July 26, 2024 • 38 mins
Legends are made at the Olympics and this summer shows across the Pushkin network are bringing their unique takes to Olympic stories. This special episode includes excerpts from a few: a Cautionary Tale about underestimating female marathoners, a Jesse Owens story from Revisionist History’s series on Hitler’s Olympics, and—from What’s Your Problem—the new technology that’s helping Olympic athletes get stronger.
Check out other show feeds as well, the Happiness Lab and A Slight Change of Plans are also going to the Games.
Sylvia Blemker of Springbok Analytics on What’s Your Problem
The Women Who Broke the Marathon Taboo on Cautionary Tales
Hitler’s Olympics from Revisionist History
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Pushkin. Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glabo. Here here at Pushkin. We
love the Olympics. One of my strongest childhood memories was
the nineteen seventy six Olympics in Montreal, my homeland's first
(00:32):
Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
My family didn't have a television, but we rented one
just for the occasion. Two rabbit ears on top of
a grainy black and white set. Who put the TV
in the fireplace because there was no other place for it,
And I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the
world in gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away
(00:57):
around the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters.
I still get nervous thinking about that race. Lassie Van's
improbable double in the five thousand meters, and the ten
thousand meters Alberto want to Rena, Cornelia ender Don Cory,
and the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay maybe the
(01:18):
greatest swimming race ever.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I was a little kid and I fell in love
with the Olympics, and I've been in love ever since.
There are just so many good Olympic stories to tell.
So this summer a bunch of Pushkin shows are giving
you their unique takes on the games. Over at the
Happiness Lab, Lorie Santos will be talking with the coach
who coaches the coaches. Maya Shankar is going deep with
(01:48):
a whole suite of swimmers talking about their slight change
of plans. And my colleague bend A daff Haffrey and
I have done a nine part series about the nineteen
thirty six Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi Olympics, and today
I'm sharing a taste of some of my favorite stories
from Pushkin's Olympic summer. One from Revisionist History, another from
(02:11):
What's Your Problem, and to kick us all off, a
story from Tim Harford. Over at Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
For sheer myth making about distance running, You can't beat
the Marathon. After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian
army at the Battle of Marathon, a chap called Philippides
ran twenty six miles to Athens with the good news,
and then, so the story goes, collapsed and died. Thus
(02:40):
began the legend of the Marathon. This is a race
so grueling, a challenge so overwhelming, that it could literally
kill you. Women weren't allowed to compete in the first Olympics,
let alone in the marathon. If it could kill a man,
can you imagine what it would do to the fragile
(03:01):
frame of a woman. The International Olympic Committee were reluctant
to let women compete in any events at all, and
when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in
nineteen twenty eight, the longest women's race was eight hundred meters.
It was a disaster. The newspapers of the day reported
(03:24):
the disturbing scenes The New York Evening Post.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
Below us on the Cinderpath were eleven wretched women, five
of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed
after reaching the tape. The Chicago Tribune added that one
finisher collapsed into unconsciousness and required medical attention. A press
syndicate reporter commented it.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Was not a very edifying spectacle to see a group
of fine girls running themselves into a state of exhaustion.
Other writers described the race as a disgrace or dangerous,
or opined that two hundred meters was surely the maximum
distance a woman could attempt without premature aging. And damage
(04:09):
to her reproductive capacity. But this is all, of course nonsense,
not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity, all
of it. There weren't eleven women in the race. There
were nine. Not only did the gold medalist Lena Radkebatschawer
break the world record, but so did the silver and
(04:31):
bronze medalists and the three women behind them, Which is,
I suppose what happens when an event doesn't have many precedents.
Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor, no matter.
Rather than celebrating the greatest women's middle distance race in history,
(04:51):
the pundits wrote whatever sensationalized nonsense they felt like writing.
The International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse
to keep the women's eight hundred meters out of the
Olympics for the next three decades. If women couldn't be
(05:12):
allowed to run eight hundred meters until nineteen sixty, you
can imagine what the male dominated athletic establishment of the
nineteen sixties thought of the idea of women running a marathon.
But there were a few independent, spirited women who liked
to run. Then, naturally enough, their thoughts turned to that
(05:33):
iconic distance. One of those women was Katherine Switzer. As
a girl, she told her father she wanted to be
a cheerleader. You don't want to be a cheerleader, honey,
he told her. Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want
people to cheer for you. He encouraged her to run
a mile each day to get fit for sports, and
(05:55):
she did. She became a journalism student at Syracuse, where
there were women's sports teams at all, So she asked
to train with a men's cross country team. Sure, said
the head coach, and then she heard him laughing with
the other coaches behind her back. That only made her
more determined. More encouraging was volunteer coach Arnie Briggs, the
(06:19):
university mailman and, at fifty years of age, the veteran
of fifteen Boston Marathons. He was full of stories about
the classic marathon, which had first been held in the
late eighteen hundreds, and one December night, on a miserable
training run through a snowstorm as cars skidded and honked around,
(06:40):
Catherine had heard one too many of those tales. Let's
quit talking about the Boston Marathon and run the damn thing.
No woman can run the Boston marathon. Why not, I'm
running ten miles a night, Arney relented. No dame ever
ran the Boston Marathon. If any woman could do it,
(07:01):
you could, but you'd have to prove it to me.
If you ran the distance in practice, I'd be the
first to take you to Boston. Now you're talking, she thought,
a few months later, and three weeks before the marathon,
they ran thirty one miles in training. Arnie turned gray
and passed out, but Catherine was feeling great. The next day,
(07:23):
at Arne's insistence, she signed up for the race, signing
her name as she always did, Ka v.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Switzer.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
She and Arnie checked the rule book. There was nothing
forbidding women to enter. Arne signed up too, as did
Catherine's boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all two hundred and thirty
five pounds of him. He was a promising hammer thrower,
had been a serious college football player. And no, he
wasn't planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and
(07:57):
if a girl can run a marathon, I can run
a marathon. On Wednesday, April nineteenth, nineteen sixty seven, race day,
it was snowing. Most of the field were running in tracksuits.
There were seven hundred and forty one entrance, and Katherine
pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride. Kay Switzer
(08:21):
two to sixty one. From the other runners, she got
a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome. Hey,
you're going to go the whole way. Gosh, it's great
to see a girl here. Can you give me some
tips to get my wife to run? She'd love it
if I could just get her started. Arnie was beaming.
Big Tom unmissible in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt, wasn't
(08:44):
happy that Katherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention.
