Melissa from Michigan, I work an extra part time job serving lunch at my child's school, but I still can't afford to put food on our table. Daniel from California, choosing whether to pay the rent or pay to fix the car to get to work doesn't leave us with much at all.

Now, we can't even pay for meals. Hunger is a story we can end end it at Feeding America dog brought to you by Feeding America and the Ad Council. Hi, I'm Robert Evans.

I'm Crystal. I'm Cody Johnston. When this year started, we were doing an election podcast, which is called Worst Year Ever, and it's a podcast that we do. But then this year became way worse than an election. And now there's a plague in a series of general uprisings and federal agents shooting us all in the street. And our podcast has turned into more of, you know, kind of a general survival guide for the apocalypse that we're all in the process of hopefully living through.

We don't just talk about things.

We also bring interesting people into to interview and answer our questions and shed light on stuff that we don't all normally talk about.

This is the worst year ever on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Happy Saturday.

Since this Saturday Classic is coming out in the middle of a three parter on Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe, we chose it to kind of fit within that theme. You know, it's a little weird to have other stuff coming out in the middle of a multipart episode. This is our September 14th, 2016 episode on Piata Coopertown and the developments of the modern Olympic Games. And because we are in the middle of this pandemic, it has also been more than a year since we have been able to share a live episode of the show with folks.

I think I speak for both of us when I say we miss doing tours, we really do desperately.

This one was recorded live at the Dallas Museum of Art, which was an absolute delight. And we hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Wilson, and we were lucky enough to recently be invited by the Dallas Museum of Art to participate in their late nights program for an Olympic themed evening of fun and art with super exciting invitation. It was and it was really great, but it was a little wacky. Yeah, we flew in on the day of the event and we had plenty of time factored in to this plan.

But due to severe weather, the Dallas Fort Worth airport got shut down and we couldn't land and we had to be diverted to Shreveport.

And finally we took off again. We made it to the museum. Our amazing liaison at the DMA, Jesse Fraser, had switched up the schedule to basically postpone our talk by two hours, two hours.

And much to our surprise, our amazing listeners were still there. Yeah, I was perfectly ready. And I mention it in the episode that you're about to hear that I really thought everybody would leave, but they didn't. They stuck around. They were amazing. It was really humbling and really touching. And the evening turned out to be incredibly fun, even if getting there had been a crazy frantic dash. But this episode runs a little long. So now, without further ado, we are just going to intro it and let it go.

It is our chat with our Dallas listeners about Pierre Tacuba, often considered the father of the modern Olympics. And here we go.

Hi, everybody. We are so happy to be here. Yeah, I am so happy you're here.

Thank you for being so patient and dealing with the weird time delay. It's been an adventurous day of travel normally. Yeah. Normally when we have a live show, we start with some story about what a fascinating thing we saw in your city today.

What we saw today actually was Shreveport that was unexpected, which we didn't actually see because we had to stay on the plane the whole time with the shutters down so that it wouldn't get too hot.

So that that was that was how it started out. But now we're here and we're delighted to be here.

Drollery out. Yeah, there is some dicey moments. We did not know if we were going to miss it. So we're very delighted to be here.

And again, thank you guys for rolling with the crazy time change.

We really expected there to be like our six friends that were invited and then like maybe two stragglers who were just tired and needed a place to sit. So it's wonderful to see all of you.

Yes. Are you ready to talk about the Olympics?

How many how many of you guys have been watching the Olympics?

Because Tracy does not have the rabies like I have, but I have Olympic rabies, like I tell you, work a lot. In the last two weeks, I've been teleworking so I can just watch it all day long. And I have it going on the television and then another one on a monitor so I can get a secondary feed because I have Olympic rabies. So it's exciting.

So it's very exciting for me to get to talk about sort of where the modern Olympics started and some of the really wild ride.

It went on for a little while before it kind of smoothed out. Yeah. You want to talk about that for a bit? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to be a jerk and take off my glasses because my vision is poor and I can't read my page and look at you at the same time. I know I need bifocals probably and I already got the lecture. It's fine. This is literally what we were talking about backstage. Yeah it is.

It is. It is.

So tonight we are going to talk about the man who reignited the world's interest in the Olympics and really catalyzed the launch of the modern games. And we're also going to talk, as Jesse mentioned, about several of the early games and how a rather rocky start eventually led to the games becoming what we know them of today, what we know of them today and how obsessively people like me watch them. Also, we never did our hello and welcome to the podcast.

We want to do that part now.

Sure. And then I'll do this other paragraph and then we'll smooth it right out. We're just like the Olympics. I thought you were going to say we're just like at home. Well, no, we're already way smoother than that because we have a wonderful editor. Tracy and I sometimes are a little sloppy jalopy in the studio. We can be, especially because you record early in the morning and we often have been up kind of late making sure all our notes are together and sometimes it's not good.

