REVISITING Olympic Weirdness: Barefoot Marathons, Medals for Artwork, Pistol Dueling

Tired of being boxed in by filters when shopping for a car? Well, CarGurus has the solution. Meet CarGurus Discover, a new search feature where you can look for vehicles based on the way you think, using your own words. It's no wonder CarGurus is the number one most visited car shopping site according to SimilarWeb's estimated traffic data. Buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus at CarGurus.com. Go to cargurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com. cargurus.com Hey weirdos, it's Rachel. In case you missed it, I'm off on parental leave right now, but we're doing some really fun stuff while I'm gone. You've probably already noticed that we've got some amazing new episodes dropping into the feed hosted by the one and only Jess Bodie. The next one of those will be coming in two weeks. But in between Jess's episodes, we are going to also be airing some reruns, which we've never done before. Because Weirdest Thing has been around for a long time. It's not quite in its awkward tween years gap, but we're getting there. And we realized we've never gone back to revisit past episodes in the feed. It features a couple of fan favorites from the original Weirdest Thing host rotation, Sarah Chodosh, and Claire Maldarelli. Of course, talking about running. What else? This episode features me doing one of my goofy little quizzes, which I always love and should really do more. Unless you disagree, let me know. We also hardly ever do like themed topically cohesive weirdest thing episodes. It just isn't really our vibe to constrain people in terms of what they can talk about. Plus, now we have a guest host on almost every episode. And when I'm bringing folks in who are not part of the regular weirdest thing rotation I'm definitely not going to tell them what they are and aren't allowed to talk about. So yeah theme episodes like we're all talking about the Olympics are pretty rare and I really love them. There are certain conversations you can just only end up having if everybody has come in having read about and thought about the same topic to get ready for the show. We also referenced several other older weirdest thing episodes in this one so it's kind of like a rushing nesting doll of vintage episodes. So it Just follow that rerun rabbit hole and enjoy the ride. Honestly, the only thing that doesn't hold up about this app is that I definitely say that we are hopefully at the tail end of the pandemic. And this was in the summer of 2021. That was not true. But in my defense, it should have been true. And we ruined it. By we, I mean, you know, the collective public. And by the collective public, I really mean several elite government officials. but anyway one quick thing I will add before we get into the episode is that I am spending a little bit more time on social media than I have in the last couple of years to make up for the fact that I've you know otherwise fallen off the face of the earth to care for a newborn you can find me on blue sky at Rachel Feltman or threads where my username is rafeltman okay let's rewind back to the 2020 olympics otherwise known as the 2021 olympics and enjoy the show At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and hex stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Trodosh. And I'm Claire Maldorelli. Welcome back, Claire. Woohoo! Happy to be here. It's been a while. Listeners, of course, you already know, but Claire has been busy hosting our fantastic sister show, Ask Us Anything. It's on break right now, so definitely it's a great chance to go get caught up if you haven't been listening live. But Claire, in the off season, we're so thrilled to have you back on The Weirdest Thing team. Thank you. I'm excited to be back and talking about weird things again. Which you don't do on Ask Us Anything ever. Nothing good on that show. All right. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Today we are all talking about the Olympics, which had been postponed last year and seemed like they might be postponed again, but I guess are happening as of the time of this episode's publishing, which is a choice we will not comment on. But there's a reason people love the Olympics. And while the choice to hold them at what we hope is the tail end of a brutal pandemic is maybe a little questionable, we can completely appreciate why people love them and are excited about them. So we are going to safely, from our respective homes, enjoy some Olympics-related content. why don't we start with Claire's tees yes okay so surprise surprise I'm talking about running um so I would like to talk about how the winner of the marathon at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome won the race barefoot that's amazing oh Jesus I can't even run a regular marathon much lost barefoot yeah it's um wow the marathon that's amazing right it's a lot of miles it's not the event you would expect someone to uh somehow win barefoot but yeah and there was a lot of cobblestone involved which just sounds okay well um my feet already hurt just thinking about it excited to hear more sarah what's your tease i'm going to talk about how there used to be olympic medals for art and how that relates to the 1992 dream team oh see art is really hard I would fail see Claire's like art Claire's like Olympic marathon no sweat Olympic doodle no thank you I couldn't do either so yeah I was gonna say not two two of my least strong areas to be honest um okay i so i i forgot to make a tease but i guess i can there are a couple teases for mine and one of them is that claire in fact at one point would have been the ideal olympic athlete for reasons i will explain and uh the other tease um is that in the early days of the modern Olympics, there were just kind of no rules. And I'm going to talk about some of the bizarre circumstances that came out of that situation. I love this. I love no rules. I think all sports should have less rules. Just chaos. All right. What should we start with? All great teases today. I want to start with the marathon. Okay, great. Yeah. Okay. So I'm starting. All right. Yeah. Got all excited and was like, oh, wait, okay, I have to go now. Right, exactly. Okay. Well, I think I haven't done weirdest thing recording in so long. I was like, oh, I begin now. Okay, so these days, there's tons and tons of money and effort that goes into designing running shoes. I will know. I'm obsessed with writing about it on popscye.com. and that includes a lot of them that are meant for running long distances like marathons which is 26.2 miles long. In fact there's been an explosion of marathon shoes on the market that have fancy midsole technology and