Take it off, he said, I shan't, she replied. The
crowd of runners squeezed closer and closer together as they
approached the start, and then they were off and feeling great.
Just four miles later, the fun would stop. Catherine Switzer
(09:16):
was running with her little group, including coach Arnie and
boyfriend Big Tom, feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of
the other runners. But the four mile mark, the press
truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers a
good shot of that dame who was running the marathon.
Then Switzer recalled a man with an overcoat and felt
(09:39):
hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking
his finger at me. He said something to me as
I passed and reached out for my hand, catching my
glove instead and pulling it off.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Who was it?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
A protester, a crank, but he was wearing an official's ribbon.
Moments later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes
coming up fast behind me. When a runner hears that
kind of noise, it's usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my
head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious
(10:10):
face I'd ever seen. A big man, a huge man
with bad teeth, was set to pounds, and before I
could react, he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming,
get the hell out of my race and give me
those numbers. Katherine was terrified. She realized she'd wet her
pants in fear, and she turned to sprint away as
(10:30):
the furious official tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt.
The press truck was still there, The cameras were whirring
and clicking, and then, seemingly from nowhere, two hundred and
thirty five pounds of orange clad college football player crashed
into the official, who flew sideways and landed on the
(10:52):
roadside in a crumpled heap. Oh God, thought Katherine big
Tom's killed him. We're in trouble. Run like hell, yelled Arnie,
and they sprinted away from the scene with a press
truck in pursuit, cameras still clicking. It was an extraordinary scene,
(11:12):
and perhaps the strangest thing about it, Catherine Switzer wasn't
the first woman to run a marathon. She wasn't the
first woman to run the Boston Marathon. In fact, she
wasn't even the leading woman in this race. A mile
ahead of her, Roberta. Bobby Gibb was making serene progress
(11:33):
without an irate race official insight.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
There's so much in this Cautionary Tales episode. Two groundbreaking
female marathoners and an epic two hundred and sixty eight
mile race two hundred and sixty eight miles along the
spine of England. You can find it now in the
Cautionary Tales feed. There are two things that define our era,
(12:02):
an absolute obsession with sports and incredible technological progress. Sylvia
Blemker works at their intersection. She's a professor of biomedical
engineering at the University of Virginia and the co founder
of Springbok Analytics. She figured out how to combine MRI
(12:22):
scans with artificial intelligence to create incredibly detailed analyzes of
our muscles. Springbox clients include Olympic athletes, major League Baseball,
and a bunch of professional basketball and soccer teams. Sylvia
Blenker talked about how her work helps elite athletes and
(12:42):
people with neuromuscular diseases in this interview with Jacob Goldstein
for What's Your Problem.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
What's one surprising thing your work has taught you about
elite athletes.
Speaker 7 (12:55):
I never thought I would see muscles that were so
developed they broke our scale.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (13:05):
Yeah, like it was just too big the A I
couldn't figure out what it is.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Well, no, the AI found it. But we are like
our kind of rating system.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (13:14):
Was there a particular athlete or a particular sport or
particular muscle?
Speaker 5 (13:18):
What?
Speaker 6 (13:18):
What? What muscle broke the scale?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Uh?
Speaker 7 (13:21):
The gluteus maximus breaks it a fair Yeah, fantastic. Yes,
it's a pain in my butt.
Speaker 6 (13:30):
Like because it's too big.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yeah, yeah, it's just so big. The other thing is
that they have some tiny muscles too, huh, Like they have.
Speaker 6 (13:39):
Like smaller than a normal person's muscle.
Speaker 7 (13:42):
Much smaller.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Huh.
Speaker 7 (13:43):
They put their muscle where they need it.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
What's an example, like what muscle is tiny and what
kind of.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Athlete calf muscles are small and most fast athletes huh.
Speaker 7 (13:54):
And either you look at a sprinter or like a
running back.
Speaker 6 (13:59):
It's just all squad no calf, all.
Speaker 7 (14:02):
Like thigh no calf, yeah bye and him.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
It kind of makes sense because you know, if you're
trying to run fast, you wouldn't want to put a
lot of mass like at the end of your leg.
Speaker 7 (14:11):
It's like as a lot of inertia to like move
your leg.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Because you know, the muscles are important for sprinting, that's
the interesting thing. But they just don't they're small, They're
very small.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Huh uh huh. So I'm particularly interested at this moment
in the sports piece of what you do. I'm curious,
by the way, do you work with any Olympic teams
or Olympic athletes?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, yeah, We've actually been working with several different Olympic athletes.
Speaker 7 (14:44):
The ones that probably that.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Come to mind most are multiple players on the US
women's national soccer team.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Oh cool, tell me, like, tell me the story of
that of that work. So they came to you, what
did what did they what do they want when they
came to like how did that? How did that begin?
Speaker 7 (15:03):
They came to us along with their team.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
So the technology we provide, you know, an athlete could
understand it, but really with their team to help them
figure out how to keep athletes healthy.
Speaker 6 (15:15):
So what did they what did they say? What did
they say when they came to so?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Uh, for example, one athlete that's coming to mind had
a known imbalance side to side that based on a
history of injury, and they really wanted to know where
that imbalance was coming from.
Speaker 6 (15:35):
So the the woman had had hurt one of her legs,
and that leg was even after she came back, that
leg was weaker essentially than the other. I mean, is
that the sort of gross macroy?
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yeah exactly, that's a that's a nice way to put it.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
And and and they wanted a sort of finder like okay,
but we can see that, but what's going on on
the inside, like muscle by muscle tell us that, yes.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Exactly, that's precisely what we do.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
We go on the inside because on the outside you
see perhaps that her knee extents or quads seem weaker
on one side than the other. But there's four quads,
quadre steps, four muscles, and so it's not clear which
of those muscles are actually the culprit for that imbalance
and in what way good.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
So this is their question and then what happens next.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
So this first step is an MRI scan, And so
with these athletes or teams, we have ways to connect
them with an MRI machine, whether it be through an
imaging center that they partner with, or we've even actually
brought MRI mobile trucks to sites to make it easier.
Speaker 6 (16:51):
Run off the field and get an MRI and go
back and keep playing.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, yeah, kind yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
It helps just with the timing of things. But so
for we connect them there, so it takes about ten minutes.