We're very like kind of like I need more coffee. I can't.

But we'll start like it's a regular podcast. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy B. Wilson sometimes. Sometimes, don't you want to just switch to confuse people? There have been times I've always just said your name. I'm not I've not ever been quite sure why I almost said your name, but that's happened more than once. I have almost said I'm Holly Fry, which is not my middle initial, but it's hers.

Well, when we had that previous podcast pop stuff, we would say weird things. Yeah, we were a little nuttier.

Yeah. Maybe one day with a little more casual. Yeah, I guess so. While public about who is the father of the modern Olympics is characterized in a lot of different ways, including sometimes a fool, sometimes a sexist, pretty accurate and a visionary, regardless of the lens that you use to look at his life.

He really did leave an indelible mark on history as the father of the modern Olympic Games. It's true and pure. The Freddy was born a baby New Year. He was born in Paris, France, on New Year's Day of 1863. He was the fourth and final child of a very aristocratic family and his father.

Now, here's the part where if we were in the studio, I'd probably get to do a couple of times. I was going to act like I can speak French really well today. Shil Deaf, Freddy Barron, Dick Warburton, and he was a painter. His mother was Murray. Marcel Zogu decrees. No, I didn't do that very well at school. And the family traveled a lot throughout Europe. And when they weren't on the road, they could often be found at his mother's family's chateau, which was in Normandy.

And you just wish your family had a chateau in Normandy. You attended school primarily in Paris at the Jesuit College of St. Ignatius. And he earned a degree in literature, actually. And he next continued his education at the law faculty of the political sciences, which was pretty common for aristocratic young men. They would kind of go military, which he was offered a military career and turned it down and decided he would go to college.

But instead he decided to pursue his his law education. It did not stick.

No, because he didn't really find his calling. And so he became interested in education. And his dedication to the field of education grew steadily until 1883. And at that point he was twenty. And so what he decided to do was to go to England to compare the educational systems of England and France.

And he was convinced after the study of the two approaches to education that the key to a really balanced and thorough education was the inclusion of sports in school curriculums. So all of you who groaned your way through PE.

Thanks, Piers. And his personal mission really became one of educational reform overall, but sports was really the focus of his agenda pretty much throughout. One of the things he did a whole lot of with start groups, you like to start groups.

He started a lot of groups. He established the union, the society from said the core support, which was the union of French running groups. And that was an eighteen eighty seven. Yeah. We'll pop in periodically with some of their groups that he started because he was a busy bee and he had some really, really big goals in mind for sports.

So he pretty early on decided it would be super cool if we re-established the Olympic Games. And so he worked really diligently towards that starting at the end of the eighteen eighties. And that year at the Universal exhibition in Paris, he started an assembly series where basically he was bringing people together so that he could promote the importance of sport and physical education in groups very much like what we have here today.

So in 1890, to add one of these gatherings that he had started, he launched a plan to revive the Olympics, which at that point was much smaller deal, not an international giganto thing like it is now. And he spoke to this group and he talked about the virtues of sport is a great way to achieve any more, even more than the technology of the day could achieve. And his thing that he said was, quote, Let us export rowers, runners and fencers.

There is the free trade of the future. And on the day it is introduced within the walls of old Europe, the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay.

He was real excited and his enthusiastic idea really did met was met with enthusiastic response, but ultimately failure. He was undeterred. He still thought this was a good idea and he was going to keep going. And we should also mention Tracy kind of alluded to it, that there were events happening, that people were calling the Olympics that were modeled on the historical Olympics of ancient times.

But they were like local. It would be like the city Olympics or even the country Olympics in some case, but nothing where we were going to have multiple countries coming together to compete there.

That was sorry, I considered insanely ambitious. I mean, that's why people were like, it's a great idea. I'm not going to happen. There was, though, some interest in the idea of the Olympics, and that was in part fueled by archaeological excavations that were happening at the site of ancient Olympia. And so there was this whole zeal for antiquity that became a driving force in adopting this whole Olympic Games idea. In a report on the first modern games, it was written, quote, We shall then before long enter on the 20th century, crowned with the fair flowers of ancient civilization.

That's very poetic, that's poetic and about taking advantage of this fascination with Olympia's history that was part of the culture of later 19th century, because if you've studied like Victorian culture at all, you know, they got really obsessed with, like these weird little pockets of other cultures and they would kind of blow them out in completely inappropriate and, you know, lack of understanding type ways. But they got very obsessed. So he thought he was going to trade on that.

And he arranged for yet another big gathering.

And this assembly, which was the International Athletics Congress in 1894, was horse hosted at the Sorbonne in Paris.

And unlike the 1892 Congress, this group resolved to follow through on Coopertown.

