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I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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About 4,000 athletes competed in the 1936 Olympic Games. But Jesse Owens is the one people remember. Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper. Self-effacing, soft-spoken, and an unbelievable athlete.
In 1935, as a 21-year-old, he'd already set three world records in a single day, all in the same hour, with a bad back. The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking, as he wins the final and equals the world's record time. And in 1936, even the Germans were expecting something great from him.
Now Mr. Owens, how many gold medals do you hope to win? It's the desire of every athlete to win a first place in the Olympic Games.
In 1936, he was slated to compete in three events. And since I'm in three events, I hope to emerge with three victories. I hope. 100 meters, 200 meters, and broad jump. 100 meters, 200 meters, and the broad jump.
Later, they added a fourth event, the 4x100 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 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 takeoff board, and...
They look like they're flying. And then they land in a huge spray of sand. So the morning of August 4th, 1936, 10.30 a.m. in the Reichsportfeld, it's the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers go on to the final. Owens had just run his heat in the 200 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 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, he'd have been out of the contest. And he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win four gold medals in 1936 to one of three athletes who'd won three golds. Right up there with Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek, who actually would have had more total medals than him. And I ask you, be honest. Have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek? No. 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' life and made him a legend. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, Ben-Nadav Hafri and I are talking about one of the biggest stories to emerge from the Berlin Games.
It was cool that day in August.
Clouds had rolled in over the stadium. Around 100,000 people were in the stands watching. And America's most famous athlete, Jesse Owens, was screwing up. Badly. Which makes no sense. All he had to do was jump 7.15 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 10 years ago or so. Age of 65, I think. And I jumped further than my high school mark. Is that right? Yeah. And you're the first American to jump 57 feet. Yeah. One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time. Milan Tiff. I actually jumped 60 feet, but they wouldn't recognize it because I jumped out of the pit.
Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
So when I was in high school, starting at the age of 12, 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 Mill and Tiff was this extraordinary, first of all, he was astonishing looking. He looked, there was something kind 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 just obsessed with him as this kind of like this strange otherworldly figure. And he was a favorite in 1980, had we not boycotted the 1980 games.
He might well have won a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. 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.
This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff, I felt like I had taken some kind of intense psychedelic, the effects of which have yet to wear off. The first humans. It's unbelievable. I understood that to walk is just to take a number of tiny long jumps. I found myself transfixed by an actually gorgeous painting of Milan's, portraying a pair of empty tighty-whities suspended in a blue abstract space called Mysteriously.
Palm Springs. 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. 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 the morning, by which he meant 3 a.m. Tiff took us out to the broad jump pit to help us get inside Jesse Owens' 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 actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid? Yeah, yeah. You know, we...
I'd sit and he'd tell the stories. Yeah. And I'd hear all the stories. And, you know, he talked about his experience in Berlin. You know. We asked him to tell us about how you're supposed to approach a jump. You gotta have a giddy-up first. That kind of rocking. You have to have some, or a jiggle, we will call it. Yeah. You have to have a jiggle or a giddy-up before you even get into your run. Yeah. That adjusts your run. Is that why, this is obviously the broad jump, but
Luz Long, I noticed he does this sort of like hitch in his leg before he starts running. Is that what the Giddy Up is? Yeah, it's like a dance. It's like a preparation. Can you show us what your Giddy Up was? Well, it's like a one, two, three, four, five. Then you start to run. Yeah. And I taught it to Willie Banks. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. World record. Taught it to Mike Powell. World record.
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. What was, did Jesse Owens have a giddy up? No, he had to stay on start because he was a sprinter.
Jesse Owens' competitor, facing down the pit, the Reichsportphobe. Lutz Long.
Lützlong was Germany's champion broadjumper, Hitler's champion. And he looked the part. A fine aquiline nose, framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning to watch.
Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than to see a black man lose to an Aryan. The thought was nagging 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' turn came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil.
That's why he was fouling out. He was psyched out by all of it, distracted. And when he saw how amazing Lutz Long was at the broad jump, he began to wonder if there was something true about all this Aryan stuff. He was down to his last jump. And then came the miracle. In an autobiography he published in 1978, Owens wrote, Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lutz Long. Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What has taken your goat?
Obviously, we had to reenact this. "I had to smile a little in spite of myself, hearing his mixed-up American idiom. '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. 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 Reichskanzler Hitler did?" he asked. I was thunderstruck that he'd say it. "I..." I started to answer, but I didn't know what to say. "I see," he said. "Look, we'll talk about that later. Now you must jump, and you must qualify." "But how?" I shot back.