Then they send those pictures up into the cloud into
our server and then we crunched through it and then
we send back a report on their muscles. We also
have what we call it interactive viewer, and it's presented
(17:20):
in the form of a three D model. Three dimensional model,
so you actually see your own legs, the muscles and bones,
your own muscles and bones, that we've identified from the
images going through a process called segmentation where we find
all the muscles and bones and then we reconstruct them.
So it's kind of like a digital twin of that
(17:40):
person that they can see on their computer. And so
along with it or a number or all these metrics
that helps them understand their balance, the development or strength
of the muscles, and the health of the muscles.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
And so in the case of this soccer player who
came to you, who you know, knew knew she had
some kind of problem with her quadriceps on one side,
but didn't know what was going on, what did you find?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
We found some imbalances and actually not just in those muscles.
It turns out that, you know, it's all connected. So
I think there were at least one calf muscle and
then some in the especially in the deep hip, those
were impacted.
Speaker 7 (18:28):
So yeah, it kind of shows up everywhere.
Speaker 6 (18:31):
To what extent can trainers or you know, strength coaches
develop programs that are sufficiently kind of fine grained to
match the kind of fine grained findings you're having, right Like,
for example, if you find, as I understand you did,
that a soccer player has one particular quadricep that is weak, Like,
(18:54):
are there workouts that target a single quadricep and not
the others?
Speaker 7 (18:58):
Yep, there are.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
That's cool for whichever quadricepp you're just like, just for fun,
give me an example.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
One way that it's very simple is using something called biofeedback.
Speaker 7 (19:10):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
So you can measure whether you use something called e MG,
which is a way to measure how much electrical activity
is a muscle, and then you can see which muscles
you're using for a given task. So if you give
people the feedback of which of those muscles they're using
and say, oh, no, you're not using this one, use
this one more, that actually works very effectively.
Speaker 6 (19:34):
Oh really, So you can basically use your brain if
you're getting the feedback to focus on which quadricep you're exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah, and there's other ways you can you can give
the feedback in other different ways. But yeah, our brains
are very good at that. Once they get feedback, they're
very good at learning.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
That's cool, especially somehow to think of what the lead athletes, right,
because they are already presumably like super dialed in in
terms of like the relationship between their brain and their
body at this very.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Elite level exactly.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (20:03):
The other I was going to mention.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
A lot of players and teams use this not just
one time, but overtime. So they'll get a scan, figure
out a plan, work on that for maybe three months
or six months, and then do another scan and see
how things are progressing and adjust accordingly. So that's that's
definitely another way to in the long term see if
(20:29):
what they're doing is resulting in the change that they're
hoping to see.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
So, what happened with that soccer player who had the
weak quadricep and other.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Related Yeah, No, I think she's doing great, like staying
healthy and and you know, getting ready.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
So I know you can't tell us her name, but
will we see her in the Olympics this time?
Speaker 7 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
You can hear more from that interview and a bunch
of other stories from people who are creating groundbreaking new
technologies on what's your problem. I'll be back in a
minute with the final leg of this relay race through
Pushkin's Olympics summer. Our last story today is one from
(21:22):
Revisionist Histories series about the nineteen thirty six Olympics in Berlin.
The series is all about why America chose to compete
in the Games when it was already clear who Hitler
was and what the Nazis stood for. Ben Daphaffrey takes
everyone's favorite story from the Berlin Olympics about two athletes
(21:44):
making good on the promise of the Games and breaks
it wide open.
Speaker 8 (21:50):
The Collock Street tears around the clay circle with the
speed of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
About four thousand athletes competed in the nineteen thirty six
Olympics Games. Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Streak Jesse Owens in one hundred meters.
Speaker 8 (22:08):
He started building the other out and got that capa
coming second up on him.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
already set three world records in a single day, all
in the same hour. With a bad back.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
The world's most runner makes the others look as if
they're walking as he wins the final and equals the
words record of time.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
And in nineteen thirty six, even the Germans were expecting
something great from him.
Speaker 9 (22:47):
How many board medals do your host to win? The
two part times, it's to desire very athlete to win
a first.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Place in the Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In nineteen thirty six, he was slated to in three events,
and since I'm in three.
Speaker 8 (23:03):
Events, I hope to emerge with.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Three victory.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Broad jump one hundred meters, two hundred meters and the
broad jump. Later they added a fourth event, the four
by one hundred meter relay. He would win gold in
all four, the only person to win four gold medals
in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you know
the name Jesse Owens. But it all could have turned
(23:33):
out differently because of that broad jump. You've seen a
broad jump before today. It's called the long jump, and
it's one of the more dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers
sprint down the runway, hit a take off board and
they look like they're flying and then they land in
a huge spray of sand. So the morning of August fourth,
(23:56):
nineteen thirty six, ten thirty am in the right place,
sport Feld, it's the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers
go on to the final. Owens had just run his
heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he headed
over to the pit. It was the third day of
the Games, and by then he already had his first
gold medal, so it was a surprise when he botched
(24:19):
his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it was
a practice run no sweat, though he had two more tries,
so he lined himself back up and started jogging down
the runway. He took off and came up short. He
had one jump left. If he screwed up that last jump,
(24:41):
he'd have been out of the contest, and he'd have
gone from being the only athlete to win four gold
medals in nineteen thirty six to one of three athletes
who'd won three golds, right up there with Conrad Frey
and Hendrika Mastenbroke, who actually would have had more total
medals than him. And I ask you, be honest, have
you you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika mastenbrook No,
(25:04):
And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying jump, you
wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
(25:27):
made him a legend. It was cool that day in August,
clouds had rolled in over the stadium. Around one hundred
thousand people were in the stands watching in. America's most
famous athlete, Jesse Owens, was screwing up badly, which makes
(25:48):
no sense. All he had to do was jump seven
point one five meters to qualify. He already had a
world record for jumping a meter farther than that, So
what was going wrong? Malcolm and I decided to ask
an expert a legend. Actually it was about.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
Ten years ago.
Speaker 8 (26:06):
So the age is sixty five, I think. And I
jumped further than my high school mark.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And you're the first American who jumped fifty seven feet.
Speaker 8 (26:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time,
Milan tiff.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
I actually jumped sixty feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize
it because I jumped out of the pit.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And where should you do that?
Speaker 8 (26:31):
Right here?
Speaker 5 (26:31):
You say, wow? And I jumped.