literal carbon fiber plates that together give you superior energy return which is essentially how much energy gets back to the runner on each stride the more the better, of course, which overall improves your running efficiency. So a little bit less effort for each step you take when you run, which might seem small, but it really adds up over time considering you take, shoot, I don't know how many steps you take for 26.2 miles, but it's a lot. So much technology has come out in play that there's now limits on the height that running shoes can have. So in the Olympics coming up, the maximum height for running shoes is 40 millimeters. But if you've ever seen various running shoes on the market, they just they look like literal platform shoes or platform sandals that I used to love to wear in high school. So a lot of running technology these days. And it makes you wonder that in 1960, someone was able to run the entire race barefoot. I will explain. So in 1960, a guy from Ethiopia named Abebe Bekila, he was a not really well-known runner. He was known in the Ethiopian community as a sort of up-and-coming athlete. So he was born in a mountainous region in Ethiopia and really in a rural community. He was working as a cattle herder. And then when he was a teenager at age 19, he visited Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa, and he visited the Imperial Palace where he saw the bodyguard forces in training. And he was so impressed that he applied to join and was accepted. And in training, all of the guards were encouraged to, quote unquote, pursue vigorous physical exercise. and so he joined in and found that he had this natural ability to run really well over long distances so quickly he did a 5,000 meter race and a 10,000 meter race and then he started his marathon debut in the 1959 military forces day celebrations in Addis Ababa and that's where a coach saw him and was like this guy's got talent so started him on this sort of like rigorous his training program. And he actually finished one race with a time of 2.21.23, which was a really, really fast time for that time. I think it had actually beaten the Olympic record at the times. But despite all of this, he actually wasn't chosen for the Olympic team. But at the last minute, another runner from Ethiopia actually broke his ankle during a soccer game and they were like, okay, let's put in this new running talent. Imagine, it just goes to show you, I'm going to get into this more in my fact, but how much the Olympics have changed that someone was playing another sport where they could get injured right before the Olympics. It's like, let me just play a quick soccer game right before the big day. And it's like, oops, I broke my ankle. But it's hard because these days they say that you really shouldn't. It's best for your body perhaps not to run just one sport or play one sport. Yeah. But, you know, cross-training, maybe like water aerobics, something very safe. Yoga, Pilates, although Pilates can be very challenging. I messed myself up doing Pilates. Same. Same. In a good way, though. So, yeah. So days before the race, he hops in, and he was training in Ethiopia both with and without shoes. So on some days, he would wear shoes for some of his races, and some he wouldn't. But he was wearing essentially just, like, one pair of shoes because running shoes are expensive. And it wasn't like the Olympics today where runners are sponsored. They get all of these running shoes in advance, all of this wardrobe and apparel and all this free stuff. It was essentially kind of a more DIY type of thing. So he had this one pair of running shoes. And a few days before he was about to leave for Rome, the shoes literally fell apart. And according to an article in the World Athletics Organization, he went on a search in his hometown to find a new pair of running shoes. but as the story goes he couldn't find a pair that he was comfortable wearing for 26.2 miles. He went to a local running store, tried a bunch on, really wasn't feeling it but he did you know think to himself well I do need to buy a pair of shoes. I've got a big day ahead of me. So he bought a pair, tried them out for a bit and they gave him blisters. So he said screw this I'm going to go barefoot for the big day. And if there's any runners out there, and maybe you and Sarah can also attest to this for whatever shoes you wear for cross training or for weightlifting, you know that your shoes are very important. So I like to train in exactly one type of running shoe. And despite the amazing shoe technology, like I mentioned, available on the market today. I refuse to wear literally any other shoe but this exact pair of shoes so much that when I saw that there was an update that they were going to do for 2021, I went and bought like a ton of the old pair because I was like, I just, I will die. Yeah, you can't risk it. Exactly. So he's not loving the new shoes and he's like, I'm going to go barefoot on the first, on the big day. coaches do have a saying and it's unclear if it existed or was popular in 1960 but it goes like this nothing new on race day or the rhyme tried and true and nothing new and i was trying to think about this i was like well technically because he trained with and without running shoes he kind of was adhering to the method nothing new on race day why try this new pair of shoes that gives me blisters when I've run in training runs, probably not the full 26 miles, but whatever, I've done it barefoot, so I'm just gonna go for it. All right. So yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Exactly, right? I feel like this is exactly what I would do in his situation So race day comes the Olympic marathon that year was scheduled in Rome at 5 p which seems pretty late for a 26 mile jogging event An evening run. An evening, yes, a light evening jog. But Rome is an incredibly hot place in August, and it's unclear why they decided to have it at night instead of, say, early in the morning when marathons happen now. Like the New York City Marathon, I think, starts at 9. Other ones start at 8 or sometimes even 7 a.m. But it was smart for them not to do it in the middle of the day. If you remember back to a previous episode of Weirdest Thing where I talk about the ill-fated 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, where they decided to start the marathon at 3 o'clock p.m., you'll remember that among other things that made that marathon perhaps the most ill-fated in history, that start time in the heat of the day didn't really bode well for the runners. And there was like one water station, right? The whole... Tired of being boxed in by filters when shopping for a car? Well, CarGurus has the solution. Finally, car shopping made