have to go under
the assumption that Powell never did better than four to three.
But once again, Roger Banister's four minute mile has withstood
(34:52):
the test of time. Uh kinda bah, No, Actually it hasn't.
There's also another guy named Weller. Weller was famous enough
as a professional runner of the time that when he
said he could run a mile on the Banbury Road
in Oxford, the newspapers of the day all showed up
to preview it, to talk about his two brothers, who
were also professional runners, and to cover his attempt on
(35:14):
October tenth, seventeen ninety six. And there it is in
the papers. Weller of Oxford runs a mile in three
minutes fifty eight seconds, not only one hundred and fifty
eight years before Roger Banister, but a second and a
half faster than Roger Banister. So here's the thing. If
(35:39):
somebody really ran a mile in three fifty nine or
three fifty eight at the time of the American Revolution,
wouldn't that stand out as such an impossible performance, then,
such an anomaly so startling that it would be viewed
in the same way we would view news coming up
on Monday that somebody now had just run the mile
in three minutes flat. I mean, if somebody ran the
(36:01):
mile in three minutes flat, we would check to see
if the guy was a space ala or a time traveler.
Wouldn't they have been amazed on October tenth, seventeen ninety six,
disbelieving what they had heard, not at all. And that's
the second half of the story of the day. Roger
Banister did not break the four minute barrier. Research and
(36:22):
computers and simulations show that people in the seventeen eighties
were consistently running the mile in four minutes and eighteen seconds,
four minutes and twenty seconds, four minutes and fifteen seconds,
if the info about Weller is right, three minutes and
fifty eight seconds. All the time, these numbers were being
put up by all kinds of runners. So a four
(36:43):
minute mile would have been great, but not out of context,
not in seventeen ninety six. And then you have to ask,
if it happened, where are all those records? Who were
all those four minute eighteen guys and four minute three
second guys and three fifty eight guys. What happened to
(37:04):
the record words. Well, see, that's another scandal. Those eighteenth
century records were erased in the nineteenth century because richer,
slower people in the nineteenth century wanted to say they
held the records, they erased the record book. That part
(37:25):
of the story, and the additional sad truth that much
of the claims about Roger Banister are really really racist. Next,
we know Roger Banister really did run a three minute
(37:47):
and fifty nine second mile on May sixth, nineteen fifty
four in England. It was timed and announced to a
waiting crowd by no less a figure than Norris mcwerder,
who was later the founder or co founder of the
Guinness Book of World Records. And everybody who was there
saw history and was part of an impossible dream coming true.
(38:09):
And as I mentioned earlier, the next day, the New
York Times actually had an editorial asking whether or not
anybody would ever do it again. There is considerable evidence,
as I've laid out here, that it was done before,
like two hundred years before. But if you were still
not convinced that, no, no matter what else, it was
(38:30):
Roger Banister's three minute, fifty nine point four second mile
on May sixth, nineteen fifty four was not the first
four minute mile. If James Parrott and the naked runner
Powell of Hampton Court and Weller seventeen ninety six don't
convince you there is also this. There is a sports
historian named Peter Radford, himself the bronze medalist in two
(38:51):
sprints at the nineteen sixty Olympics in Rome, and he
brought the story of Parrot and Powell and Weller to
the forefront in the British press nearly twenty years ago.
This man found them because he was looking for and
finding the records of more than six hundred running races
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Running against the clock,
(39:11):
against each other, usually for money, was not only the
most popular professional sport in Britain at that time, it
was also probably the first. And with so many races
and especially winning and losing times recorded, Peter Radford had
data to work with. When guys didn't run a four
minute mile, how fast did they run it? How fast
(39:33):
were these professionals going the average ones over other distances
in say seventeen eighty nine, what was the range of times?
