Pushkin. Hello, Hello Revisionist history listeners. I'm so excited to bring you Season seven 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 track Smith approached Pushkin to make a show about running in 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 nineteen sixties. 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 nineteen sixty eight 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 dare 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. Nineteen sixty eight, 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 and Metal 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 twentieth century, two black men standing on a platform, each with a fist in the year yesterday. They stood on the victory platform with bald heads, wearing black socks and gloves and a racial protest. I remember seeing that photo as a kid growing up in the nineteen seventies, 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 Budwinter, an eccentric tactician who reinvented what it meant to be a coach. The other Harry Edwards, a fiery professor, a 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, Saint 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 nineteen sixties, Silicon Valley was not yet called Silicon Valley. That nickname wouldn't come until the early nineteen seventies. 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 as State was where a coach named Budwinter held court, and Budwinter is where this story begins. Bud was one of the most important coaches of the twentieth century. He invented modern sprinting with an unconventional approach that has today become dogma. Have you ever watched the way the fastest man in history, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, glides down the track, You Saint bad look at the timeline by word unruffled, calm, composed. You can credit Budwinter for the way Bolt ran. Bolt's coach was a Budwinter disciple. Over his career, Bud coached one hundred and two All Americans, thirty seven world record holders, and twenty 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 the 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. Budwinter was born Lloyd Sea Winter in nineteen o nine and grew up in San Francisco. Well, his mom was a spitfire irishwoman, 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 lush. You know who cares. It just wasn't his priority. In nineteen forty one, 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 but he never raised his voice. This is Ray Norton, one of Budd's athletes, and never did I ever hear him use profanity. That's pretty unusual foot coach. My high school coaches as all they did, you know, they couldn't coachy. 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 annuals showdown between the Big Ten and the conference that would become the Pac twelve. First of all, we snuck in the place and we're sitting quietly hoping nobody noticed 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 nineteen fifty five, not too many of the big track schools. We're 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 in 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 but Winter and Bud walked from the bleachers and then 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, Kate, I wasn't even the fastest guy in the starting blocks where he was standing. A couple of the high school kids could meet 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 sixty three. Sprinters are like five eight, five, nine, five ten. What he saw is that I had a natural relaxation mode. I didn't stringen 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 Bud'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 Bud's thought was, what if that was entirely backwards? What if this Winter should be gliding. Norton joined Bud's team in nineteen fifty six 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 Two, 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, Budd learned about a new approach to tackling the problem, teaching the pilot's relaxation techniques. Bud watched as the techniques were applied to boxers at San Jose State. This is what Bud wrote in his nineteen eighty one 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 about that season, some spectacularly. At the start of the Second World War, Budd enlisted in the Navy, and he got a chance to build on what he'd learned with Yates's 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 doctor Belisavranich to get a little one oh one 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. Branich is a clinical psychologist who works with lots of people in high stressed 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 a boxygen. 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 dog fight, 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 side 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 strussed 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 study involved two hundred cadets. For six weeks, they get tended 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. Doctor Belissa Ranich again, if you are able to get yourself to breathe well mechanically meaning diapromatically, 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. One hundred meter sprint is ten seconds, the two hundred meters is twenty 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 timeframe. 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 he came from Bud. He was really visionary and understanding how important relaxation was to performance. Think about it in the forty fifties or sixties. What you were hearing was cool 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 clinch your fists when you're running. Loose jaws, but 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 had 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 time for us. A 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 he's 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 lab. This is a second lab. And so he had us not only strategizing, but he had us seen ourselves. This is the night before. Yeah, we called a hypnosis, but it's hypnotized on us, but it got into our heads, got into our heads. But also ran as 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, Doctor Peter wayAnd it 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 marathon or 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 in 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 and how fast they can run, all of the forest difference happens during that initial impact period. So it's essential that they get the hiknee 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 government. 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, okay, everybody, give me your your shorts and he was punched holes 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 spicside give me him and he would shape them like a pyramid so that the real part would get more push off. He would always thinking of ways to take off a tent or one hundress of a second. And I never had a coach to be concerned about little minor details like it. At the heart of the Budwinter Revolution is that he saw his role as cultivating the talent of his athletes. He took rock 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. Bud was one of the first modern coaches who understood that a coach's job was to men and you facture elite performance systematically and methodically, not just shepherd it into existence. The most successful of the coaches of the contemporary edge, Bill Belichick and football, Phil Jackson and Pat Summit 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. Budd was the profit of that movement. Budd held coaching clinics NonStop. 