Revisionist History - Relax and Win from Legacy of Speed

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Sharing a new Pushkin show, Legacy of Speed. When two Black sprinters raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games, it shook the world. More than 50 years later, the ripple effects of their activism are still felt. Host Malcolm Gladwel tells the stories of the runners who took a stand, and the coaches and mentors who helped make them fast enough — and brave enough — to change the world.In this episode, we hear how coach Bud Winter took what he learned from working with fighter pilots in World War II and created a system for training sprinters at San Jose State. His “Relax and Win” methods used breathing, visualization and other unconventional coaching techniques to create a powerhouse track program. Another thing that made him unique at the time? His focus on recruiting Black athletes to a mostly white school.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. I'm so excited to bring you Season 7 in just two short weeks. Until then, I wanted to share another podcast with you that I've been working on. It's a new show called Legacy of Speed. As any loyal Revisionist History listener knows, I'm totally crazy about running. So when Tracksmith approached Pushkin to make a show about running and sports activism, I was all in. Legacy of Speed is a series about the transformation of a track program at San Jose State in the 1960s. What started out as just a second-tier state college that no one outside of Northern California had even heard of, quickly became known as the home to Speed City. Under the guidance of one coach and his unconventional techniques, San Jose launched the careers

of the fastest sprinters of the day. I traced the journey of those sprinters, who went on to make an iconic protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics. The show features conversations with Olympic athletes, sports journalists, performance coaches, and documentarians. You'll hear from some of the best runners of all time, Tommy Smith, John Carlos, Lee Evans. It's a story about athletes who dared to take a stand and the mentors who made them fast and brave enough to pave the way for the sports activism we see today. Here's a preview. You can follow the story by searching for Legacy of Speed wherever you get your podcasts.

1968. The Summer Olympic Games are in Mexico City. For the first time, the Games are truly a television spectacle. Twice as many hours of coverage with new technology like instant replay. And it's being broadcast live around the world in color. Everyone is watching. The United States leads the Olympics in medal awards and is just about supreme in the sprint races, thanks to men like Tommy Smith and John Carlos. Tommy Smith, John Carlos, two of the greatest sprinters of all time, captured in one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

Two black men standing on a platform, each with a fist in the air. Yesterday, they stood on the victory platform with bowed heads wearing black socks and gloves in a racial protest. I remember seeing that photo as a kid growing up in the 1970s. A kid who was obsessed with sports. And even though I was much too young to understand anything about the context for it,

I understood that it was an act of transgression. Over the next five episodes, I want to tell you the story behind that transgression, how those two men ended up on the victory stand. Their struggles and triumphs. Because in that moment half a century ago, the way we think about sports and social protest shifted forever in ways that we are still wrestling with today. Two extraordinary figures made that iconic moment possible. One, Bud Winter, an eccentric tactician

who reinvented what it meant to be a coach. The other, Harry Edwards, a fiery professor and black power activist who dared to challenge that most sacred of American institutions. And here's the remarkable thing. All four of those men, those two runners, the professor and the coach, came from the same place. A second-tier state college that no one outside of Northern California had ever heard of. San Jose State, or as it was known back then, Speed City. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is Legacy of Speed, a story about athletes who dared to take a stand

and the visionaries who made them fast enough and brave enough to change the world. In the 1960s, Silicon Valley was not yet called Silicon Valley. That nickname wouldn't come until the early 1970s. But among the rolling hills and citrus groves south of San Francisco, a hundred revolutions had already started to bubble. The microchip, the beginnings of the personal computer, the internet. The Bay Area was wide

open to innovation and reinvention, and anyone who had a crazy idea about how to do things better. And in the middle of that ferment was a commuter school in downtown San Jose, San Jose State. San Jose State was where a coach named Bud Winter held court. And Bud Winter is where this story begins. Bud was one of the most important coaches of the 20th century. He invented modern sprinting with an unconventional approach that has today become dogma. Have you ever watched the way of the fastest man in history? The Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt glides down the track. Usain Bolt, look at the time, 9-5-8, world record!

Unruffled, calm, composed. You can credit Bud Winter for the way Bolt ran. Bolt's coach was a Bud Winter disciple. Over his career, Bud coached 102 All-Americans, 37 world record holders, and 20 Olympians, including Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the two sprinters who raised their gloved fists in Mexico City. Bud's athletes so completely dominated sprinting that people stopped calling the San Jose team by its formal nickname, the Spartans, and just called it Speed City. He was a scrapper. He grew up in a poor neighborhood in San Francisco. Yeah, it was right by the zoo. That's Kathy Winter, Bud's daughter. Bud Winter was born Lloyd C. Winter in 1909 and grew up in San Francisco. Well, his mom was a Spitfire Irish woman, and his father was a photographer and a very quiet introvert.