His idea they were in, in, in. And so this eventually led to the creation of a body that we still have today, which is the International Olympic Committee and the revival ultimately of the Olympic Games. And this is also when some of the basic guidelines around participation were created, including like amateur athletes had to compete and when their could and could not be prizes.

So in the middle of all this starting groups and wanting to relaunch the Olympics, we should also point out the peer to peer 10 also had a personal life. He was doing other things due on March 12th of eighteen ninety five. He married Marie wrote that and they had their first child named Jack a year later in eighteen ninety six. And of course also in 1896, the first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens, Greece. So that was a very big year for Peter.

So while he is called the father of the modern Olympics, those first modern games definitely would not happened without the involvement of another man. Giorgio's Assaraf. Money had been a serious problem for the Olympic plan from the beginning. This may sound familiar to people who are familiar with the current Olympic Games. Initially, the city of Athens was reluctant to host it because Greece was insolvent. That may also sound familiar.

The city just didn't have the money to do it and there was no infrastructure to support it either. Yeah, but people really wanted to go back to the site of the ancient Olympics to kick this thing off. So Avery, who was an Alexandrian man with great private wealth from shipping, banking, real estate, he just was a really good businessman, had his hands in a lot of stuff that was making a great deal of money. And he financed the restoration of the stadium that was used for the Olympics.

And this structure had originally been built in 330 B.C. So it was extremely ancient and it had only been excavated a few decades prior to this. So it needed a lot of work. It required so much money to restore. But Avery was willing. And in doing so, he not only injected funding into the project, but he also catalyzed additional sponsorships from other wealthy patrons, ultimately making the games possible. So it just took one rich guy to get the other rich guys interested.

It was kind of a quirky thing, though.

The stadium, for example, the track was a lot longer and narrower than a regulation track. So the runners had to, like, change their speed when they went around the curves because the curves were really tight. It was regulation in ancient times, not today, and as an aside, the winter weather that happened prior to the games prevented the completion of that stadium quite as designed. So initially, all of the stadium and the seeding was supposed to be restored with Pentel like marble.

This is this beautiful white marble. But construction was only completed for the seating portion. The rest was done, but the seating just the first six rows were done. So they had to kind of quickly shuffle in some wooden seating to fill out the rest of it. But overall, off, true to his word, did provide additional funding after the Olympics had wrapped up so that they could, in fact, restore the entire facility.

I just want to say a restored Zaydi stadium with marble seats sounds really beautiful and really uncomfy there.

So those first summer games, they were only for men, no women competing.

They began on April 6th of eighteen ninety six, and that was Easter Monday and they ran until April the 15th.

About sixty thousand spectators were there the first day and there were two hundred and forty one athletes from 14 different countries who traveled to Athens to participate, even though it was really hot and sunny parasols were not allowed because that might block the view for everybody else.

Yeah, ladies kookery fans, but no parasols.

And the Greek royal family was on hand that afternoon and they addressed the crowd. There wasn't really an opening ceremony the way we know it now, that didn't happen until later.

But they were there and kind of kicked everything off. And they did have a hymn that was kind of their opening ceremonies that was written specially for the occasion. And it was sung by a choir of one hundred and fifty vocalists. And by all accounts, was just a lovely, lovely thing.

So we're used to seeing really inspiring human stories in a televised Olympic coverage. Those stories are actually what made people want to watch the Olympics on television, like the Olympics are not popular on TV until they started showing the story of like the underdog athlete who became this wonderful star. But there have always been amazing people with unique stories behind the participation in the games. Even before there were TV networks deciding, oh, this would be a great way to get people to watch.

And so in a little bit, we're going to talk about them.

Yeah, but first we're going to pause for a word from one of our sponsors.

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Hello, Earthlings, it's Kasur here, bringing you the devilish sounds and twisted treats of my new podcast, Kesha and the is where I, your host Kesher, bring you into my twisted universe, where the supernatural as well, quite natural. Kesha and The Creepy's explores supernatural subjects and alternative lifestyles with today's most exciting pop culture guests and experts in the occult. You may know me from my party jams like tick tock.

We are who we are. But it's my curiosity for the unexplainable and mystical that drives these fascinating conversations that span non-traditional spirituality, psychedelic art and all things creepy. Listen and follow Cashen. The creepy's on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast. So one of those sort of personal interest stories that we talked about involves Hungarian swimmer Alfred Hyeok, and he was an architecture student who had made a conscious decision to become good at swimming when he was just a boy because he watched his father drown in the Danube when he was 13, which is kind of a horrifying impetus to do something really well.

But it worked. He got really good at it. And his architecture school was not super enthused that he was going to hop away and go do this weird Olympics thing. They didn't want to give him the time to compete, even though he was already a decorated, competitive swimmer. It wasn't like a guy who went, hey, can I have the week off? Because I would like to go swim. It was like, no, you remember when I won all of those awards, I would like to go win more awards.