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 Buds techniques. Their names were Jack Champ and Joe Chump. Their coach is a Bud leg figure named Igor Beaver get it, Ego Beaver. He eventually made a fifteen minute instructional film that he shot at San Jose State. Coach Winter believes that the sprinter should undergo a special drill to members of Bud's team appeared in the film, which was called Sprinting with Bud winter barm action is powerful, but it is also relaxed. The run of thinks of driving his elbows. The hands are loose. Ray Norton was his first major recruit. In nineteen fifty eight, Norton tied the world record for the hundred yard dash with a time of nine point three seconds. The only other Americans that held that record were from big schools like USC and CAL. That same year, Budd 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, in fact that somebody favorit attended 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 attract me. And we got an invitation to go to the pen Relays. Well, I didn't even know what that was because I'd never been back East in my life. The Pen 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 of sounds. They used to pronounce the San Josie and said, 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 Soundly 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 Carol and Stanford and anybody who's big, because he felt there like the poor people going to againt the risk people. And Ray Norton. He was beating almost everyone. Fifty nine was my biggest year. At that time. I held the world's record for the one hundred yards, two and twenty yards around a curve, the hundred meters and the two hundred meters. I had all those records at one time, and I also went undefeated another meters period for two years. I beat him all everybody. It was now nineteen sixty. 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, done, knew I don't do snakes, still thought. I jumped out of the hurdles position and snapped my back, the lower part of my back. It rushed 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 ninety percent of my conditioning. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I lost ten pounds. But Norton didn't want to give up his chance at the Olympics. I just decided that I still could win and nobody can beat me, even though I couldn't walk. Three weeks before that, Norton made it to the finals of the hundred meters and the two hundred meters at the Olympics, but he finished dead last. Then he botched a Paton pass in a four by one hundred meter relay, leading to a disqualification. The meltdown was astonishing. The US hadn't lost the men's hundred meters since nineteen twenty eight. 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 Budd next door, and my doors open so Bud can see me because I've hurt, and he knows it. Okay, So I say, Bud, I said, you know, I'm drafted. I'm gonna 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 Budd 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 see is my nerves. You're not gonna be telling a lie. Let's say, I said, can you do that? But I don't want these people to think they're getting damnaged 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 Or 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 inspiring, exciting, interesting, horrible experience. That's Bud in nineteen sixty three, giving the opening remarks at a sports symposium hosted by San Jose State. They were aspiring 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 how horrible because of what happened to ray and Norton, and alluding 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 game says its heroes, both athletes and coaches, and perhaps only this time, Speed City would get swept up in another bigger revolution across America. The nineteen sixties 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 the calm and self possession and preparation could unleash extraordinary performance. The splinters 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 Rostock. The show is edited by Trisha Bobida and Karen Shakerji, and our mix engineer is Jake Korski. Original music composed by Alexis Quadrato with trumpet by Lee Hogan's fact checking by Winton Saint Clair. Our Pushkin EPs are Katherine Girardo and Milo Bell. Our development team is Lee Taal Molaude and Justine Land. We had help with research and archival material from yur La Hill, Kathy Winter, Tom Ratcliffe, John Stalkup, Brett Lyman, and Carlie 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 add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot 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 a Legacy of Speed wherever you get your podcasts.

Pushkin. Hello, Hello Revisionist history listeners. I'm so excited to bring you Season seven 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 track Smith approached Pushkin to make a show about running in 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 nineteen sixties. 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 nineteen sixty eight 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 dare 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. Nineteen sixty eight, 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 and Metal 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 twentieth century, two black men standing on a platform, each with a fist in the year yesterday. They stood on the victory platform with bald heads, wearing black socks and gloves and a racial protest. I remember seeing that photo as a kid growing up in the nineteen seventies, 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 Budwinter, an eccentric tactician who reinvented what it meant to be a coach. The other Harry Edwards, a fiery professor, a 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, Saint 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 nineteen sixties, Silicon Valley was not yet called Silicon Valley. That nickname wouldn't come until the early nineteen seventies. 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 as State was where a coach named Budwinter held court, and Budwinter is where this story begins. Bud was one of the most important coaches of the twentieth century. He invented modern sprinting with an unconventional approach that has today become dogma. Have you ever watched the way the fastest man in history, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, glides down the track, You Saint bad look at the timeline by word unruffled, calm, composed. You can credit Budwinter for the way Bolt ran. Bolt's coach was a Budwinter disciple. Over his career, Bud coached one hundred and two All Americans, thirty seven world record holders, and twenty 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 the 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. Budwinter was born Lloyd Sea Winter in nineteen o nine and grew up in San Francisco. Well, his mom was a spitfire irishwoman, 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 lush. You know who cares. It just wasn't his priority. In nineteen forty one, 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 but he never raised his voice. This is Ray Norton, one of Budd's athletes, and never did I ever hear him use profanity. That's pretty unusual foot coach. My high school coaches as all they did, you know, they couldn't coachy. 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 annuals showdown between the Big Ten and the conference that would become the Pac twelve. First of all, we snuck in the place and we're sitting quietly hoping nobody noticed 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 nineteen fifty five, not too many of the big track schools. We're 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 in 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 but Winter and Bud walked from the bleachers and then 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, Kate, I wasn't even the fastest guy in the starting blocks where he was standing. A couple of the high school kids could meet 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 sixty three. Sprinters are like five eight, five, nine, five ten. What he saw is that I had a natural relaxation mode. I didn't stringen 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 Bud'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 Bud's thought was, what if that was entirely backwards? What if this Winter should be gliding. Norton joined Bud's team in nineteen fifty six 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 Two, 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, Budd learned about a new approach to tackling the problem, teaching the pilot's relaxation techniques. Bud watched as the techniques were applied to boxers at San Jose State. This is what Bud wrote in his nineteen eighty one 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 about that season, some spectacularly. At the start of the Second World War, Budd enlisted in the Navy, and he got a chance to build on what he'd learned with Yates's 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 doctor Belisavranich to get a little one oh one 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. Branich is a clinical psychologist who works with lots of people in high stressed 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 a boxygen. 