Speaker 8 (26:34):
I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on
the grass. I had grass stands all over the back
of me.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
So when I was in high school, starting at the
age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribed to
Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
it's called. And Millen Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
(27:07):
of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
But I was I was just obsessed with him as
this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure. And
(27:31):
he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
be He's going to be a little bit. He might
be a little I don't know, but I have a
sense that he might be. He might be a little
out there.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Lawn Tiff,
I felt like I had taken some kind of intense
psychedelic the effects of which I've yet to wear off.
Speaker 8 (27:57):
The first humans.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
It's unbelievable understood that to walk is just to take
a number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed
by an actually gorgeous painting of Milans portraying a pair
of empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space
called mysteriously palm springs.
Speaker 8 (28:17):
And the birds and the trees would all fly down.
They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have
when I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
he could take us out to the UCLA track, and
when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above
us the whole time, which only made everything a little
more surreal, and Olympic legends just walking up to him,
literally bowing down. This, I think because they wouldn't normally
see him. He told us he prefers to run in
(28:46):
the morning, by which he meant three am. Tiff took
us out to the broad jump pit to help us
get inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could
do because he's a master of the approach. The part
Jesse Owens was screwing up. But also because so you
(29:07):
actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid. Yeah, yeah,
you know, I sit and he.
Speaker 8 (29:12):
Tell the stories. Yeah, and not hear all the stories.
And you know he talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
You know, we asked him to tell us about how
you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 8 (29:25):
Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
of rockings. You have to have some or a jiggle
where you will call it. Yeah, you have to have
a jiggle or a gide up before you even get
into your run. Yeah, that adjustice your run.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Is that why this is obviously the broad jump, but
lose long. I noticed he does this sort of like
hitch in his leg before he starts running. Yeah, it's
like a dance.
Speaker 8 (29:46):
It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 6 (29:48):
Can you show us what your gidea up was, Well,
it's like a one.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
Two, three, four five, then you start your run. Yeah.
And I told it to Willie Banks World Ragged, taught
it to h Bike Pile whol record.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
We gave it a shot on the track where at
the very same time actual Olympic athletes were practicing for
this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did
we set a world record? Not even close. Did we
become friends with any Olympians they were otherwise occupied. But
this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.
(30:26):
What was Did Jesse Owens have a gideo?
Speaker 8 (30:28):
No, he had a stamp start because he was a sprinterer,
you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
He didn't have a jiggle, well, he didn't have a che.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
No, he didn't have a jiggle or a giddy. Yeah.
And it took his competitor to say, man, come on,
you gotta do something first.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit there export feld
Loots Long. Lutzlong was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champ,
and he looked the part, a fine ak line nose
framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As
Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning
(31:10):
to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than
to see a black man lose to an Arian. The
thought was nanging at him, messing up his focus. And
then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler had
been watching the games, and saw that when Owens's turn came,
Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil. That's
(31:33):
why he was fouling out. He was psyched out by
all of it. Distract it, and when he saw how
amazing Lutslong was at the broad jump, he began to
wonder if there was something true about all this arian stuff.
He was down to his last jump, and then came
the miracle. In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight,
(31:54):
Owens wrote, suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Lutslong.
Speaker 9 (32:00):
Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What
has taken your goat?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 9 (32:09):
I had to smile a little in spite of myself
hearing his mixed up American idiom ah nothing, I said,
you know how it is? He was silent for a
few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
But I also know you are a better jumper than this. Now,
what has taken your goat? I laughed out loud this time,
(32:33):
but I couldn't tell him him. Above all, I glanced
over at the broad jump pit. I was about to
be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if he wasn't
sure of which ones to use. Is it what Reichkanze
Hitler did?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
He asked.
Speaker 9 (32:49):
I was thunderstruck that he'd say it. I started to answer,
but I didn't know what to say. I see he said, Look,
we talk of that later. Now you must jump and
you must qualify. But how I shot back? I have thought?
He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
(33:11):
one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I nodded.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
Yet you must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
this time in frustration, And as I did, I heard
the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, You take
off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
(33:38):
All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
a cloudburst.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
closer and closer to the pit, and he hit that
mark on the towel leapt into the air, and when
(34:04):
he finally got that, he qualified, and later that day,
with Hitler back in the stands in the metal event
itself well record, he set an Olympic record. And that's
when Lootes along the Aryan poster child who had just
lost to Jesse Owens, hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler,
(34:25):
and the Hitler was pissed man, but Long didn't just
embrace him, According to Jesse Owens, Later that night they
met up in the Olympic village. The hours ticked on
and they stayed up late, talking about their lives, the
state of the world in the uncertain future. Some kind
(34:48):
of strange bond had been formed between the men that day,
because then the next day they did it again, and
after that, again and again and again. Every single night
of the Games they met up to talk. They became friends.
The dream of the Olympics was real for them. They
(35:08):
bridged an unbridgable gap between two cultures, two races. Something
unbreakable had bound them. After the Games, when Owens was
back in America and Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany,
they wrote letters to each other even after long was
serving in the Wehrmacht the Nazi army, back and forth
across the Atlantic for years. They kept coming until right
(35:33):
before Lutzlang was killed in the war. He was stationed
in the deserts of North Africa. On some lonely desert hour,
he sat down to write one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 9 (35:47):
I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
fear so much for myself.
Speaker 6 (35:55):
My friend, Jesse.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
I fear for my woman, who was at home, and
my young son, Karl, who has never really known his father.
My heart tells me, if I be honest with you,
that this is the last letter I shall ever write.
If it is so, I ask you something. It is
(36:17):
something so very important to me. It is you go
to Germany when this war done. Someday find my Carl
and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse, what
times were like when we were not separated by war,
I am saying, Tell him how things can be between.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Men on this earth. There are tears in your eyes.
You would not be alone. This story is a big
part of the legend of Jesse Owens. If you look
up Jesse Owens in the Encyclopedia Britannica. There's the story
(37:00):
when they made a star studied Hollywood film about Jesse
Owens's life. Lutslog and that qualifying jump are the pivotal moment.
Retelling this story would help launch the career of the
greatest Olympic documentarian of all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm
not an auctioneer, but I think it is the reason
why Lutslog's silver medal sold for nearly half a million
(37:22):
dollars two years ago, about five times the amount earned
for any other silver medal at auction. It's arguably the
most important story in Olympic history. It is proof of
the Olympic dream. It made the case that it was
good that America went to the Vilin Games because it
made possible this improbable friendship that transcended even the Second
(37:44):
World War, a story that was just too good to
be true.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
You can hear the rest of this episode and the
whole Hitler's Olympics series by following Revisionist History, And if
you're looking for more Olympic content, take a look at
Happiness Lab Slight Change of Plans, and other Pushkin shows
This summer We're all going to the Olympics. Thanks for
help with this special episode goes to Sarah Nix, Sophie Crane,
(38:25):
Sarah Bugaier and Nina Lorence.