And they're like schoolwork.

But he went to the games anyway.

He also won the gold in two events, the 100 meter and the twelve hundred meter freestyle. So the way the twelve hundred meter freestyle worked was it took all the people out in a boat. Twelve hundred meters away.

And they were like they were like, you got to swim to shore. And and then he said that the driving force behind this achievement was actually fear and. His quote was, My will to live completely overcame my desire to win. But he wanted to live more than all the other swimmers, apparently because he whipped them soundly. She did go on to finish his architecture degree after the games and then kind of, I think, a lovely twist. He went on, went on to design sports stadiums and swimming facilities, many of which are still in use today.

So he was good at swimming and good at architecture within the next sort of inspiring people to talk about where marksmen they were two American brothers, John and Sumner Payne, and they were like a big story that year in the Olympics because for one thing, they didn't really have any training involved in their participation, really. They were just they could shoot things a little swimming. So John was going to Athens for the Games. He stopped in France where his brother lived.

And it was like, hey, do you want to come to compete in these revolver matches with me? And his brother said, sure. And the Boston Athletic Association was already sending a team and both of the men were already members that worked out. Yeah. So he was kind of grandfathered in by virtue of being in that athletic group.

And the pair got to Athens and they had no idea what to expect and what to pack. So they basically brought a crazy arsenal. This wouldn't work today.

No, they had a lot of different revolvers. They had a lot of different ammo because they didn't know what they'd need. And they got there literally the night before the competition began. So even though they had no prep time, though, they dominated the first event, which was the twenty five meter military revolver contest. And John easily took the gold. Sumner came in second and John Score was more than double that of the third place shooter. It was like some older brother, summer brother.

Hey, you guys like they were just not nobody could come anywhere close to them.

So the next day John sat out because they had agreed between the two of them that whoever won the first day would not play the second day. Right. We should point out this may explain why they weren't doing gold, silver, bronze. It was like you win or you're the rest of the dudes there was. So it wasn't quite as fancy to be second. Yes.

So Sumner this time took the gold in the thirty meter competition once again, way, way beyond all of the other scores that they had arrived at the game, the games with thirty two hundred rounds of ammunition, which like that seems like a lot again for revolvers, but I'm not sure how they thought this game was going to work. They only fired ninety six shots, though. I don't know what they did with the rest of that. I know nobody ever tells you if they just were like, OK, there's trouble all of this back to the state.

Yes. So although I got home and started shooting a lot of it, I just had to go to France to Sumner's house, I guess.

So the last athlete from those first Olympic Games that we're going to talk about is Carl Schuman. And he was 26 when he competed. And the feats that he pulled off were astonishing because, I mean, we those of you that raised your hands when you said you watch the Olympics, I'm sure you sit there like me going, oh, my gosh, these are super heroes. This is not human, possibly. Oh, my gosh. You lose your mind and you just go insane.

So imagine doing that for somebody that goes, I'm going to do a few different sports. You guys do lots of sports, Carl Schuman, not just one. Any sports. Carl Carl Schuman. Do we say that he was twenty six? We did. OK, I wasn't paying attention. Oh dear.

Schumann won the gold in several different gymnastics events. You got team gold and horizontal bar and parallel bars and an individual gold in the vault. So that is already that's a lot of gold. But then he also competed in Greco Roman wrestling and he made it to the gold medal match. And that bout lasted on the first day. Yeah, for forty minutes. But then they had to pass because the sun was going down.

And so they started up again the next morning and he ultimately won after fifteen additional minutes that were played out after everyone had gone to bed and woken up again.

As I was working on the research for this in my head, it was very much like when you're kids and you have to go home because it's dark out, then you have to come back and compete in an international athletic level. That's not how I worked in your neighborhood as a kid. So Schoeman also competed in weightlifting and track and field events, including the long jump and the Shot-put, although he did not place in those events. And at a time when the city was really riding high on the fact that a hometown hero named Spiridon Louis had won the marathon, that was like a big deal and Greece was pretty much going bananas over him.

The king of Greece actually turned to Schoeman and said, I think you're the most popular man in Greece now because he had just blown everybody away by being this incredible multi sport athlete.

So after the eighteen ninety six games and their great success, Cooperton became the International Olympic Committee president and the he replaced Demetrius Vocalist's.

And this would be a job that he would then have for a really long time. He remained the IOC president until nineteen twenty eight nineteen twenty five, which was twenty nine years after he first took the job.

And then he was named honorary president for life and the first games that were staged under combattants leadership as IOC President WAPs, they did not go well at all.