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 dog fight, 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 side 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 strussed 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 study involved two hundred cadets. For six weeks, they get tended 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. Doctor Belissa Ranich again, if you are able to get yourself to breathe well mechanically meaning diapromatically, 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. One hundred meter sprint is ten seconds, the two hundred meters is twenty 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 timeframe. 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 he came from Bud. He was really visionary and understanding how important relaxation was to performance. Think about it in the forty fifties or sixties. What you were hearing was cool 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 clinch your fists when you're running. Loose jaws, but 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 had 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 time for us. A 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 he's 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 lab. This is a second lab. And so he had us not only strategizing, but he had us seen ourselves. This is the night before. Yeah, we called a hypnosis, but it's hypnotized on us, but it got into our heads, got into our heads. But also ran as 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, Doctor Peter wayAnd it 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 marathon or 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 in 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 and how fast they can run, all of the forest difference happens during that initial impact period. So it's essential that they get the hiknee 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 government. 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, okay, everybody, give me your your shorts and he was punched holes 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 spicside give me him and he would shape them like a pyramid so that the real part would get more push off. He would always thinking of ways to take off a tent or one hundress of a second. And I never had a coach to be concerned about little minor details like it. At the heart of the Budwinter Revolution is that he saw his role as cultivating the talent of his athletes. He took rock 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. Bud was one of the first modern coaches who understood that a coach's job was to men and you facture elite performance systematically and methodically, not just shepherd it into existence. The most successful of the coaches of the contemporary edge, Bill Belichick and football, Phil Jackson and Pat Summit 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. Budd was the profit of that movement. Budd held coaching clinics NonStop. 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 Buds techniques. Their names were Jack Champ and Joe Chump. Their coach is a Bud leg figure named Igor Beaver get it, Ego Beaver. He eventually made a fifteen minute instructional film that he shot at San Jose State. Coach Winter believes that the sprinter should undergo a special drill to members of Bud's team appeared in the film, which was called Sprinting with Bud winter barm action is powerful, but it is also relaxed. The run of thinks of driving his elbows. The hands are loose. Ray Norton was his first major recruit. In nineteen fifty eight, Norton tied the world record for the hundred yard dash with a time of nine point three seconds. The only other Americans that held that record were from big schools like USC and CAL. That same year, Budd 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, in fact that somebody favorit attended 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 attract me. And we got an invitation to go to the pen Relays. Well, I didn't even know what that was because I'd never been back East in my life. The Pen 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 of sounds. They used to pronounce the San Josie and said, 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 Soundly 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 Carol and Stanford and anybody who's big, because he felt there like the poor people going to againt the risk people. And Ray Norton. He was beating almost everyone. Fifty nine was my biggest year. At that time. I held the world's record for the one hundred yards, two and twenty yards around a curve, the hundred meters and the two hundred meters. I had all those records at one time, and I also went undefeated another meters period for two years. I beat him all everybody. It was now nineteen sixty. 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, done, knew I don't do snakes, still thought. I jumped out of the hurdles position and snapped my back, the lower part of my back. It rushed 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 ninety percent of my conditioning. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I lost ten pounds. But Norton didn't want to give up his chance at the Olympics. I just decided that I still could win and nobody can beat me, even though I couldn't walk. Three weeks before that, Norton made it to the finals of the hundred meters and the two hundred meters at the Olympics, but he finished dead last. Then he botched a Paton pass in a four by one hundred meter relay, leading to a disqualification. The meltdown was astonishing. The US hadn't lost the men's hundred meters since nineteen twenty eight. 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 Budd next door, and my doors open so Bud can see me because I've hurt, and he knows it. Okay, So I say, Bud, I said, you know, I'm drafted. I'm gonna 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 Budd 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 see is my nerves. You're not gonna be telling a lie. Let's say, I said, can you do that? But I don't want these people to think they're getting damnaged 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 Or 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 inspiring, exciting, interesting, horrible experience. That's Bud in nineteen sixty three, giving the opening remarks at a sports symposium hosted by San Jose State. They were aspiring 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 how horrible because of what happened to ray and Norton, and alluding 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 game says its heroes, both athletes and coaches, and perhaps only this time, Speed City would get swept up in another bigger revolution across America. The nineteen sixties 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 the calm and self possession and preparation could unleash extraordinary performance. The splinters 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 Rostock. The show is edited by Trisha Bobida and Karen Shakerji, and our mix engineer is Jake Korski. Original music composed by Alexis Quadrato with trumpet by Lee Hogan's fact checking by Winton Saint Clair. Our Pushkin EPs are Katherine Girardo and Milo Bell. Our development team is Lee Taal Molaude and Justine Land. We had help with research and archival material from yur La Hill, Kathy Winter, Tom Ratcliffe, John Stalkup, Brett Lyman, and Carlie 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 add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot 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. 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