"'I have thought,' he said. "'You are like I am. You must do it one hundred percent. Correct?' I nodded. "'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.'
All at once, the panic emptied out of me like a cloudburst. 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 then he hit that mark on the towel, leapt into the air,
And when he finally got that, he qualified. And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands, in the medal event itself, world record, he set an Olympic record. And that's when Lutz Long, the Aryan poster child who had just lost to Jesse Owens, hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler. And 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 and the uncertain future. Some kind 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 bridged an unbridgeable gap between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them. After the Games, when Owens was back in America and Lütz Long 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 before Lützlong 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. 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, my friend Jesse. I fear for my woman who is 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 a something so very important to me. It is: You go to Germany when this war done, someday find my Karl 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 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. When they made a star-studded Hollywood film about Jesse Owens' life, Lutz Long 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 Lutz Long's silver medal
sold for nearly half a million 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 Berlin Games because it made possible this improbable friendship that transcended even the Second World War. A story that was...
Just too good to be true. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We all have self-care non-negotiables, the things we absolutely cannot do without. Mine is my Saturday morning run with my friend Conley. I call it the old man run. Same trail every Saturday, same coffee shop afterwards. It restores my peace of mind. It's all too easy to get swept up in life by this or that, this phone call, this meeting, this kid's activity, until we have no time left for ourselves.
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Benjamin Franklin famously said, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Nice thought. But for many people, sleep doesn't come easy, which is why more and more people have discovered the importance of a bedtime routine to help prepare for sleep.
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The distortions, the myths. And when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens' friendship with Lutz Long, I thought, we gotta do an episode on this. Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all that moral fog.
So I wanted to read more of what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters. I wrote to the Jesse Owens archive at the University of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't have any. They suggested I write to the family, but they didn't have any either. It seemed strange to me that no one had kept them. So then I thought, maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country. My name is Galinda Rohr. I was living in Leipzig and working in Leipzig for more than 30 years.
and the last 25 years as the director of the Sports Museum in Leipzig. And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right? That's right. Lutz Long was born in Leipzig, 1913, and he lived there almost till the end.
Rohr and her colleague, the sport historian Volker Kluge, have looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens Lutz Long story than anyone else. We got a lot of questions from all over the world about the legend. Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There are a few different versions, but Rohr dug through the official reports about the games. They're over a thousand pages long.
There is a very good documentation about the Olympics called Official Report of the 1936 Olympics, and they describe it very exactly what happens and where.
Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary evidence is an article Kluge turned up, written by Lützlong himself. It was published about a week into the Games, and it's called Mein Kampf mit Owens, My Struggle with Owens, which I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs. But homages to Hitler aside, the article was part of the surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens' win.
including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Lutz Long lying together in the grass of the Reichsbordfeld, smiling. The photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the competition, when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing a dark turtleneck sweater, and it looks like he's cracking a joke. Owens is beaming at him and wearing his Team USA crew neck. In the photo, they're so close, it almost looks like they're touching. They look like real friends.
So Gerlinda Rohr and I turned our attention to that. So between the first three jumps and the final three jumps, these photographs we are doing. Oh, so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens wins the gold. Yes. Oh, wow. So it's even it's prior. Sure.
There's a good chance that photo was taken or at least commissioned by Leni Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the Third Reich. The photos float freely around the internet now. You can find them on Getty Images. But at the time, they were part of the Nazi propaganda push meant to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed. So we know that Lutz Long and Jesse Owens met at least for the time it took to take that photo. And they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said. But here's the strange thing.
In his article, Lutz Long mentions Jesse Owens' difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping him with the approach. Which is strange, because that's the most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's biggest competitor. Owens is what stands between Long and the gold. And yet Long goes out of his way to help Owens get to the final.
You would think in an article about the Olympic spirit, Long would mention that. They were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in Nazi Germany, it would have been a way for an Aryan to take credit for a Black man's success. But he doesn't mention it. Okay. So maybe all the meaningful stuff happened in those Long talks in the Olympic village. What about those?
I even think that it cannot be because Lutz Long didn't live in the Olympic Village. Oh, really? He didn't live here. I know from his family and from photographs and from...
a diary of his mother, that after the opening of the Olympic Games, he went back home from Berlin to Leipzig. And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump? He would go home at the end of each day? No, not each day. After his competitions started, he lived in Berlin in another hotel.