They were in Paris in nineteen hundred and we have to say the corruption can't really be shackled with all of the shame in this because the games were kind of lumped together with the nineteen hundred Paris Exposition. So control of the Olympics was pretty much taken over by the French government and they saw the Olympics as a secondary event to the World's Fair. So the Olympic planning really did not get enough attention or focus by the by the the government committees.

So there's an episode in our archive by previous hosts that is specifically about this these games and what a debacle they were. So we're just going to hit a few of the highlights of the misery and confusion of the Olympic Games. We'll start with the fact that the committee that was doing the advertising and the promotion tended to give out this information as being part of the expo programming. So a lot of the athletes didn't even know that they were at the Olympics and that they were part of a completely different sporting event.

And despite the fact that they may not have known what they were, therefore there were far more athletes at the French games than there had been at the previous games that were so successful in Athens. There were this time nine hundred and ninety seven participants from twenty four countries, although France by far had the most competitors involved in the nineteen hundred games, also had the first black Olympic competitor, Konstantin Enrique desu Zubayda I think, who participated on the French rugby team.

So because these games were in conjunction with the expo, they dragged on and on and on. They opened on May the 14th and they wrapped up on October twenty eight. I have a friend who's super into the Olympics like to the point that he says on Facebook, you just want to follow me for the next two weeks.

And it's like it's like mentally it's almost like he's he's live tweeting the Olympics on his Facebook.

And I don't I think. His fingers would have fallen off if the Olympics now are going from May 14th until he does he just walk around like this from, you would have finger cramps forever.

So the scheduling of the events was so poorly handled and the information was so poorly shared that a lot of them, just like they happen with no journalists to cover them. And those spectators either. Yeah, I think it was a croquet match where one person showed up and was like, am I even in the right place?

I don't I'm not from your country.

And the venues were entirely subpar. So they did not have a fabulously wealthy investor to complete beautiful venues. One of the things that was happening, the track and field events were being held. I'm like really slippery, uneven ground. So you can imagine how beautifully that went off. And swimming was taking place in the sand and the currents were causing swimmers to have really fast times. It was just kind of throwing them down the river.

Basically, it was even faster than the Rio pool, apparently.

Yeah. So a lot of new events were added that year and some of them have continued on. There was archery, rowing and football. That means soccer. And then there were also events that year like croquet and golf that didn't become standard parts of the Olympic programs. But golf did come back in twenty sixteen. So maybe we will stick around and I'm going to confess.

I didn't follow it. I don't know what happened or if it's still happening. Golf is not my thing. And though the IOC did not officially recognize women's events, twenty two women did participate in the nineteen hundred games. You'll often hear about Great Britain's Charlotte Cooper as being the first women to win a gold medal in the modern Olympics. She won for tennis, but there was actually another woman, Alain de Ali of Switzerland, who had competed on a yachting team and that won gold a couple of months prior to Cooper's victory.

So she didn't win an individual, but she is technically really the first woman that ever won a gold.

There was also an American woman, Margaret Abbott, who won a gold in golf. However, she was one of the people who did not know that she was at that moment competing in the Olympics.

And then Holly and I had a conversation on the plane about she may not have even known that in her life, in her life. It's unclear whether whether this was something that people put the pieces together after she died or not. But regardless, all of this confusion was due to just terrible record keeping and bad, bad communication.

Throughout the five month run of the Olympic Games, there were also some interesting things going on. We're in team events and some of those included polo, sailing and tennis were the participants weren't even all from the same country because they couldn't kind of get it all together in one country. And also they didn't know it was the Olympics. So this includes the Dutch two man rowing team, which won gold. And this is sort of fascinating. It's one that Serrin Delina talked about in their episode specifically about this.

But at the last moment, the Coxon on the Dutch team had to be replaced and the person that replaced them was like a young French boy, like a young French boy, like seven to thirteen is where his age is guessed. And they won gold. And he was in the pictures and then he vanished. And no one has any idea who he ever was. So he sometimes referred to is like the lost Olympian or the missing Olympian. And I just wonder if there was just a kid wandering around France trying to tell people he had won an Olympic gold medal and people like to pick up.

So obviously, this was a mess. It was so much of a mess that there was some debate as to whether the nineteen hundred games could even be considered real Olympics. The French, though, did walk away with one hundred medals, which made the governmental organisers really happy about their involvement.

Coopertown, though, was not really thrilled, and he really hope that one day France would be able to redeem itself as an Olympic host.

And next up, we're going to talk about the nineteen eighty four games which saw history repeating itself almost immediately.

But first, we're going to pause for a sponsor break. Street Politicians is a show for the people, I am Tamika Mallory, the one who is always right and on my side, the one who is never wrong and catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. But that's not all. We will also have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as break down different political issues with local activists in their community.