And he lived on the poor side, so I think that's why he had such a compassion and a heart for people that didn't have money. Bud ended up at UC Berkeley. He studied psychology. After college, Bud coached football at a high school and then a junior college. He was a man of obsessions. He didn't just golf. He invented a golf club that he swore hit the ball further because he'd exposed it to radiation. He didn't just fish. He went

fishing around the world. He was unkempt, unassuming. He wore mismatched patterns. His clothes were often wrinkled. When he traveled, he stuffed his suits into a duffel bag. He always seemed to have soup or something down his shirt. But when you pointed it out, he'd go, you know, who cares? It just wasn't his priority. In 1941, Bud took a job coaching track and freshman football at San Jose State. I would say my dad was somewhat absent. And I don't say that with negativity in my heart or anything, but his whole life was about track and field and the guys. We'd be sitting there at the table at dinner,

and all of a sudden my dad would get up and he would go over to the side and he'd start to practice. Like the shot put, okay, now he wants to tell him to turn his head this way. And here we were in the middle of trying to tell him a story about what we did at school. As a coach, Bud was a teacher, not a screamer. The thing that impressed me about Bud, he never raised his voice. This is Ray Norton, one of Bud's athletes. And never did I ever hear him use profanity. That's pretty unusual for a coach. My high school coaches, all they did, you know, they couldn't coach all they did was use profanity. Bud didn't look like a traditional coach. He didn't sound like a traditional coach. And that was all part of the

charm. Norton remembers the first time he met Bud. He was still in high school. He and some of his friends who also ran went to a track meet at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual showdown between the Big Ten and the conference that would become the Pac-12. First of all, we snuck in the place, and we're sitting quietly, hoping nobody notices us, you know. Norton and his friends all ran track for their high school teams. A couple of them were pretty fast, but none of them expected to be recruited by the colleges at this meet. It's 1955. Not too many of the big track schools were interested in black sprinters.

We watched the big boys, the collegiate guys, and then when they left, we kind of eased down on the track and got into the starting blocks. They started to race each other, just for fun. We were supposed to be there, obviously, and there were several coaches in the stands watching. All of them left except one. That one was Bud Winter.

And Bud walked from the bleachers and we're in the starting blocks. And we said, oh God, we've been busted. They're going to throw us out of here. And he walked real slow and then he stopped in front of me and he said, do you know you could be the world's fastest human? And I went, Okay.

I wasn't even the fastest guy in the starting blocks where he was standing. A couple of the high school kids could beat me. And they're going, What? This coach must be on something. At the time, Norton had no idea what Bud saw in him. It wasn't until he went to San Jose State that he understood that Bud had turned the science of sprinting on its head. I was 6'3". Sprinters are like 5'8", 5'9", 5'10". What he saw is that I had a natural relaxation mode. I didn't strain when I ran. And the other kids did. He could teach me the relaxation mode, and I could handle it.

The relaxation mode. Shorthand for the complex set of ideas at the heart of Budd's philosophy. Coaches for generations had stressed the visible application of effort, intensity, the grimacing, tightly coiled runner huffing and snorting down the track like a runaway plow horse. Work harder, push, push, push. But Budd's thought was,

what if that was entirely backwards? What if the sprinter should be gliding? Norton joined Budd's team in 1956 on a scholarship. He would become a star, the first real star of the so-called Speed City era at San Jose State. We'll be right back. Bud Winter had his lightbulb moment when he first arrived at San Jose State. He sat in on a class taught by Dorothy Hazeltine Yates. It was about the psychology of fighter pilots, an enormously important subject at the start of World War II. Pilots were suffering from nervous

exhaustion, burnout, breakdowns. They were making fatal errors in combat because of the enormous stress they were under. In the class, Bud learned about a new approach to tackling the problem, teaching the pilots relaxation techniques. Bud watched as the techniques were applied to boxers at San Jose State. This is what Bud wrote in his 1981 book, Relax and Win. The results proved not only gratifying, in some cases they were amazing to us. Green, inexperienced novices very soon showed the cool, confident poise of champions. San Jose boxers won every bout that season, some spectacularly.