Alright, so the Long talks seem less likely, though there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way. First, a few days after the bra jump, a Newswire service wrote that, quote, something like a Damon and Pythias friendship has sprung up between Lutz Long and Jesse Owens. Though, I think that's just a reference to the hug on the field that all the reporters would have seen. But then, there's an athlete who decades after the games claimed that she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long.
But Volker Kluger thinks the timing of her story is implausible given her event schedule. Also, I can't find any record of it in Owens' Olympic diaries. Owens is on the record saying, quote,
I mean, they had some intense schedules to keep. Actually, even Hitler couldn't keep up with their schedules. The Fuhrer liked to sleep late. He famously slept through a lot of D-Day. And probably for the same reason, he wasn't even in the stands the morning of the broad jump qualifiers. Which is why it's not actually possible that he walked out on Owens. That leaves us with the letters. So then the final piece of the legend...
is these letters, these sort of beautiful letters that Lutz Long writes to Jesse Owens from the front, from the battlefields of the war. And I've not been able to find any archival record of those letters. Have you? I asked his widow when she was living still in Hamburg, and she said, there weren't letters we got from
Owens at one point cites 1939 as the date of Lutz Long's last letter. He says that in it, Long writes about his wife and son.
But Volker Kluger points out that Long didn't even marry his girlfriend until 1941. And by the way, his son wasn't born until then either. And okay, well then there's that other account featuring a letter from Long on the front lines of North Africa after he was married and after his son was born. Except he didn't serve in North Africa. He died in Sicily. Also, you couldn't even send letters from the Nazi front lines to American citizens. I mean...
They were fighting a war against each other. So then they really wouldn't have been speaking really beyond the competition itself. So probably the moment they spoke was when they were taking those photos. The only time they met each other was during the long jump competition in the stadium. The only time? Never before and never after.
I looked through Jesse Owens' diary from the 1936 games. In the back, he keeps a list of addresses, presumably of people he wants to write to. And there's no address for Lutz Long in there. It was starting to look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true. But then I was left with a new question. If it's not true, how did it catch on? We'll be right back.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. Brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection.
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going on simultaneously with athletes from all over the world. So you have an infinite number...
Of stories to choose from. Like a farm system. It's a farm system. Storytelling. So every year, a different one bubbles up. You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist, wins seven golds. Nadia Comaneci, a kind of beautiful waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful natural experiment in myth-making. It just has an enormous strategic advantage over the other big sports spectacles. World Cup, World Cup.
Super Bowl. Those are monocultures. Yeah, I think that's totally true. And like in the myth-making thing, you have this ancient aura to it. Yes. The other thing is, it's this playground for...
for healthy prejudice. So the flying fin, the kind of mysterious pavunurmi who comes from like the woods of... And like, you know, Abibi Bikila running barefoot through the streets of Rome to win the marathon in 1960. Of course, he's barefoot, right? He's Ethiopian, right? On and on, you take on the characteristics of your country. And that's like, it's this kind of really fun exercise in...
Multicultural ethnocentrism. Right. It's like, what's in the water over there? That's right. Did you ever cross paths with Bud Greenspan? No. Bud Greenspan. The most legendary Olympic storyteller of all time. There are those who believe in the core values of the Olympics. No one more so than filmmaker Bud Greenspan.
At some point in this project, I got a little distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan. He looked like the Buddha if the Buddha had been born farsighted on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was bald and typically wore his black, thick-framed glasses on top of his head, like his brain was stargazing.
Do you ever look at that unappealing negative side of the Olympics in your films? I've been asked that many times, Jean. I think I'd rather spend 100% of my time on the 90% that's good than a lot of my colleagues who spend 100% of their time on the 10% that's not so good.
Here I should just acknowledge that he's talking about us in our nine-part series on Hitler's Olympics, which, fair, I defer to him, because Bud Greenspan basically invented modern, uplifting Olympic storytelling. When Bob Costas, the voice of the Olympics on NBC, first got the big job, he watched like 16 hours of Bud Greenspan documentaries. Just to get the feeling right. Though criticized at times for looking at the games like a young boy through rose-colored glasses...
He has been making films on the Olympics for over 50 years. That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to Bud Greenspan, which is why there's all those angelic voices in the background.