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We'll hop back in and talk about the 1984 games which took place in St. Louis, and, you know, you might think that after that whole problem of running an Olympic Games alongside an international exposition had been so evident that we would never do it again, except we did it again the next time they did the exact same thing.

It's after working on this podcast for three years. That just seems to happen a lot in history like that didn't work. Let's try that again.

So the 1984 Olympics were initially announced as a Chicago, Illinois event, but then the organizers realized they were going to be competing with the World's Fair in St. Louis. And the city of St. Louis had already arranged to have the amateur athletic unions track and field championships there at the same time. So basically there were conflicts in the calendar. So the decision was made to once again loop the Olympics and the expo together. And all of the exact same problems that had happened the previous time happened again.

Yes. So once again, because they wanted to run it kind of over the course of the expo, it went on for months and months and months. I think that one was like April to October, but it was very similar, like a four and a half, five month situation. Only 12 countries participated this time because Paris had been such a train wreck.

Of the six hundred and thirty athletes who did choose to compete, 83 percent of those were from the US.

So internationally, people were like new. It was definitely not the beautiful international people coming together event that Cuba always envisioned for the Olympic Games. He also didn't envision a lot of cheating problem, though, but we had that in 1984. There was a boxer who entered the games under the assumed name of a popular local person from St. Louis, hoping that the judges would be more generous with his points and would not recognize this very obvious fraud.

They did eventually, but it took a shockingly long time.

And then the marathon winner, Fred Laws, had actually become ill on the course while he was running, and he dropped out of the event and got picked up by like an assistance vehicle. And then when that car was carrying, carrying him back to the stadium, it broke down and he was like, well, I feel better.

So he just jumped back to. So he rejoined the race and he crossed the line first, and eventually people realized someone had seen him do this and so later to avoid a lifetime ban from the sport because, of course, everybody was up in arms about it.

He claimed that he had experienced temporary insanity during the race.

This is where I go, really. I was crazy. I didn't know what I was doing.

So after this 1994, I the word that I was going to say is not appropriate for a family audience. Some say debacle. Coubertin wrote, quote, I had a sort of resentment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town.

It wasn't a big fan of St. Louis, remember, he was fancy and French. So, you know, I'm glad we're not doing the show in St. Louis because that might have been really offensive. It would have been bad.

What was Cougar? And we didn't say that about St. Louis. And while the ban the Kubel prepared for the next games, which are going to be held in Rome, he also busied himself in some other ways to remember how we talked about how he'd like to start groups and do stuff he'd never, ever lost his passion for education. So even while he was kind of spearheading all of these Olympic events, he was also still trying to do some some good and some revision and reform in the education sphere.

And so in nineteen eighty six, he founded Lassus.

Yeslam formed the less and More, also known as the Association for Teaching Reform.

So Holly just said the next Olympics are going to be in Rome. But that is not what happened in 1996. The Italian organizers were already way, way behind schedule and then on top of their being behind schedule, Vesuvius erupted and it was immediately obvious that Rome was not going to be ready for Olympics in time to actually have them there. So Italy needed to also reallocate all of the funds that were supposed to go to pay for the games, to instead pay for volcano cleanup.

So they decided to move them elsewhere. And London offered to host the games with only two years to get ready for it. And that sounds like we're leading to another disaster story. Those British got their act together, though, and they didn't.

These were incredibly, incredibly well organized games under the leadership of British Olympic Association Chairman Lord Desboro. They were really considered to be just pretty amazing in terms of how well run they were. The venues had been built specifically for the games through an interesting deal. He worked with the Franco British exhibition of nineteen eighty eight, actually footed the bill to build all of these buildings in exchange for getting part of the ticket sales back. So that was one of the ways that London kind of worked this whole deal financially.

And there was, for the first time ever, a pool built for swimming events. So they didn't have to throw guys down a river or take them by boat way far away and tell them to just get back on to shore, somehow swim back and don't drown. Yeah. 2008, athletes from 22 different countries participated in these games, which once again went from April all the way to October. So we hadn't quite worked that part out yet. However, women were finally allowed to officially compete in the Games.

Although Coopertown was not a fan of letting them do this, he called women's athletics, quote, the most honest that excite human eyes could contemplate.

Thanks, Coopertown. What a charmer. But then when I think about it in a French accent, I'm like, OK, I don't agree, but it's still cute.

Also, we did not mention and I didn't put it in these notes, go look up the built on the Internet, the most spectacular mustache you have ever seen on the planet.

He had a pretty spectacular, pretty great mustache. I had wonderful. Slightly goofy. Yeah, good. When we were settling on what topic to do for our live show here, you kept sending me pictures. I'm like like this'll make you want to do this one. And I was like, I'm sure that's I just gave her up. It was like death by a thousand cuts of mustache pictures.