And his computer looked at all of these races six
hundred or so, and all of the times and all
of the speeds, and it spit out this conclusion. Factoring
in the margin of error, Radford wrote, the best possible
(39:54):
one mile time would be anywhere between four minutes thirteen
seconds and exactly four minutes. So no, you cannot say
James Parrott ran the first four minute mile in seventeen seventy,
and Weller ran the first sub four minute mile in
seventeen ninety six, not with certainty, but I think you
can say with certainty that somebody did it before the
(40:18):
year eighteen hundred, and that when Roger Banister crashed through
the tape at Oxford at six oh four Greenwich meantime
on the evening of Thursday May sixth, nineteen fifty four,
and the track announcer Norris McWhorter announced that Roger Banister's
time in the mile was and he gave it a
desperately long pause by all accounts, three minutes fifty I
(40:41):
an unfall ten seconds the moment that happened, Roger Banister
became at best the second man to run a mile
in four minutes or less, but more likely he was
like the twenty second or the two hundred and twenty second.
So why why didn't anybody know this? Why did Roger
(41:05):
Banister live a life of unceasing, undiminished and sorry, undeserved fame?
And that guy Weller who may have run the race
a second faster and one hundred and fifty eight years earlier,
why don't we even know Weller's first name? All sports
are based on history. Records are made to be broken.
(41:28):
The older the record, the louder the break. Who screwed
this up? How did we lose Weller in the nooks
and crannies of history. We didn't lose him. It wasn't
an error. It was deliberate. And that's where this gets
to be a crime. Our historian and ex Olympic runner
(41:49):
mister Radford quoted another ancient book, British Rural Sports by J. H. Walsh,
which was published in eighteen eighty eight, and in it,
all the dozens of speed and distant events had two
sets of records. One for professionals like Parrot and Powell
and Weller, the ones who ran for money, the ones
(42:10):
on whom people bet, the ones who bet on themselves.
There was that set of records, and then another set
of records which was given far more weight and far
more importance for the amateurs. By the early twentieth century,
Radford wrote, the professional records had been erased from these books, expunged,
not forgotten, removed. Why because the professionals were far better
(42:35):
than the amateurs. No amateur held the record in the mile.
It was all professionals, but the amateurs were in charge.
They were the British upper class. They rased not for money,
but for sport. So the amateurs simply did what the
upper class always does in this situation. They erased the
records of all the professionals. And oh, by the way,
(42:56):
they also erased all records set by women. The British
obsession with the superiority of the amateurs over the professional
If you've ever seen the movie Chariots a Fire, you
already know exactly what I mean. It spread throughout the
world through the Olympics. That's why Jim Thorpe lost all
his gold medals from the nineteen twelve Games. Why the
(43:18):
greatest all around athlete ever died in poverty because he
had once played minor league baseball to make some money
in the summer, and everybody knew about it, and nobody
thought they'd hold it against it, but then they held
it against him. He was a professional, so his records
did not count like James Parrott or fill in the
blank here, Powell or I don't remember his first name Weller.
(43:44):
So the world record in the mile as of the
year eighteen sixty one was credited to a man, an
amateur named Matthew Green. Matthew Green was the fastest man
in human history four minutes and forty six seconds, four
minutes and forty six seconds. In my twenties, I might
(44:06):
have come close to that number. By nineteen thirteen, the
International Amateur Athletics Federation had taken over, and it recognized
a runner from Cornell, not me, a different runner from Cornell,
as the all time outdoor record holder in the mile
four minutes and thirteen seconds, John Paul Jones, one hundred
and forty three years after James Parrot. The indoor record
(44:29):
in the mile was then held by a man named
Abel Kiviat four eighteen and two I met Abel Kiviat.