for you. Meet CarGurus Discover, a new search feature where you can look for vehicles based on the way you think, using your own words. Whether you want great gas mileage for road trips or extra trunk space for the whole group chat, simply type it in and CarGurus Discover will give you real, shoppable listings that match. It's the smarter way to find the car that fits your life. With more than 4 million listings, CarGurus has the biggest selection of cars, so it's easier than ever to find the right car and the right deal. It's no wonder CarGurus is the number one most visited car shopping site, according to SimilarWeb's estimated traffic data. Buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus at cargurus.com. Go to cargurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com. Cargurus dot com. Yes, one water station. And I wouldn't really call it a water station if I remember. It was kind of just like a well that you had. It was like a self-service well. That was such a great episode. People definitely need to go back. It was so scary. But you will still want to run a marathon. Don't worry. Well, I hope. I hope. Maybe listen to it after you run your race. anyways okay so the race starts and right away a group of four runners set the pace including Bekila and a key rival of his this guy from Morocco named Roddy Ben Abdusilam so the race continues and if anyone knows anything about following marathons you know that even though the marathon is technically 26.2 miles. Once you hit the elite racing teams and runners and Olympics where everyone is going really, really fast, the race doesn't really start until the 20 mile mark. It might sound late for a marathon given that it is 26.2 miles, but marathoners will often typically hold a set pace for the majority of the race and then pick it up towards the end at mile 20. And it's like whoever has it left in the tank is going to be the winner. That is not how I race a marathon. I just go hard fast and then die at the end. But that's not the best tactic. I'm not an elite runner. So there we go. So they're at the 20 mile mark and it was essentially pitch black at this point because they started at 5 30 p.m. And they actually had to light Olympic torches in order to illuminate the roads for the runners because they couldn't see anything. And it was cobblestone again throughout Rome. So he's running. It's pitch black. There's like torches with runners running along with the torches to kind of try to keep up with the runners. And he's still going barefoot. And at this point, he's running over total cobblestone. And I don't mean like cobblestone, like, you know, like the nice cobblestone. It's like the bad cobblestone. I guess you could call it like those you know what I mean like those big big I mean it's cobblestone that has been there for hundreds of years like Rome Rome is a different level of old compared to any cobblestones you have walked on in the U.S. yes correct exactly thank you Sarah for for that description um like the big stones you know like you're running on giant stones and it sounds terrible and if you google 1960 Olympic marathon you can see some great footage and he is just running straight through on this cobblestone and a documentary about the event quote unquote calls it he was in the zone so they enter the last 500 meters which is essentially like the last 0.2 of the 26.2 mile race and he just ditches his competitor in the dust there's like two runners at the end and he like sprints to the finish in two hours, 15 minutes, and 16 seconds, breaks the previously held marathon record, all totally barefoot, in the dark, running on cobblestone. And I will just say, he seems like such a great person. In his interview at the end, he said, quote, I want the world to know that my country, Ethiopia, always won with determination and heroism. Winning that race, he also became the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal. And four years later, he also won the gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, though he was wearing shoes and socks. So moral of all of this story is, and something that I've been trying to keep in the back of my head, I guess, when I cover running technology and running shoes and marathon shoes and stack height and midsole technology and all of that is you could be the best you could wear the best running shoes on the planet but it my favorite part of marathons and olympic games is that you never know what is going to happen on race day and it so much of it like yes you can measure how much better this running shoe will help your economy or whatever But you also have to take into account the person's training and their determination and their grit. And I think that's what makes the Olympics even just a great thing to watch. I love that. I feel like it is like it's fun to get caught up in like the gear and the tech and like getting getting new shoes. Like I don't even run. And when Claire gets like new running shoes delivered to the office that like someone has sent her to test, I'm like, look at these cool shoes. like I don't know anything about running shoes at all I only know about weightlifting shoes like it's fun to talk about it and to like get caught up in it but it's true like at the end of the day shoes that give you like one percent more power return kind of pale in comparison to all the rest of the training that you do like if you sleep properly and eat well and train hard like all of that is going to make such a much much bigger difference than a pair of shoes I guess it's once we get like we've gotten so elite and so uh like we're pushing to the forefront of especially like sports like running that I guess we're sort of at this phase where there's where every microsecond counts yeah yeah exactly it's like for most people it's like that you won't notice it doesn't matter at all yeah yeah i think it's funny yeah exactly although i don't know if it has made me want to run barefoot like there was a big movement back i think it was like in the 90s of like barefoot running and those like shoes that yeah that's where those weird toe finger shoes came from yeah i'm really glad that that like phase is over but not for some people no no i went on a day once with a guy who was just wearing those shoes out in the world. Have you seen those high heels with the toes? Oh, no. It's made by the same people. It's like a collab with some high fashion brand and also Vibram who made the toe shoes, I think. I'm going to find them and send them to you. They're really upsetting looking. Yes, the more, you know, get back to nature by wearing high heels. Toe shoes. Toe shoes, yes. I just don't understand. Yeah, like my feet are so uncomfortable when my toes are separated from each other. Like they like to be together. And like when they're forced to be apart and just be stuck next to two pieces of rubber or fabric, they're just miserable. Like I can't even wear toe socks. It's very sad for more than like 10 minutes. And I'm just so uncomfortable. Toe socks also freak me out. They're weird. It's not natural. Toes should be together. Exactly. This is an official pop-sci stance. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to get into my fact, which is going to start with a quick quiz. We had a lot of fun with me making up fake sports back in our episode where I talked about cheese rolling. A fan favorite, I think. So go back and check it out if you haven't already. I think this quiz about which sports did or did not happen in the Olympics may be a bit easier than the made-up sport quiz, but we'll see. We'll see how we do. Okay. So which of the following sports have not been played at the Olympics? We have first Nordic folk wrestling, motorboating, or cheerleading. Sorry, is there just one that one of them hasn't been? Just one has not been played at the Olympics. Okay. Can you repeat them? What was the second one? Yeah. Sorry. Repeat, please. Can you repeat the question? Yeah. So, all right. So, which of the following sports have not been played at the Olympics. Just one. Is it Nordic folk wrestling, motorboating, or cheerleading? I'm going with B motorboating. I'm also going to go with motorboating. Incorrect. Motorboating has appeared at the Olympics, though the IOC is notoriously opposed to motorized sports in 1900 and 1908. That didn't matter because it was Paris's call. What is Nordic folk wrestling? Well, it appeared at the Olympics in 1912. And there are going to be people who tell me I'm wrong about this. And I will say I am going to explain why I'm saying it was in the Olympics. Don't be pedantic. I'm about to be pedantic for you later. We are just having fun with this quiz. It appeared at the Olympics. cheerleading has been granted provisional status as of 2016 which means it could be approved in time for 2024 or 2028 but unfortunately cheerleading the very real and dangerous sport has yet to appear in the olympics and nordic folk wrestling has i just googled nordic folk wrestling just to try to get a sense of what the heck this is and first of all it tells me that what i should have searched for was gleema the name that covers several types of nordic folk wrestling wow yeah uh well we're gonna have to put some photos up online because first of all some of these people are wearing like boots and and what looks like underwear so to it's a great image well you're i was just gonna ask what you don't do nordic wrestling naked it's cold yeah i mean it's kind of stuff is for greece and rome yeah yeah well i'm i guess i'm surprised because like olympic wrestling now is such a thing like it is a very specific kind of wrestling and it's wild to me that there was just this other kind of wrestling but I really love it I will I will get into more detail okay which of these sports has not appeared at the Olympics life-saving billiards or motorcycle racing life-saving yes life-saving which has not appeared they all feel like they happen to going into the water, pulling people out of it. Oh my god, wow. Okay. Wait, what was B and C then? I got stuck on life-saving. That's fair. Billiards and motorcycle racing. Oh god. I want to go for motorcycle again, but after motorboating, I'm scared. Same. I'm feeling, yeah, I have the same thought process, so I'm just going to go with A, life-saving, because that just sounds wrong. Well, unfortunately, it has appeared in the Olympics. Billiards has been trying to get into the Olympics since the 1950s, but the IOC thinks it is a game, not a sport. Okay, they're right, but I was going to say billiards. Dang it. That makes no sense. I should have given you more time, Sarah. It's okay. It's okay. I just was so perplexed. They all sounded like they definitely should have never been in the Olympics. I want to say that that totally makes no sense on their part because the Olympics are literally called quote-unquote the olympic games so but if i've learned anything from my research for this episode it's that the ioc um is is a very pedantic organization god um we could also have a whole episode about like what is a sport and what is a game i'd just get a lot of angry fan mail yeah all right next up which of these has not appeared in the olympics chess pistol dueling or horse long jumping like a long jump but on a horse oh my goodness again like I want to say chess but I feel like it's I feel like it's a trap because the other two are sports and chess is not a sport oh god I'm gonna say chess I'm gonna also say chess yeah chess has not uh appeared as an official Olympic sport and this is where I will I will have to get pedantic in a minute to explain my logic but I promise this is all going to be a learning experience we're going to learn a lot based on which things I said were in the Olympics and which weren't. Okay, a couple more left. Which of these was not in the Olympics? Cannon shooting, underwater hockey, solo synchronized swimming. Cannons. Underwater hockey. Okay, so underwater hockey indeed has not been in the Olympics, but it was a real sport, as I outlined in... Shooting a cannon's not a sport? I thought you made that up. no claire this was back in my episode where i did a made sport quiz underwriter hockey was one of the trickiest yes i exactly Ah dang it I was on that episode and I got fooled this time Ugh I don't, but shooting a cannon's not a sport. Well, I'm going to get into it. Shooting a cannon is really hard, Sarah. It's a skill, it's not a sport. Okay, now bonus round, and this is the last one. Which of these took place in Paris 1900? Live pigeon shooting or pigeon racing? Oh, pigeon racing. Pigeon racing. It's a trick question. They both took place. Oh, no. Rachel. Okay, yeah. So I could get into a little bit more detail about some of these sports throughout my explanation. But I need to give people a little bit of historical context here. So the Olympics are at least 3,000 years old. That's when we know the ancient Greeks were definitely holding several major sporting festivals a year, one of which took place every four years in Olympia. though that may have only been a foot race at first actually uh but they didn't exist from the year 400 to the year 1859 the ancient olympic games tapered off during the roman empire because the romans had sporting events like gladiator fights but those were like largely framed as entertainment not as like a competition for the sake of the competitors um plus the games that had pagan associations as they were originally part of