And while this was really where the games, as we see them started to develop and take shape, there was definitely drama as well as some very interesting developments. So we'll tick off a few of those. The first one is it the marathon finally got it's now standard twenty six point two mile forty two km and one hundred ninety five meter distance at these games. So prior to that, the distance had varied. And one of the reasons that this distance happened at these games is that that last hundred and ninety five meters needed to be added.

So they would finish under the royal box because the royal people had to see it. They had to see the big finish.

The winner of that marathon, who was an Italian named Dorando, he collapsed on the track before the finish and was helped to the end, which is a. Very Olympic story, but his victory was disqualified because of the part where someone helped him, maybe not as Olympic in its story A. but an American named Johnny Hayes, after all of that, was the person who declared the winner. And we should point out it wasn't another athlete that stopped and helped him.

It was like people that were just people who were around. I think it was Olympic officials that kind of were like, oh, come on, you can finish. He did get sort of a I don't remember what exactly they gave him. They gave him kind of a consolation prize for having great Olympic spirit and working so hard they didn't want to just go, you think we took your prize away and gave it to this other guy? Wah. That was also the first year that the parade of athletes behind their national flags started.

But there were some protests that happened in it. So first, the United States refused to dip their flag in honor of Britain's King Edward the seventh.

We fought a war and not have to do that. Right. And that's one of those things that it kept coming up. I saw that referenced in several different places. And every time it would kind of chota with a tradition that continues today.

So, like, they just kind of I always assume that some British person writing Americans are still jerks.

Russian rule in Finland was being protested by the Finnish athletes, so they refused to carry a flag because it represented that and Irish athletes refused to participate under the flag of Great Britain.

And most of them ended up not competing at all because of its I can't believe there was this much drama about flags.

Do you have a flag? Do you think so? The awarding of medals had not been uniform in previous Olympics. The London Games awarded medals to all winners. Yeah, in some of the the Olympics. Prior to that, sometimes they would get medals and then like and I don't mean like, oh, in this Olympics they got medals and enlisted in the same Olympics. Some people would get medals and others would get like a certificate. You can imagine how irate making that would be.

And in the 400 meter final, American runner Jesse Carpenter in these Olympics was found to have obstructed British competitor Windom Holwell. So the race results were completely thrown out and the solution was that they were going to have a do over. But the Americans were very crabby about the whole thing and refused to participate. And in the end, Holtsville was the only one and he ran the race alone. So he automatically won the gold.

Did he did he try hard when he ran or was he just like, I'm doing it now? Yeah. No, I think I think he he put forth effort.

He felt a little cheated by having been obstructed the first time. Weren't sure. So it was decided at the ninety eight games that future games would include competitions in the arts, specifically literature, architecture and sculpture, which was actually another contender for the topic of our live show is one of the things we talked about. Maybe talking about those awards were part of the games from 1912 to nineteen forty eight. And now we're going to jump to a really good one, because in 1912, the next one, the fifth Olympiad, this took place in Stockholm, and this is when the modern Olympic Games really, really hit their stride like they were good.

They ran from May to July. So not the four to five months big extended festival. They were attended by two thousand four hundred seven athletes from twenty eight countries, including forty eight women participating in an ever expanding field of events. Sarika.

But then he would hate the Olympics now.

Yeah, maybe he would hate some of the Olympics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Games were so efficient and so well run that they were nicknamed the Swedish masterpiece. A photo finish and automatic timing made their way. Their Olympic debuts this year and they really legitimized the competition in the whole and whole new way because now you had like very precise ways of telling who won. Yeah, it just added a little science to the mix.

And while the Stockholm games went off just about perfectly, there was one small issue in that the boxing competition was canceled because the Swedish organizers found it distasteful. And this led to the IOC eventually restricting the responsibilities that local host groups had over making decisions like that so that they wouldn't be able to make changes in the program kind of late in the game. But just the same, finally, everyone could agree that in Sweden, the modern Olympics had arrived.

So now we're going to get into period Qabbani suddenly, I can't say his name. Now we're going to get into here to combattants final years. I still didn't say right. OK, my mouth has stopped working.

As we mentioned earlier, he served as president for another 13 years. Once the Paris games of nineteen twenty four had wrapped up, he was basically ready to retire. The nineteen twenty four event had been a success. It had drawn record numbers of attendees and athletes and participating countries and journalists to cover all of it. So basically Paris had been redeemed from this nineteen hundred debacle and the same year as his retirement, which was the year after that nineteen twenty five as active duty president.

He also founded the Olympic Museum and Library, and this includes his extensive writing and records, because throughout all of this, every time he had made a speech from the eighties on, he made notes. He kept it every meeting that he had, every piece of notation he made about the Olympics in each year that they were happening and all of the planning. He had been writing about it prolifically the whole time. So that sort of formed the basis for this museum and library and all of his correspondence that was used as part of this move to really reignite the Olympic flame throughout the world.