Pushkin. Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glabo. Here here at Pushkin. We
love the Olympics. One of my strongest childhood memories was
the nineteen seventy six Olympics in Montreal, my homeland's first
(00:32):
Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
My family didn't have a television, but we rented one
just for the occasion. Two rabbit ears on top of
a grainy black and white set. Who put the TV
in the fireplace because there was no other place for it,
And I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the
world in gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away
(00:57):
around the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters.
I still get nervous thinking about that race. Lassie Van's
improbable double in the five thousand meters, and the ten
thousand meters Alberto want to Rena, Cornelia ender Don Cory,
and the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay maybe the
(01:18):
greatest swimming race ever.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I was a little kid and I fell in love
with the Olympics, and I've been in love ever since.
There are just so many good Olympic stories to tell.
So this summer a bunch of Pushkin shows are giving
you their unique takes on the games. Over at the
Happiness Lab, Lorie Santos will be talking with the coach
who coaches the coaches. Maya Shankar is going deep with
(01:48):
a whole suite of swimmers talking about their slight change
of plans. And my colleague bend A daff Haffrey and
I have done a nine part series about the nineteen
thirty six Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi Olympics, and today
I'm sharing a taste of some of my favorite stories
from Pushkin's Olympic summer. One from Revisionist History, another from
(02:11):
What's Your Problem, and to kick us all off, a
story from Tim Harford. Over at Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
For sheer myth making about distance running, You can't beat
the Marathon. After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian
army at the Battle of Marathon, a chap called Philippides
ran twenty six miles to Athens with the good news,
and then, so the story goes, collapsed and died. Thus
(02:40):
began the legend of the Marathon. This is a race
so grueling, a challenge so overwhelming, that it could literally
kill you. Women weren't allowed to compete in the first Olympics,
let alone in the marathon. If it could kill a man,
can you imagine what it would do to the fragile
(03:01):
frame of a woman. The International Olympic Committee were reluctant
to let women compete in any events at all, and
when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in
nineteen twenty eight, the longest women's race was eight hundred meters.
It was a disaster. The newspapers of the day reported
(03:24):
the disturbing scenes The New York Evening Post.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
Below us on the Cinderpath were eleven wretched women, five
of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed
after reaching the tape. The Chicago Tribune added that one
finisher collapsed into unconsciousness and required medical attention. A press
syndicate reporter commented it.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Was not a very edifying spectacle to see a group
of fine girls running themselves into a state of exhaustion.
Other writers described the race as a disgrace or dangerous,
or opined that two hundred meters was surely the maximum
distance a woman could attempt without premature aging. And damage
(04:09):
to her reproductive capacity. But this is all, of course nonsense,
not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity, all
of it. There weren't eleven women in the race. There
were nine. Not only did the gold medalist Lena Radkebatschawer
break the world record, but so did the silver and
(04:31):
bronze medalists and the three women behind them, Which is,
I suppose what happens when an event doesn't have many precedents.
Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor, no matter.
Rather than celebrating the greatest women's middle distance race in history,
(04:51):
the pundits wrote whatever sensationalized nonsense they felt like writing.
The International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse
to keep the women's eight hundred meters out of the
Olympics for the next three decades. If women couldn't be
(05:12):
allowed to run eight hundred meters until nineteen sixty, you
can imagine what the male dominated athletic establishment of the
nineteen sixties thought of the idea of women running a marathon.
But there were a few independent, spirited women who liked
to run. Then, naturally enough, their thoughts turned to that
(05:33):
iconic distance. One of those women was Katherine Switzer. As
a girl, she told her father she wanted to be
a cheerleader. You don't want to be a cheerleader, honey,
he told her. Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want
people to cheer for you. He encouraged her to run
a mile each day to get fit for sports, and
(05:55):
she did. She became a journalism student at Syracuse, where
there were women's sports teams at all, So she asked
to train with a men's cross country team. Sure, said
the head coach, and then she heard him laughing with
the other coaches behind her back. That only made her
more determined. More encouraging was volunteer coach Arnie Briggs, the
(06:19):
university mailman and, at fifty years of age, the veteran
of fifteen Boston Marathons. He was full of stories about
the classic marathon, which had first been held in the
late eighteen hundreds, and one December night, on a miserable
training run through a snowstorm as cars skidded and honked around,
(06:40):
Catherine had heard one too many of those tales. Let's
quit talking about the Boston Marathon and run the damn thing.
No woman can run the Boston marathon. Why not, I'm
running ten miles a night, Arney relented. No dame ever
ran the Boston Marathon. If any woman could do it,
(07:01):
you could, but you'd have to prove it to me.
If you ran the distance in practice, I'd be the
first to take you to Boston. Now you're talking, she thought,
a few months later, and three weeks before the marathon,
they ran thirty one miles in training. Arnie turned gray
and passed out, but Catherine was feeling great. The next day,
(07:23):
at Arne's insistence, she signed up for the race, signing
her name as she always did, Ka v.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Switzer.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
She and Arnie checked the rule book. There was nothing
forbidding women to enter. Arne signed up too, as did
Catherine's boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all two hundred and thirty
five pounds of him. He was a promising hammer thrower,
had been a serious college football player. And no, he
wasn't planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and
(07:57):
if a girl can run a marathon, I can run
a marathon. On Wednesday, April nineteenth, nineteen sixty seven, race day,
it was snowing. Most of the field were running in tracksuits.
There were seven hundred and forty one entrance, and Katherine
pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride. Kay Switzer
(08:21):
two to sixty one. From the other runners, she got
a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome. Hey,
you're going to go the whole way. Gosh, it's great
to see a girl here. Can you give me some
tips to get my wife to run? She'd love it
if I could just get her started. Arnie was beaming.
Big Tom unmissible in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt, wasn't
(08:44):
happy that Katherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention.
Take it off, he said, I shan't, she replied. The
crowd of runners squeezed closer and closer together as they
approached the start, and then they were off and feeling great.
Just four miles later, the fun would stop. Catherine Switzer
(09:16):
was running with her little group, including coach Arnie and
boyfriend Big Tom, feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of
the other runners. But the four mile mark, the press
truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers a
good shot of that dame who was running the marathon.