religious festivals so um you know during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire that was, you know, bad news for the Olympics, basically. So it was in 1859 that Greece started holding modern Olympiads in Athens, and some other countries followed suit. So for a while, there were like Olympics in different countries, different countries just had their own Olympiads. The first international Olympic Games took place in Athens in 1896, which was not long after the International Olympic Committee first formed, now known as the IOC most times. The Winter Games weren't a thing until 1924, actually, and in general, it took about that long for the Olympics to look anything like the events we hold today. For starters, Olympians had to provide their own lodging until 1932. So for those first games, most like non-Greek competitors were people who happened to be in Athens for some other reason. That's why there was a big showing of like members of the British embassy in Greece at the Olympics. Also, only amateurs were allowed to compete, which I'll talk more about in a minute. And rules were really all over the place. So for those first few Olympic games, and especially the second iteration, which was Paris 1900, countries could kind of just insert events that they expected locals to do well in, which led to some very weird competitions. And one great example of this is that in 1900, France included croquet in the Olympics, which only French people signed up for, albeit some of them women. So that was cool. That was the first Olympic event that women were allowed into. But like only the French people played croquet. And then so at 1904, at the St. Louis World's Fair, which also held Olympic Games, America decided to feature ROQ, R-O-Q-U-E, which is literally just taking the first and last letters off of croquet. And it's an American variant of croquet that pretty much no one played outside the U.S. So only Americans sign up for that at the Olympics. So people pulled this kind of crap all the time where they were just like, we are going to show off to the world how good we are at this sport that none of them care about playing. And so yeah, there were a lot of accusations of people trying to like pad the medal count for the host country. And the early Olympics were very much just extensions of the world fairs that they were generally held with. So some really random stuff got airtime. These days, we would call these events demonstration sports where they're not part of the official games. They don't contribute to any nation's medal count. They're there generally because it's something the country that's hosting has like a lot of top ranked competitors in, like bowling, which was a demonstration sport in Seoul during the Olympics. So it's an opportunity to show that off on an international stage and add to the stuff there is for people to buy tickets to and to broadcast and all of that good stuff. But because there were so few rules about how to run the Olympics in the early 1900s, there are still people debating what should be counted as an official Olympic event versus a demonstration event. Because at the time, the host countries were not making a distinction. So for example, chess has been a demonstration event at a more recent Olympics. But by then, it was being called a demonstration event. No one was pretending it as part of the real thing. Whereas cannon shooting was, if it happened today, it would be a demonstration sport. But when it happened in Paris in 1900, it was just one of many, quote unquote, Olympic events. So no one has really, there are definitely people who have made lists being like, here's what was official, here's what wasn't. But it's kind of a matter of opinion. So wait, okay. So are the countries that earned medals in cannon shooting, like are those counted in their official country by country medal counts? So my understanding, and I could be wrong about this, but I think in Paris 1900 and probably in St. Louis 1904, there was no distinction between sports. And it was just like, if you want a medal, you want a medal. And there wasn't as much about like a country winning the Olympics. It was kind of I mean, I there wasn't really an opening or closing ceremony. It was all a mess. And I'm sure someone who knows more about the Olympics than me could talk about this with more nuance. But my takeaway is just like, if someone won, it was still kind of arbitrary because nobody was like keeping great track. Yeah. And it sounds like some countries were like, well, we're going to do our best sport and win like 20 medals with it. Yeah. Well, and I think the important thing to get at is that even if they really were keeping a close tally of medals, it was always going to be the host country that won because they had the most competitors there because they didn't pay for travel. Right. A very strong geographic selection. Exactly. Yeah. And also important to remember is that none of the people doing these events were professionals in any sport. So, like, cannon shooting was just as legit as foot racing because nobody was supposed to be doing this full time. In 1912, American decathlete and pentathlete Jim Thorpe actually lost his 1910 medals because he had once accepted a small payment for playing semi-professional baseball as a college student, which breaks my heart. That seems really unfair. but the Olympics were supposed to showcase this like pure athleticism that would only be tainted by someone's desire to make money or their ability to train full-time which is so radically different from what the Olympics are today that it really blows my mind it seems like the IOC was persuaded to move on this once TVs became really widespread and they realized how much money the Olympics could make by broadcasting. And relatedly, how much cooler the sports would be to watch on TV if people were performing at really elite levels. Plus, another thing is that the Soviet Union had started to train and support their national athletes basically from birth. So they didn't have amateur athletes anymore. And so other countries needed to turn to full-time professional competitors to have any chance of beating people from the Soviet Union. The Canadian Amateur Hockey Association actually sounded the alarm on this, you know, in regards to the Soviet Union's team, particularly in the late 60s. And the International Ice Hockey Federation decided that Canada should be able to include nine non-NHL professionals on its team for the 1970 Winter Olympics in Canada. But the IOC disagreed and Canada actually withdrew from all international ice hockey competitions in protest until I think like the mid-1970s. 1970s when the IOC actually opened hockey up to non-NHL professionals. And