At the start of the Second World War, Bud enlisted in the Navy, and he got a chance to build on what he'd learned with Yates' class at San Jose. He was put in charge of a research study at a flight school in California, looking at relaxation training for cadets. It was the beginning of what would be a radical transformation in the way we think about preparing people for stressful jobs. We called up Dr. Belisa Vranic to get a little 101 on relaxation techniques. So any tense muscle you have on your body is using oxygen. And you need other muscles to be sort of prepped and alert and ready to go. Vranic is a clinical psychologist who works with lots of people in high-stress jobs,

law enforcement, firefighters, Navy SEALs, pilots. So if your entire body is tense, you are going to be using up calories and you're going to be using up oxygen. For instance, chess masters burn a tremendous amount of calories playing chess, and it's because your brain uses so much oxygen. So if you are thinking intense and if your body is tense, you're tapping into your tank of energy. Imagine how quickly you might drain that tank of energy in a dogfight. And if you return safely, how would you manage to get some sleep so you could fight again tomorrow? The solution is to learn how to relax, to contain and control your stress. Inhale, two, three, four. Breathing slowly and deliberately. This is called tactical breathing. Inhale, stretch a little bit more, sigh on the exhale, and you're ready to go. So your breathing controls your heart rate and your heart rate is your main

indicator of stress. So when you get stressed out, your heart rate goes up. And once it goes past a certain point, it affects your motor skills, your fine motor skills, your memory, and your ability to perform. So whether you are working in a corporate setting or you're an athlete, you'd like your heart rate to be at a place where you are calm but alert. At the flight school, Winter's study involved 200 cadets. For six weeks, they attended classes, played sports, and took psychological tests. The cadets were split into two groups. One was the control group. The other group learned relaxation techniques.

Bud wrote about the outcome in his book. The relaxation group made more significant and even spectacular progress. The greatest improvement by the relaxation group was demonstrated in the courses that involved the most pressure. When the war was over, Bud went back to San Jose State. And that's when he realized, if relaxation techniques could help pilots, surely they could also help sprinters. Dr. Belisa Vranich again. If you are able to get yourself to breathe well mechanically, meaning diaphragmatically, and now you train those muscles separate from your sport,

it actually affects your times. It delays fatigue. The problem at the heart of a sprinter's task was pressure. They weren't running a marathon where they had two hours to settle in and adjust and make up for mistakes and misjudgments. A 100-meter sprint is 10 seconds. The 200 meters is 20 seconds. The runner must react instantly to the gun, run a flawless race, extract every ounce of speed from their bodies over an impossibly compressed time frame. The sprinter settling into the blocks before a race was under an extraordinary, potentially

debilitating amount of pressure. And the body's untrained response to that pressure makes the runner slower, not faster. Bud realized he needed to fix that problem. That idea seems common sense to our ears today, but it came from Bud. He was really visionary in understanding how important relaxation was to performance. Think about it. In the 40s, 50s, or 60s, what you were hearing was buckle up, right? Maybe a little bit later was no pain, no gain, was pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So that he was saying relax to perform better was fantastic because it works. Ray Norton and other athletes on the track team remember Bud and his phrases.

How do you explain to a sprinter running full speed to relax? Well, you teach them to relax by using certain terminologies. Mantras, really. They were designed to keep parts of your body relaxed. If you ran for bud, a couple of them were burned into your brain. Loose hands. You never clench your fist when you're running. Loose jaws. You don't have to open your mouth, but just relax. To demonstrate the power of loose hands, loose jaws,

Bud would have his athletes run it tight, straining with effort, and time them. Then he'd have them run relaxed, their hands unclenched, their faces sagging with what Bud called fish lips. The stopwatch didn't lie. I spoke with Tommy Smith, one of the greatest of all Bud's athletes. Was it difficult to master some of the things he was talking about?

So there was a lot of things that he put into a process that we had to understand. And it was very difficult at times for us to master the usage of the muscles to their maximum without tensing up, without overdoing it. The process of too much is not good. Too little is just as bad. And just like the Navy cadets, Bud's athletes also had to do visualization exercises. This is Ben Tucker, a distance runner. Before each competition, Bud would always call us in on the Friday night. This is the night before the event. And then he would have us sit in a room, turn the lights out.