Greenspan started reporting on the Olympics in the late 1940s. He was at every single Olympic Games from 1984 until he died in 2010. He won eight Emmys, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Director's Guild. Everyone knew Bud Greenspan. And even if you don't know his name, you know his style. Here's one story. Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.
Okay, we're at the Metropolitan Opera, which he adored. And intermission and having a glass of champagne. And managing editor of Time magazine, you know, comes up to us and goes, Bud. And he goes, what are you doing here? And says, you know, oh, you should be at Yankee Stadium or something. So there is something so operatic about Olympic stories. Well, yeah.
So why am I telling you about Bud Greenspan? Because his love for sport and his love for operatic storytelling came together in the holy grail of all Olympic stories, the 1936 Games and Jesse Owens. They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment. They'd certainly see each other.
I remember Bud telling me stories about how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe it was like a tennis or racquet club in New York City and they were still segregated, but he talked his way into the dining room. And I remember the maitre d' told Bud, just as long as Jesse sits with his back to the door, the front door. In the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, Greenspan got the idea for a film that fit the era.
He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot an hour-long TV documentary. To narrate it, too. A lot of the film is made up of archival footage that Lenny Riefenstahl shot of the games. But it's framed with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a suit, walking around the Reichsportfeld. And for one of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutz' long son Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track. And that's when this happened.
- Carl, you probably don't know it, but your father was greatly responsible for my winning the broad jump in 1936. - Well, Jesse, it's been a very important part of my life and I've very often seen pictures from you and the photographs of my father. Please tell me about this competition here in the stadium.
Because I have my father only seen for three times. I was born 1941 and my father died 1943. Well, it all happened on the other side of the field here where we had the preliminaries for the running broad jump. And on the first two jumps, I fouled on one and didn't go far enough on the other. And your father came to my assistance.
and he helped me measure a foot back of the takeoff board, and he held the tape until I measured a foot back as far as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came down, and I hit between these two marks, and therefore I qualified, and that led to the victory in the running project.
The film was a huge hit, and it was written, directed, and produced by Bud Greenspan. So I figured case closed. Greenspan took that hug on the field, and he just made up the rest of the myth about Luce Long. But Nancy Beffa said, not so fast.
Bud Greenspan believed that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens. But going back, why did he make it up? I don't know. I can't really speculate on that particular thing. But obviously you need a storyteller and then a recipient. So people must have
The story came from Jesse Owens.
And he'd first told it long before he made that film in the 1960s. Kai Long had first heard it from Jesse Owens, too, a decade earlier. When I first talked to Kai Long, he said for him it was completely...
unexpected situation. Again, sport historian Gerlinda Rohr. He was 10 years at the time when Jesse Owens came to Germany and suddenly Kai Long was in a lot of journalists and photographs and
He didn't know what happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only two and a half years old when Lutz Lang had to leave the family for the war. And so...
It was a completely new situation for this young boy. Of course he believed it because he didn't know what really happened. He couldn't ask his father, never. Gerlinda told me that as Kai Long grew older and reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father, Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had begun to involve Kai too.
In a TV interview, Owen said that Kai had his letters to Lutz in a scrapbook. There is no evidence that that's true.
Kai published a book in 2015 about his father full of family photos and documents. It's in German and impossible to find, but the publisher sent me a copy. And there are just no letters from Owens to Long in it. Surely if Kai had those letters in that scrapbook, he'd have included them in this book.
And so he started to think about what's the truth and what really happened when he was an adult. And he was asked all the time from journalists. And when he told them, oh, maybe it couldn't be or there aren't letters.
To me, he said, I can tell what I want. They want to hear the legends. And so he said once to me, Oh, Mrs. Rohr, isn't it nice for people to live with this story? Do you want to destroy this story? Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story.
And let me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true. Lutz Long and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good to each other on the field. But this whole series we're doing is about what happens when we fail to see the truth of what is right before our eyes. And this legend of the Owens-Long friendship has started to seem to me like one of the biggest examples of failing to see what's right before you. First, because in so many ways it doesn't add up.
And second, because it doesn't just involve one or two DAFI members of the IOC, but so many of us for a long time now. But why would Jesse Owens make this up? The truth, at last, next week. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natafhaffrey, Dolly Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking on this episode by JL Goldfein.
Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Sarah Breguer and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Shikurji, Rufus Wright, who read the excerpts of Jesse Owen's autobiography, and J.D. Landis. I'm Ben out of Haffrey.
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