there continued to be a lot of debate about who should be allowed to compete or not. Then in 1986, the IOC decided to officially leave competitor selection criteria up to individual sport federations. And by the 90s, basically every sport featured people with full-time endorsements or professional contracts. um so things have changed a lot uh you know in Paris 1900 you could basically just stroll up and be like I can shoot a pigeon and you were in the Olympics they uh they did actually reinstate Jim Thorpe's medals but 30 years after he died I know it's really sad such a bummer yeah well and it's like it's such a a like letter of the law thing right like it's it's not like he was like sitting at home getting rich off of endorsements he had gotten paid for one sport once for a different sport a different sport not even the sport he won in the olympics so yeah yeah um but again ioc very pedantic organization i think so yeah then i mean i wanted to talk a little bit about how you get a sport into the olympics because when you look at like billiards and cheerleading like waiting in the wings. It's it makes one wonder. And I will say also for anyone who has yet to pick up on this, all of the weird sports that I listed in the quiz at the beginning are from those early days when just kind of like countries could just put random stuff in there and be like, it's an Olympic event. The only weird one that I listed that's like modern is solo synchronized swimming, which is where you're synchronized to the music not to other dancers so you kind of it's like a gymnastics mat routine but in the water um it does not it is not still in the olympics it fell out of fashion um could i do it no do i think it looks silly yes that's my stance on solo synchronized swimming um it sounds lonely like i would want so um yeah getting into the olympics is a really complicated and drawn-out process you have to first get recognition as a sport from the ioc which as i said billiards has not succeeded in doing um and that gets you into the international sports federation status which means then you can have like your own international governing body that's supposed to ensure that the sport is following various IOC rules like anti-doping regulations. Then you file a petition to the IOC where you can either argue that you're an entirely new sport or a discipline, which is a branch of a sport, or an event, which is just one competition within a discipline. So, for example, triathlon was added in 2000 as a whole new sport. Meanwhile, Well, women's wrestling, when that was added, it was just a new discipline since wrestling was already in the Olympics. And then you have something like women's pole vaulting, which was just a new event within women's track and field, which was already a discipline. So that's all to say, like, there are different strategies for getting your sport in. And one of them is to kind of like fold yourself in under another sport and just be an event. There's also like a bunch of stuff about popularity. Like a sport has to be widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries and on four continents and by women in no fewer than 40 countries and on three continents, which I would like to say creates a big bias against roller derby, which is predominantly played by women and non-binary, non-gender conforming people. So I would love for roller derby to be the sport that breaks this qualifier because we could flip it. um the sport must also increase the value and appeal of the olympic games um reflect its traditions and then there are rules about like they have bans on purely quote mind sports like chess i guess i guess that's what they would call a game is a mind sport um i feel like that's so untrue because all sports are all sports are mind sports but i kind of appreciate the characterization of chess is like, it's not a sport, but it is a mind sport. Okay, but there was that article in, I think it was ESPN like a year or two ago, or maybe even a few years more, that like chess players actually burn like tons and tons of calories and they have to like... It's true. It's physically intense. Well, and relatedly, so they're really, again, sports dependent on mechanical propulsion. You know, we had motorboating and motorcycle racing in some of those really early Wild West days of the modern Olympics, but the IOC does not like mechanical propulsion, which has kept various forms of automobile racing out of the Olympics. And we also know that race car drivers go through incredibly intense physical stress. But I feel the same way about car racing, where I'm like, it does require a lot of like, it's a massive physical skill, you do have to be physically fit but like you're not propelling you forward right you know yeah I understand it I do um so yeah the sport has to be popular enough to be a draw it has to be a good return on investment in terms of how expensive it is to create facilities for it so like if you have a sport that can't be done on like the same playing field as an existing Olympic sport then that's gonna hurt your chances. And then like how psyched are people going to be to watch it on TV? Like surfing is getting its Olympic debut whenever these summer Olympics actually occur. And, you know, that's one where technically all you need is an ocean, but I guess you need a pretty good ocean. So like that, that's probably tough. On the other hand, it's going to be a huge draw. People are going to be really jazzed to watch Olympic surfing for the first time. So I'm sure that, you know, had some weight for the IOC. And there also has to be space for it. These days, events usually only get added at the cost of other events. So I feel like we don't hear about this a lot because it's rare that they shed an entire sport or even entire discipline, but they might get rid of events under it like a particular type of middle distance race or something So I feel like most people who aren interested in that particular sport don really pay attention as those things get kind of shed based on like changes in popularity or in the number of competitors around the world. And then that's how we get kind of other events inserted in. So yeah, basically my point is the Olympics was super made up for the first few decades that we did it. And a lot of really weird stuff went down including some very racist stuff at the St. Louis 1904 Olympics where they did they had what they called anthropology days which were an extension of the human zoos that were very popular at world fairs. World fairs were really messed up. They had I've talked about this on previous episodes the weirdest thing they had like eugenics tents in the science section. They had human zoos where it was just like