Then Switzer recalled a man with an overcoat and felt
(09:39):
hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking
his finger at me. He said something to me as
I passed and reached out for my hand, catching my
glove instead and pulling it off.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Who was it?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
A protester, a crank, but he was wearing an official's ribbon.
Moments later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes
coming up fast behind me. When a runner hears that
kind of noise, it's usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my
head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious
(10:10):
face I'd ever seen. A big man, a huge man
with bad teeth, was set to pounds, and before I
could react, he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming,
get the hell out of my race and give me
those numbers. Katherine was terrified. She realized she'd wet her
pants in fear, and she turned to sprint away as
(10:30):
the furious official tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt.
The press truck was still there, The cameras were whirring
and clicking, and then, seemingly from nowhere, two hundred and
thirty five pounds of orange clad college football player crashed
into the official, who flew sideways and landed on the
(10:52):
roadside in a crumpled heap. Oh God, thought Katherine big
Tom's killed him. We're in trouble. Run like hell, yelled Arnie,
and they sprinted away from the scene with a press
truck in pursuit, cameras still clicking. It was an extraordinary scene,
(11:12):
and perhaps the strangest thing about it, Catherine Switzer wasn't
the first woman to run a marathon. She wasn't the
first woman to run the Boston Marathon. In fact, she
wasn't even the leading woman in this race. A mile
ahead of her, Roberta. Bobby Gibb was making serene progress
(11:33):
without an irate race official insight.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
There's so much in this Cautionary Tales episode. Two groundbreaking
female marathoners and an epic two hundred and sixty eight
mile race two hundred and sixty eight miles along the
spine of England. You can find it now in the
Cautionary Tales feed. There are two things that define our era,
(12:02):
an absolute obsession with sports and incredible technological progress. Sylvia
Blemker works at their intersection. She's a professor of biomedical
engineering at the University of Virginia and the co founder
of Springbok Analytics. She figured out how to combine MRI
(12:22):
scans with artificial intelligence to create incredibly detailed analyzes of
our muscles. Springbox clients include Olympic athletes, major League Baseball,
and a bunch of professional basketball and soccer teams. Sylvia
Blenker talked about how her work helps elite athletes and
(12:42):
people with neuromuscular diseases in this interview with Jacob Goldstein
for What's Your Problem.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
What's one surprising thing your work has taught you about
elite athletes.
Speaker 7 (12:55):
I never thought I would see muscles that were so
developed they broke our scale.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (13:05):
Yeah, like it was just too big the A I
couldn't figure out what it is.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Well, no, the AI found it. But we are like
our kind of rating system.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (13:14):
Was there a particular athlete or a particular sport or
particular muscle?
Speaker 5 (13:18):
What?
Speaker 6 (13:18):
What? What muscle broke the scale?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Uh?
Speaker 7 (13:21):
The gluteus maximus breaks it a fair Yeah, fantastic. Yes,
it's a pain in my butt.
Speaker 6 (13:30):
Like because it's too big.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yeah, yeah, it's just so big. The other thing is
that they have some tiny muscles too, huh, Like they have.
Speaker 6 (13:39):
Like smaller than a normal person's muscle.
Speaker 7 (13:42):
Much smaller.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Huh.
Speaker 7 (13:43):
They put their muscle where they need it.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
What's an example, like what muscle is tiny and what
kind of.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Athlete calf muscles are small and most fast athletes huh.
Speaker 7 (13:54):
And either you look at a sprinter or like a
running back.
Speaker 6 (13:59):
It's just all squad no calf, all.
Speaker 7 (14:02):
Like thigh no calf, yeah bye and him.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
It kind of makes sense because you know, if you're
trying to run fast, you wouldn't want to put a
lot of mass like at the end of your leg.
Speaker 7 (14:11):
It's like as a lot of inertia to like move
your leg.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Because you know, the muscles are important for sprinting, that's
the interesting thing. But they just don't they're small, They're
very small.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Huh uh huh. So I'm particularly interested at this moment
in the sports piece of what you do. I'm curious,
by the way, do you work with any Olympic teams
or Olympic athletes?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, yeah, We've actually been working with several different Olympic athletes.
Speaker 7 (14:44):
The ones that probably that.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Come to mind most are multiple players on the US
women's national soccer team.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Oh cool, tell me, like, tell me the story of
that of that work. So they came to you, what
did what did they what do they want when they
came to like how did that? How did that begin?
Speaker 7 (15:03):
They came to us along with their team.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
So the technology we provide, you know, an athlete could
understand it, but really with their team to help them
figure out how to keep athletes healthy.
Speaker 6 (15:15):
So what did they what did they say? What did
they say when they came to so?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Uh, for example, one athlete that's coming to mind had
a known imbalance side to side that based on a
history of injury, and they really wanted to know where
that imbalance was coming from.
Speaker 6 (15:35):
So the the woman had had hurt one of her legs,
and that leg was even after she came back, that
leg was weaker essentially than the other. I mean, is
that the sort of gross macroy?
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yeah exactly, that's a that's a nice way to put it.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
And and and they wanted a sort of finder like okay,
but we can see that, but what's going on on
the inside, like muscle by muscle tell us that, yes.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Exactly, that's precisely what we do.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
We go on the inside because on the outside you
see perhaps that her knee extents or quads seem weaker
on one side than the other. But there's four quads,
quadre steps, four muscles, and so it's not clear which
of those muscles are actually the culprit for that imbalance
and in what way good.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
So this is their question and then what happens next.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
So this first step is an MRI scan, And so
with these athletes or teams, we have ways to connect
them with an MRI machine, whether it be through an
imaging center that they partner with, or we've even actually
brought MRI mobile trucks to sites to make it easier.
Speaker 6 (16:51):
Run off the field and get an MRI and go
back and keep playing.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, yeah, kind yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
It helps just with the timing of things. But so
for we connect them there, so it takes about ten minutes.
Then they send those pictures up into the cloud into
our server and then we crunched through it and then
we send back a report on their muscles. We also
have what we call it interactive viewer, and it's presented
(17:20):
in the form of a three D model. Three dimensional model,
so you actually see your own legs, the muscles and bones,
your own muscles and bones, that we've identified from the
images going through a process called segmentation where we find
all the muscles and bones and then we reconstruct them.