He continued his educational work during this time, too. He established Leonella. I can't you can just do the English version. I'll just say it in English. It's getting late now.

I have a universal pedagogical union and that was in nineteen twenty five. Then in nineteen twenty eight he insisted. He insists. That's not what it says. I swear this is not vodka.

No I also I even printed my notes really big so that I would be sure to be able to read them on the stage and yet I'm having trouble now. It's late in nineteen twenty eight he instituted the International Sports Education Office, so he was still doing a whole lot of group, good group forming relating to sports and athletics.

And then in nineteen thirty six, so a little bit later it was kind of a mixed year for Cuba. But he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize that year because of all of his work in the Olympic Games. But he did not win. The prize that year was awarded to Argentine politician and academic Carlos Saavedra Labus, who was the first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize. So pretty exciting for him, not so much for Cuba fan.

He did win another award in nineteen thirty six. However, that was the He Herrold Prize, named for a famed French Olympian and Yats woman from the nineteen twenties. She was kind of if you listen to the show, she was kind of running in the same circles as Joe Carstairs, one of my big favorites of her.

But the nineteen thirty six Olympics, despite him having this interesting year in terms of awards and recognition, were incredibly stressful for Cuba, because when the IOC had selected Berlin as the location for the thirty six Olympics, it was nineteen thirty one. And it was two years after that that Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany and everything changed. And in that moment when they had awarded it to Germany in thirty one, it was sort of this great indicator that the strife of World War One was being put aside and Germany was once again sort of being welcomed into the global village and everyone was going to be cool.

But that, of course, is not how it played out, you know, because he has.

He said became the chancellor of Germany two years later, and so by the end of nineteen thirty three German sports organizations had instituted a policy that only Aryan's could participate in athletic clubs. And as a consequence of the anti-Semitism and racism that were in place in Germany, a lot of countries started a boycott movement against the nineteen thirty six games. This is another game that past hosts have talked about specifically on the show and included in part of this movement to boycott where the United States, Great Britain, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia.

But eventually that boycott crumbled. It did not hold and forty nine nations did participate in the games and had been invited. But he declined. He wanted nothing to do with it. And the games really turned into a big propaganda play for Hitler's Germany and later came to be known as the Nazi Games. This is, however, also the games where American Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals.

So the Nazi games, but with a little knife stab from the US after the Olympics concluded in Berlin, Coopertown was described by his friends as being the sort of state of melancholy. The troubles surrounding Germany as a host of the Games were one cause, but he was also really dealing with serious financial issues.

Yup, here was deeply troubled at the thought of all his life's work falling apart because of a lack of money, like he had really put a lot of his own money in addition to his own time in kind of getting all of this stuff off the ground. And in August of nineteen thirty seven, he wrote in a letter to a close friend, quote, These adverse circumstances have created an agonizing situation. The loss of my personal fortune threatens my lifelong effort at enlightening pedagogical progress.

Also in nineteen thirty seven, he was honored by the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, is that how you say that? OK, good as an honorary citizen and this isn't the. Suddenly my mind just went, wow, you want me to read? And this is lost and became home to the International Olympic Committee in 1915, so that's why they named him an honorary citizen.

And while colleagues from the International Olympic Committee, as well as many of his friends, were trying to brainstorm ways that they might help help them financially, that discussion quickly, unfortunately, became moot because not long after the LOSEN celebration on September 2nd of 1937, he had a heart attack while he was walking in a park in Geneva and he died.

So his body was laid to rest there in Lausanne, but at the Whateva Cemetery. But his heart was interred adjacent to the ruins of ancient Olympia, Greece, with a commemoration of the revival of the Olympic Games. And that was done seven months after he died and was done to honor and fulfill his wishes, which I feel like is important because that would be a weird symbolism to do with someone's eye or I don't know if anybody would have been down with somebody going, you know, what we should do is put his heart in the limpia.

He his ghost, just like we were so excited that didn't happen because he asked for that.

But he was like, please do this with. So that is going to end. We're going to talk about kind of a thing that inspired him to create sort of the creed of the Olympic Games. And that's that during the 1948 London Games, Pierre was inspired by the words of the bishop of Bethlehem, who is Ethelbert Talbot, and that Bishop was addressing a group of athletes and officials. And he was conveying this really important message that winning was not to be gained at all costs.

And the IOC president built built after that, crafted this sentiment into the following phrase, which has become the Olympic creed.

And that is important, a voice and point of major combat lessons. Yes. And it paid off while Vanka made a settler, but do so. The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have one, but to have fought well. So that's the scoop on the Olympics and how they got started here to cool down. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday since this episode is out of the archive.

If you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I, heart radio dot com, our old HowStuffWorks. The email address no longer works and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

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