they shipped people in from other countries so that you could be like, oh, wow, look at these non-white people. But at St. Louis and at some other world fairs where they had Olympics, they would have an Olympics anthropology day, which was just the people from the human zoos doing sports. But it wasn't even, they didn't get medals that counted towards particular countries. That was the one place where the Olympics would draw the line and say this isn't part of the real Olympics. So anyway, the Olympics, what are they? Who knows? A mostly modern invention based on a misunderstanding of what the ancient Olympics used to be. Yes, absolutely. Well, it just it really fascinated me because I think as someone whose entire life has been in the like you know post-amateur um era of the olympics it just surprised me how recently they were so different it's really presented as like a a storied historic institution and it's all it's all pretty made up pretty recently yeah this is what bothers me about the ioc acting all high and mighty about like oh we can't allow like cheerleading into the olympics because like what would that say about the Olympics? Like, I don't know, like, it's all made up. And we've just always arbitrarily decided what gets to be in the games. I don't like that's true. All right, well, we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Sarah, tell us about Olympic art. Yeah, I mean, we're I'm here to get more into the silliness of what the olympics offend okay so here's the fact which has was when i learned it so wild to me i heard it on another podcast and i legitimately had to look it up in the middle of cooking dinner because i was like this can't be true like these people didn't fact check properly but it is true the olympics gave out medals for art at every games from 1912 to 1948 and somehow we've just all collectively forgotten about this fact which is crazy to me because it was so recent um so the the reason why it was basically a man named Pierre de Coubertin which I'm sure I am butchering who's like basically the founder of like what we consider the modern Olympics and he was a big believer in the idea of the Olympics as not just a competition of athleticism but like of being a complete person like if you were going to be a true Olympian you should be skilled not just in sport but in music and literature this sounds like a like a jane austen book it does feel like that true woman a truly accomplished woman must be exactly exactly okay or like a college application like you can't just be good at school god forbid you just are good at one thing you must be good at all of the things um and i'm i'm unclear where he got this idea because like again the ancient olympic games were very much about sports like often just like one sport too yeah like there weren't that many like you had like discus and chariot racing pentathlon running wrestling but like i don't think any literature or sculpture was involved so i'm not really sure where we came up with this idea also like the ancient olympians were naked but as far as i know cooper 10 was not interested in having all the olympics be naked and oily but regardless when he founded the modern games on it let's be honest more people would watch if we're looking to spice up the olympics let's go back to its roots um but anyway cobertown was pretty insistent that there needed to be like an artistic component to the olympics and i think perhaps single-handedly he managed to get it included as like kind of a side exhibit in the 1912 games in stockholm so they awarded medals for painting sculpture architecture literature and music i was hoping that like the other olympic events it was going to be some kind of race like who can compose the best song the fastest or something like that but uh you just submitted your work in advance like it was just kind of like a normal art competition um they all had to be olympics or sports themed and then it was basically like exhibited at the games and the judges then got to give out medals so over the course of these years the judges gave out 151 total art medals and also withheld a lot of medals because at the time the judges were just allowed to say like we didn't think that any of these things deserve a medal what the Pulitzer prizes yeah like the cartoons yeah no award for editorial cartoon which was devastating aren't good enough it is literally like that and also not only that but they were allowed to say like give out silver and bronze but no gold and just be like we didn't we're a lot of a lot of second and third places here but yeah to me though like the whoever won silver like they won gold they were the best like whoever you picked it was the best that's the definition of who's gold reading curve on medals yeah it was wild to me but apparently the the olympics art judges were extremely extremely picky um so uh the art part was like it was never it was never that successful and it was kind of a sideshow but i do want to point out like they were olympic medals like it wasn't it was considered an accessory to the games but they were official olympic medals and they kept holding the event through the 1948 games um coubert himself actually won a gold medal in literature in 1912 the first year that they did it for a poem that he wrote he submitted it under a pseudonym and i couldn't i couldn't determine whether it was like it was legitimately a pseudonym and nobody really knew it was him and he wanted just because he was like an incredible poet or if it was like hey i'm gonna submit this under a pseudonym but like you know right maybe maybe like not enough people had submitted their applications and he's like I gotta put one in. Yeah um but uh other than other than the founder of the Olympics you have probably never heard of any of the other artists who ever won medals because the artistic community didn't take it seriously like just the fact that your entry had to be sports themed meant that like lots of artists weren't going to submit everything so like in the architecture category most of the things that were entered were like sports arenas But if you're an architect who doesn't design sports arenas, like, why do you? Nobody cared. No artist cared about winning an Olympic medal in art because it was a silly thing to begin with. So you might think that the IOC stopped awarding Olympic medals for art because of, like, a lack of interest or maybe because, like, it's literally a sports medal that is given out for art. But that is not why. The thing that killed the Olympic art medals was the debate about whether amateurs should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. so the guy who took over the IOC after World War II um Avery Brundage who was American