So it's kind of like a digital twin of that
(17:40):
person that they can see on their computer. And so
along with it or a number or all these metrics
that helps them understand their balance, the development or strength
of the muscles, and the health of the muscles.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
And so in the case of this soccer player who
came to you, who you know, knew knew she had
some kind of problem with her quadriceps on one side,
but didn't know what was going on, what did you find?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
We found some imbalances and actually not just in those muscles.
It turns out that, you know, it's all connected. So
I think there were at least one calf muscle and
then some in the especially in the deep hip, those
were impacted.
Speaker 7 (18:28):
So yeah, it kind of shows up everywhere.
Speaker 6 (18:31):
To what extent can trainers or you know, strength coaches
develop programs that are sufficiently kind of fine grained to
match the kind of fine grained findings you're having, right Like,
for example, if you find, as I understand you did,
that a soccer player has one particular quadricep that is weak, Like,
(18:54):
are there workouts that target a single quadricep and not
the others?
Speaker 7 (18:58):
Yep, there are.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
That's cool for whichever quadricepp you're just like, just for fun,
give me an example.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
One way that it's very simple is using something called biofeedback.
Speaker 7 (19:10):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
So you can measure whether you use something called e MG,
which is a way to measure how much electrical activity
is a muscle, and then you can see which muscles
you're using for a given task. So if you give
people the feedback of which of those muscles they're using
and say, oh, no, you're not using this one, use
this one more, that actually works very effectively.
Speaker 6 (19:34):
Oh really, So you can basically use your brain if
you're getting the feedback to focus on which quadricep you're exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah, and there's other ways you can you can give
the feedback in other different ways. But yeah, our brains
are very good at that. Once they get feedback, they're
very good at learning.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
That's cool, especially somehow to think of what the lead athletes, right,
because they are already presumably like super dialed in in
terms of like the relationship between their brain and their
body at this very.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Elite level exactly.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (20:03):
The other I was going to mention.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
A lot of players and teams use this not just
one time, but overtime. So they'll get a scan, figure
out a plan, work on that for maybe three months
or six months, and then do another scan and see
how things are progressing and adjust accordingly. So that's that's
definitely another way to in the long term see if
(20:29):
what they're doing is resulting in the change that they're
hoping to see.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
So, what happened with that soccer player who had the
weak quadricep and other.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Related Yeah, No, I think she's doing great, like staying
healthy and and you know, getting ready.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
So I know you can't tell us her name, but
will we see her in the Olympics this time?
Speaker 7 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
You can hear more from that interview and a bunch
of other stories from people who are creating groundbreaking new
technologies on what's your problem. I'll be back in a
minute with the final leg of this relay race through
Pushkin's Olympics summer. Our last story today is one from
(21:22):
Revisionist Histories series about the nineteen thirty six Olympics in Berlin.
The series is all about why America chose to compete
in the Games when it was already clear who Hitler
was and what the Nazis stood for. Ben Daphaffrey takes
everyone's favorite story from the Berlin Olympics about two athletes
(21:44):
making good on the promise of the Games and breaks
it wide open.
Speaker 8 (21:50):
The Collock Street tears around the clay circle with the
speed of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
About four thousand athletes competed in the nineteen thirty six
Olympics Games. Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Streak Jesse Owens in one hundred meters.
Speaker 8 (22:08):
He started building the other out and got that capa
coming second up on him.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
already set three world records in a single day, all
in the same hour. With a bad back.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
The world's most runner makes the others look as if
they're walking as he wins the final and equals the
words record of time.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
And in nineteen thirty six, even the Germans were expecting
something great from him.
Speaker 9 (22:47):
How many board medals do your host to win? The
two part times, it's to desire very athlete to win
a first.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Place in the Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In nineteen thirty six, he was slated to in three events,
and since I'm in three.
Speaker 8 (23:03):
Events, I hope to emerge with.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Three victory.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Broad jump one hundred meters, two hundred meters and the
broad jump. Later they added a fourth event, the four
by one hundred meter relay. He would win gold in
all four, the only person to win four gold medals
in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you know
the name Jesse Owens. But it all could have turned
(23:33):
out differently because of that broad jump. You've seen a
broad jump before today. It's called the long jump, and
it's one of the more dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers
sprint down the runway, hit a take off board and
they look like they're flying and then they land in
a huge spray of sand. So the morning of August fourth,
(23:56):
nineteen thirty six, ten thirty am in the right place,
sport Feld, it's the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers
go on to the final. Owens had just run his
heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he headed
over to the pit. It was the third day of
the Games, and by then he already had his first
gold medal, so it was a surprise when he botched
(24:19):
his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it was
a practice run no sweat, though he had two more tries,
so he lined himself back up and started jogging down
the runway. He took off and came up short. He
had one jump left. If he screwed up that last jump,
(24:41):
he'd have been out of the contest, and he'd have
gone from being the only athlete to win four gold
medals in nineteen thirty six to one of three athletes
who'd won three golds, right up there with Conrad Frey
and Hendrika Mastenbroke, who actually would have had more total
medals than him. And I ask you, be honest, have
you you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika mastenbrook No,
(25:04):
And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying jump, you
wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
(25:27):
made him a legend. It was cool that day in August,
clouds had rolled in over the stadium. Around one hundred
thousand people were in the stands watching in. America's most
famous athlete, Jesse Owens, was screwing up badly, which makes
(25:48):
no sense. All he had to do was jump seven
point one five meters to qualify. He already had a
world record for jumping a meter farther than that, So
what was going wrong? Malcolm and I decided to ask
an expert a legend. Actually it was about.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
Ten years ago.
Speaker 8 (26:06):
So the age is sixty five, I think. And I
jumped further than my high school mark.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And you're the first American who jumped fifty seven feet.
Speaker 8 (26:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time,
Milan tiff.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
I actually jumped sixty feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize
it because I jumped out of the pit.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And where should you do that?
Speaker 8 (26:31):
Right here?
Speaker 5 (26:31):
You say, wow? And I jumped.
Speaker 8 (26:34):
I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on
the grass. I had grass stands all over the back
of me.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
So when I was in high school, starting at the
age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribed to
Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
it's called. And Millen Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
(27:07):
of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
But I was I was just obsessed with him as
this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure. And
(27:31):
he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
be He's going to be a little bit. He might
be a little I don't know, but I have a
sense that he might be. He might be a little
out there.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Lawn Tiff,
I felt like I had taken some kind of intense
psychedelic the effects of which I've yet to wear off.