I interviewed him when he was ninety. I wish I
had known about James Parrott. Then I didn't. Abel, and
I talked about his roommate at the nineteen twelve Olympics,
Jim Thorpe, got to tell you that story sometime too,
(44:50):
But boy Able Kiviat and I could have had a
conversation about amateurs versus professionals and whether or not his
record was actually a record. Anyway, you can see where
this is all going, and we are almost at our
proverbial finish line. Not only did his we forget the
great athletes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Parrot
and Powell and Weller, who if they did not break
the four minute mile, they came damn close and did
(45:12):
a lot better than my friend Abel Kiveat did, or
my Cornell guy John Paul Jones, to say another, of
Matthew Green four minutes and forty six seconds, What did
you do stop for lunch? Not only were the remarkable
athletes like Parrot and Powell and Weller forgotten, they were
buried deliberately. It makes the subject of the Roger Banister
(45:36):
four minute mile that everybody celebrates with almost undiminished astonishment
every year at this time. It makes all this a
little less trivial and a little bit more nefarious and
wrong and ugly. Speaking of ugly and Banister there is
(45:57):
one other component to this story. In the nineteen nineties,
having been the god of the four minute mile for
four decades, having been celebrated every day for breaking a
record that was probably broken one hundred and eighty three
years before, Roger Banister was asked about the new generation
of runners, those of African descent on September twelfth, nineteen
(46:18):
ninety five, Sir Roger Banister explained, quote, it's certainly obvious
when you see an all black sprint final that there
must be something rather special about their anatomy or physiology
which produces these outstanding successes. And indeed there may be,
but we don't know quite what it is. Some countries
have the good fortune to have a high proportion of
(46:40):
black sprinters and hurdlers. End quote. Nineteen years later, Banister
was still driving right into the Eugenics lane, sounding just
enough like Jimmy the Greek Snyder to make you squirm.
I love watching people like Usain Bolt, Banister said. The
West Africans, of course, have an inbuilt advantage, having been
(47:02):
transported as slaves to the way Indies. Only the toughest endured.
They have astonishing muscle composition with those fast fibers and
superior genes. I will leave it to you and to
his maker, an assessment of how much of Roger Banister
was patronizing, how much was him trying to rationalize how
(47:24):
his time had been bettered by nearly ten percent, and
how much of it was just sheer racism. But I
will note that in what Banister said is another reason
to believe that the idea that he was the first
human to run a four minute mile is laugh out
loud ridiculous. What about all of the runners of color
(47:49):
over the centuries, over the millennia, in Africa and South
America and elsewhere on this globe. By Banister's own disturbing logic,
certainly some of them must have beaten him to break
the four minute tape. No, let me close with this.
(48:11):
I don't know for certain who ran the first four
minute mile or when. For all we know, it was
broken two thousand years ago, and for that matter, so
was the present world record of three point forty three
point thirteen. Might have been James Parrott or Powell or Weller,
whose first names we don't know, or someone so lost
to history that we don't know their first name, or
(48:32):
their last name, or their country. We don't know who
it was. But no matter what you hear, or see
or read in this Weekend Ahead, it's sure as hell
was not Roger Banister, which brings us lastly to missus
Roger Banister, Moira Elva Jacobson Banister, daughter of a Swedish economist.
(48:56):
According to Roger Banister, his wife didn't know a lick
about sports, let alone about running, let alone about him
running four time. Roger Banister once said, my wife thought
I had run four miles in one minute. You know,
(49:18):
as I've been thinking about this and researching that story,
you might as well go with that four miles in
one minute. It's no more ridiculous than thinking that Roger
Banister was the first man to run one mile in
four minutes. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(49:56):
Thank you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and
John Phillip Scheneil arranged, produced and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on the guitars, base and drums, and
mister Shaneil handled orchestration and keyboards, and was produced by
Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions
arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The
(50:16):
sports music is the Alderman theme from ESPN two, written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical
and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss. The best
baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend Dennis Leary,
and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's
countdown for this the one hundred and eighty second day
until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the two hundred
(50:40):
and nineteenth day since Defendant J Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use
the mental health system, use the not regularly given elector
objection option, use the justice system to stop him from
doing it again while we still can. The next scheduled
(51:02):
countdown is tomorrow Boalton's as a new warrant. Still then,
I'm Keith Ulremman. Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(51:35):
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