EPISODE 195: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Please note: this is the back two-thirds of Episode 194 from May 5, 2023, repeated and isolated so new listeners can get right to the Roger Bannister story without the news. If you've heard Episode 194, this'll be a re-run. Talk to you Monday!

A-Block (1:30) N SPORTS: Saturday, May 6, the sports world will do what it always does on May 6: celebrate the most remarkable track and field milestone of the 20th Century (and maybe of all time). It is now 69 years since Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. It was an accomplishment as unbelievable as the Moon Landing; so unbelievable that an editorial in The New York Times asked if it would ever be accomplished again. Roger Bannister won immortal praise, for the rest of his long life and beyond, despite racism and controversy and one minor detail.

He could not POSSIBLY have been the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. There is ample evidence of runners - other British runners in fact - performing the feat as early as 1770. And yet the history of these earlier athletes has been forgotten or erased - or deliberately purged. Why?

B-Block (19:17) IN SPORTS PART TWO: The erasure of the runners who "broke" the four-minute mile barrier in the 18th Century (or earlier) was no accident. It was the deliberate result of the flourishing of the fetishization of amateurism, first in Great Britain in the 1800's, and then throughout the world through the Olympic movement.

C-Block (25:30) IN SPORTS PART THREE: Sadly, the concoction by which Roger Bannister's feat 69 years ago was turned into "the first human ever, ever, since man crawled out of the ooze, to run a mile in four minutes" is more than just elitist revisionist nonsense. It also involves something even worse: blatant, obvious racism. It's an extraordinary story and you should learn the details so you can yell at everybody who tells you about the "great" Roger Bannister.

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