Speaker 8 (27:57):
The first humans.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
It's unbelievable understood that to walk is just to take
a number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed
by an actually gorgeous painting of Milans portraying a pair
of empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space
called mysteriously palm springs.
Speaker 8 (28:17):
And the birds and the trees would all fly down.
They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have
when I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
he could take us out to the UCLA track, and
when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above
us the whole time, which only made everything a little
more surreal, and Olympic legends just walking up to him,
literally bowing down. This, I think because they wouldn't normally
see him. He told us he prefers to run in
(28:46):
the morning, by which he meant three am. Tiff took
us out to the broad jump pit to help us
get inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could
do because he's a master of the approach. The part
Jesse Owens was screwing up. But also because so you
(29:07):
actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid. Yeah, yeah,
you know, I sit and he.
Speaker 8 (29:12):
Tell the stories. Yeah, and not hear all the stories.
And you know he talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
You know, we asked him to tell us about how
you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 8 (29:25):
Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
of rockings. You have to have some or a jiggle
where you will call it. Yeah, you have to have
a jiggle or a gide up before you even get
into your run. Yeah, that adjustice your run.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Is that why this is obviously the broad jump, but
lose long. I noticed he does this sort of like
hitch in his leg before he starts running. Yeah, it's
like a dance.
Speaker 8 (29:46):
It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 6 (29:48):
Can you show us what your gidea up was, Well,
it's like a one.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
Two, three, four five, then you start your run. Yeah.
And I told it to Willie Banks World Ragged, taught
it to h Bike Pile whol record.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
We gave it a shot on the track where at
the very same time actual Olympic athletes were practicing for
this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did
we set a world record? Not even close. Did we
become friends with any Olympians they were otherwise occupied. But
this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.
(30:26):
What was Did Jesse Owens have a gideo?
Speaker 8 (30:28):
No, he had a stamp start because he was a sprinterer,
you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
He didn't have a jiggle, well, he didn't have a che.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
No, he didn't have a jiggle or a giddy. Yeah.
And it took his competitor to say, man, come on,
you gotta do something first.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit there export feld
Loots Long. Lutzlong was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champ,
and he looked the part, a fine ak line nose
framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As
Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning
(31:10):
to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than
to see a black man lose to an Arian. The
thought was nanging at him, messing up his focus. And
then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler had
been watching the games, and saw that when Owens's turn came,
Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil. That's
(31:33):
why he was fouling out. He was psyched out by
all of it. Distract it, and when he saw how
amazing Lutslong was at the broad jump, he began to
wonder if there was something true about all this arian stuff.
He was down to his last jump, and then came
the miracle. In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight,
(31:54):
Owens wrote, suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Lutslong.
Speaker 9 (32:00):
Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What
has taken your goat?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 9 (32:09):
I had to smile a little in spite of myself
hearing his mixed up American idiom ah nothing, I said,
you know how it is? He was silent for a
few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
But I also know you are a better jumper than this. Now,
what has taken your goat? I laughed out loud this time,
(32:33):
but I couldn't tell him him. Above all, I glanced
over at the broad jump pit. I was about to
be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if he wasn't
sure of which ones to use. Is it what Reichkanze
Hitler did?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
He asked.
Speaker 9 (32:49):
I was thunderstruck that he'd say it. I started to answer,
but I didn't know what to say. I see he said, Look,
we talk of that later. Now you must jump and
you must qualify. But how I shot back? I have thought?
He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
(33:11):
one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I nodded.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
Yet you must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
this time in frustration, And as I did, I heard
the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, You take
off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
(33:38):
All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
a cloudburst.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
closer and closer to the pit, and he hit that
mark on the towel leapt into the air, and when
(34:04):
he finally got that, he qualified, and later that day,
with Hitler back in the stands in the metal event
itself well record, he set an Olympic record. And that's
when Lootes along the Aryan poster child who had just
lost to Jesse Owens, hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler,
(34:25):
and the Hitler was pissed man, but Long didn't just
embrace him, According to Jesse Owens, Later that night they
met up in the Olympic village. The hours ticked on
and they stayed up late, talking about their lives, the
state of the world in the uncertain future. Some kind
(34:48):
of strange bond had been formed between the men that day,
because then the next day they did it again, and
after that, again and again and again. Every single night
of the Games they met up to talk. They became friends.
The dream of the Olympics was real for them. They
(35:08):
bridged an unbridgable gap between two cultures, two races. Something
unbreakable had bound them. After the Games, when Owens was
back in America and Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany,
they wrote letters to each other even after long was
serving in the Wehrmacht the Nazi army, back and forth
across the Atlantic for years. They kept coming until right
(35:33):
before Lutzlang was killed in the war. He was stationed
in the deserts of North Africa. On some lonely desert hour,
he sat down to write one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 9 (35:47):
I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
fear so much for myself.
Speaker 6 (35:55):
My friend, Jesse.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
I fear for my woman, who was at home, and
my young son, Karl, who has never really known his father.
My heart tells me, if I be honest with you,
that this is the last letter I shall ever write.
If it is so, I ask you something. It is
(36:17):
something so very important to me. It is you go
to Germany when this war done. Someday find my Carl
and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse, what
times were like when we were not separated by war,
I am saying, Tell him how things can be between.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Men on this earth. There are tears in your eyes.
You would not be alone. This story is a big
part of the legend of Jesse Owens. If you look
up Jesse Owens in the Encyclopedia Britannica. There's the story
(37:00):
when they made a star studied Hollywood film about Jesse
Owens's life. Lutslog and that qualifying jump are the pivotal moment.
Retelling this story would help launch the career of the
greatest Olympic documentarian of all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm
not an auctioneer, but I think it is the reason
why Lutslog's silver medal sold for nearly half a million
(37:22):
dollars two years ago, about five times the amount earned
for any other silver medal at auction. It's arguably the
most important story in Olympic history. It is proof of
the Olympic dream. It made the case that it was
good that America went to the Vilin Games because it
made possible this improbable friendship that transcended even the Second
(37:44):
World War, a story that was just too good to
be true.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
You can hear the rest of this episode and the
whole Hitler's Olympics series by following Revisionist History, And if
you're looking for more Olympic content, take a look at
Happiness Lab Slight Change of Plans, and other Pushkin shows
This summer We're all going to the Olympics. Thanks for
help with this special episode goes to Sarah Nix, Sophie Crane,
(38:25):
Sarah Bugaier and Nina Lorence.
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