And then we would just sit there and he would just talk us through. This is the first lap. This is the second lap. And so he had us not only strategizing, but he had us seeing ourselves. This is the night before. Yeah, we call it hypnosis, but it's hypnotizing us. But it got into our heads. Got into our heads. Bud also ran his athletes methodically through drills he'd created, like the high knee exercise. The runner marches up and down the track, driving one knee after the other high into the air in an

exaggerated slow motion version of running. That's a real basic of how sprinters run. the track, driving one knee after the other, high into the air, in an exaggerated, slow-motion version of running. That's a real basic of how sprinters run. Dr. Peter Weyand studies the biomechanics of sprinting at the Locomotor Performance Laboratory at Southern Methodist University. And it's directly connected to how forcefully the sprinters hit the ground. So if you watch a marathoner run, they don't run that way. They have kind of a shuffling gait. The sprinters punch the track with their limb. So the high knee lift allows them the space to get the high velocity, and then the quick stop, it's like delivering a punch to the ground.

The more force the sprinter can deliver with that leg punch, the faster they can get off the ground, which leads to a longer, more efficient stride. All of the difference in how fast they can run, all of the force difference happens during that initial impact period. So it's essential that they get the high knee lift and that they execute the high velocity and quick stop. That's the entire secret right there.

The innovations, the tinkering, the rethinking, the search for the slightest edge never stopped. I realized, I said, this is the first genius I ever met. Because his mind was busy of how to make us run faster. That's Lee Evans, another of Bud's greatest sprinters. I remember he said, OK, everybody give me your shorts. And he used punch holes in it in the back part of him so the wind could flow through them better and he said okay

okay I'll give me everybody give me the spikes out of your shoes we take our spikes and give to him and he would shape him like a pyramid so that the real part would get a more push off He was always thinking of ways to take off a tenth or one hundredth of a second. And I never had a coach to be concerned about little minor details like that. At the heart of the Bud Winter revolution is that he saw his role as cultivating the talent of his athletes. He took raw clay and molded it. That is not how coaches saw their role in those years. The traditional coach exploited talent. The distinction between cultivation and exploitation is crucial.

Coaches of that era were motivators, recruiters, tacticians. Coaches took what they were given and put it to use. Budd was one of the first modern coaches who understood that a coach's job was to manufacture elite performance systematically and methodically, not just shepherd it into existence. The most successful of the coaches of the contemporary age, Bill Belichick in football, Phil Jackson and Pat Summitt in basketball, are in many ways Bud's disciples. When a coach wins again and again in different places and with different athletes, it means they have crossed the line from exploitation to cultivation. Bud was the prophet of that movement.

Bud held coaching clinics non-stop. He wrote a how-to manual, So You Want to Be a Sprinter, that became a must-read for coaches and athletes alike. In it, two cartoon sprinters helped demonstrate the right way and the wrong way to execute Bud's techniques. Their names were Jack Champ and Joe Chump. Their coach is a Bud-like figure named Igor Beaver.

Get it? Igor Beaver. He eventually made a 15-minute instructional film that he shot at San Jose State. Coach Winter believes that the sprinter should undergo a special drill to emphasize... Members of Bud's team appeared in the film, which was called Sprinting with Bud Winter. Arm action is powerful, but it is also relaxed. The runner thinks of driving his elbows. The hands are loose.

Ray Norton was his first major recruit. In 1958, Norton tied the world record for the 100-yard dash with a time of 9.3 seconds. The only other Americans that held that record were from big schools like USC and Cal. That same year, Bud added another star to his team. This one was shorter in stock here, a more traditional-looking sprinter. Bob Pointer was a high school state champion from Pasadena who had his heart set on USC. He went to junior college, trying to study his way onto the USC track team. Meanwhile, Bud kept sending him letters.

That kind of thrilled me, you know, the fact that somebody paid attention to you. Others started to pay attention to San Jose State too. It drew crowds from, you know, the Bay Area and all around because Bud would promote the heck out of a track meet. And we got an invitation to go to the Penn Relays. Well, I didn't even know where that was because I'd never been back east in my life. The Penn Relays in Philadelphia are the oldest track and field event in the United States, a massive international carnival of track and field. So Ray and I went and we won all the stuff back east. And people back there, they hadn't heard the sounds.

They used to pronounce it San Jose. And they said, those guys from San Jose. And they thought it was a black college because we had gold uniforms, and most of the kids were African Americans. But what that did, that put San Jose State on the map. Bud was doing all of this with a minuscule budget at a state college that, when he arrived, didn't even have dormitories. He loved beating Cal and Stanford and anybody who was big because he felt like the poor people were going up against the rich people.