through and through um was absolutely adamant that everybody participating in the Olympic Games had to be an amateur because as Rachel said that's how you make them pure um but really the idea of like amateurism being more pure than being a professional athlete is like very much rooted in classicism so I found this great quote from an Olympics historian, Bill Mallon, which is quoted in a really excellent 2012 article in The Atlantic about amateurism generally. So he said, amateurism really started when the people who were rowing boats on the Thames for a living started beating all the rich British aristocrats. Damn. So basically like when all the professional athletes, many of whom weren't like fancy, rich, upper crust people who were like, I'm good at this thing and I'm actually going to earn a living doing it. they started getting really good and then all of a sudden all the wealthy elites were like oh it's not really very sportsman like to like get paid to do this you're you're only a gentleman if you do this sport as a hobby on the side yeah also definitely as like an extension of the world fairs that these olympics were being held at often like there was kind of a eugenic subtext where it was like the pure we're just showing off like the purity of our best stock not our athletes this is just like how good you know your standard well-bred frenchman is at shooting a pigeon because of our good breeding i definitely like i didn't read anything that like came out and said this explicitly but again it's like these were happening at world fairs that had competitions for the most well-bred baby with the best head shape and things like that. Oh my goodness. Yeah, definitely all the talk of like maintaining the purity of their athleticism really skews me out. It's also, it's super hypocritical because like rich people were fine to pay pro athletes to like teach themselves and their sons. Because like, let's be honest, it wasn't women competing how to like play tennis or like row. but they also simultaneously like look down on the people who they clearly considered experts in their field because like they had the audacity to actually get paid to do the sport um but like of course the the idea of being an amateur and being an artist are not really compatible because like imagine if the only people who were allowed to compete in the architecture competition were amateur architects like that's just not a thing i show up with a football shaped house I drew on a napkin yeah I mean the gold I mean entertaining in other ways but not really in the keeping of what the olympics is supposed to be about um and so they had they like kind of had to get rid of the art competition because I don't understand like there was who was even going to submit like they already had trouble getting artists to actually submit works they like at least one year had to extend the deadline because they didn't have enough entries coming in um so they went so far as to strike all of the medals out of the olympic of like the official olympic record so the 151 medals they don't count towards the country's medal counts um which i'm actually all right with but i think it's interesting that they used to count and then the ioc was like actually in retrospect we shouldn't have ever given out any of those yeah no i mean similarly like the ioc has definitely looked back and like redacted a bunch of stuff that happened in Paris and then like these are the medals that count but it's like their logic the logic by which they separated sports seems to have been pretty much just like a vibe like should this have counted or not yeah yeah um and it's all like especially wild I guess because you know they the the art medals went away starting in the 1950s but then as Rachel said it wasn't that long after that that the Olympics became the giant money grabbing scheme that we know them today. So like as soon as Avery Brundage left, the IOC said, hey, you know what? We can make a lot of money if we pay, if we just had professional athletes who were actually really good at these events. And then people would probably tune into the television and watch the people that they already know from the other sports that they play professionally and just like watch them in the Olympics. So starting with the 1992 Olympics, the IOC changed the rules. And while you don't get, you can't get paid to go to the games, you are allowed to be a professional. Hence the 1992 Dream Team. I brought it around in the end. For those who don't know, the 1992 Dream Team was the U.S. basketball team that was the first to feature NBA players. So Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley. And ever since then, of course, the men and women's U.S. basketball teams have absolutely dominated the Olympics because we have the NBA. I learned that each each the men the men's and the women's teams have lost only once each to like not one gold um the men's team lost to Argentina which is not a country I associate with basketball but as I learned in researching this basketball is an amazingly popular sport outside of the U.S. that's one of those sports that I think is just U.S. centric and it is so popular every like many other places in the world um it did make me kind of wonder like what would art look like if it were in the Olympics today like if pro artists today could enter into the Olympics would it be more interesting because you could make money off of it and like be an actually interesting person it still makes no sense to me to have an art medal as an Olympics thing but there is kind of like art exhibitions related to the Olympics like there's always sculptures and things and often when you go to cities that have hosted in the past they'll still have like artifacts from the olympics that are like up and around the city um but yeah this is just crazy it's crazy to me that we have just like entirely forgotten that for like a large chunk of the modern olympics we gave out art medals it's just the olympics are silly i love them but also they're so silly all right what was the weirdest thing we learned this week i'm giving my vote to the barefoot foot race. I still like art in the Olympics. I was going to vote for one of Rachel's, so it's a three-way toy. Wow. The IOC would be horrified, but I know. They would have some rule. You refuse to give out a gold. We'll take the W's. All right. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode come find us at popscye.com slash weird. You can buy our merch including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags and mugs at popscye.threadless.com The show is produced by all of our hosts including me, Rachel Faltman with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening Weirdos.