And Ray Norton, he was beating almost everyone. 59 was my biggest year. At that time, I held the world's record for the 100 yards, 220 yards around a curve, the 100 meters, and the 200 meters. I had all those records at one time. And I also went undefeated in the 100 meters

period for two years. I beat them all. Everybody. It was now 1960. Norton had been going strong for almost two years. Everyone thought he would win big at the Rome Olympics that year. But then, just before the Games, he suffered a freak injury. A teammate, the high jumper John Thomas, played a prank and threw a snake at him.

That was a real snake. It was a little one, but it was, you know, John knew I don't do snakes. Still don't. I jumped out of that hurdles position and snapped my back, the little part of my back. It ruptured the nerve. This is three weeks before the Olympic Games. I had no feeling in my legs. Couldn't walk.

I didn't run in any tune-up meets. I couldn't. I didn't run anymore until the Olympic Games, which I had probably lost 90% of my conditioning. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I lost 10 pounds. But Norton didn't want to give up his chance at the Olympics. I just decided that I still could win and nobody could beat me, even though I couldn't walk three weeks before that. Norton made it to the finals of the 100 meters and the 200 meters at the Olympics, but he finished dead last.

Then he botched a baton pass in a 4x100 meter relay, leading to a disqualification. The meltdown was astonishing. The U.S. hadn't lost the men's 100 meters since 1928. I don't even know how I ran, to be honest with you. Only a few people knew about his injury. One of them was Bud. Norton says he begged his coach not to reveal the truth. I'm in one room, Bud's next door.

My door's open so Bud can see me because I'm hurt. And he knows it, okay. So I say, Bud, I say, you know, I'm drafted. I'm going to play football after the Olympics. He says, I know, champ. He called me champ. And I said, I don't want him to know I'm hurt. Norton says Bud didn't want to lie.

I said, you're not. It's my nerves in my back that's killing me. All you got to say is my nerves. You're not going to be telling a lie. I said, can you do that, Bud? I don't want these people to think they're getting damaged goods because I'm playing football as soon as I get back out of the Olympics. All Bud would say after Norton's loss was that Ray Norton was trying too hard and that's the worst thing a runner can do, Which was the truth, as far as Bud Winter was concerned. Speed City had been stopped short in its first great international test.

The Olympic Games to me were at once an inspiring, exciting, interesting, horrible experience. That's Bud, in 1963, giving the opening remarks at a sports symposium hosted by San Jose State. They were inspiring because once again they pointed out what we must do in the United States if we're going to maintain our sports supremacy. They were wonderful because it pointed out that maybe on the field of sport is the one common ground

upon which nations of the world can get together. And now horrible because of what happened to Ray Norton and our losing the sprint supremacy. All of that relaxation training, the visualization exercises, the loose hands, loose jaws, high knees, all undone. A freak injury from a prank gone wrong. Bud was devastated. But he and his runners would get another chance in the spotlight. Every Olympic Games has its heroes, both athletes and coaches. Only this time, Speed City would get swept up in another, bigger revolution across America. The 1960s would bring riots, protests, violence, political

assassinations, and the organized marches of the civil rights movement. And here was a group of young black men who had already been liberated from one orthodoxy, who had been taught that calm and self-possession and preparation could unleash extraordinary performance. The sprinters of Speed City would become famous, and a question would be asked of them that had never really been asked of athletes before. What will you make of your position? You will stand on a platform.

What will you do once you're there? In our next episode, the athletes of Speed City win acclaim and break world records. But off the track, they struggle to make ends meet. After a discus thrower objects to the treatment of black athletes on campus, he sparks a movement that will become one of the most important moments of activism in sports history. Legacy of Speed is hosted by me, Malcolm Gladwell. It's executive produced by Tracksmith and presented by Puma. Our producers are Joel Meyer and Emily Rostec. Thank you. with trumpet by Lee Hogans, fact-checking by Wynton St. Clair. Our Pushkin EPs are Catherine Giraudoux and Milo Bell.

Our development team is Lital Mollad and Justine Lang. We had help with research and archival material from Yerla Hill, Kathy Winter, Tom Ratcliffe, John Stalkup, Brett Lyman, and Carly Lowe. Special thanks to Bud Winter Enterprises. Legacy of Speed is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad-free listening

across our network for $4.99 a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That was a preview of Legacy of Speed. You can follow the story by searching for Legacy of Speed wherever you get your podcasts.