Since the era of Joseph Stalin, Moscow’s rulers have sent Russian athletes into the Summer and Winter Olympics with one command: you must win. These competitors operated under a "win-at-all-costs" doctrine most notably through the use of "shamateurism." By giving elite hockey stars nominal titles as military officers or factory workers, the USSR bypassed amateur requirements to field seasoned professionals against genuine Western students—a disparity that defined the Cold War sporting era.

But the deception went deeper than employment records; it extended into the very biology of the athletes, particularly in high-strength disciplines like weightlifting and powerlifting. Athletes such as Vasily Alekseyev, the super-heavyweight lifter who set 80 world records and weighed 360 pounds, were often the face of a system later revealed to be fueled by state-mandated anabolic steroids

Today’s guest is Bruce Berglund, author of “The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold.” We look at the intersection of Russian sports and geopolitical power, from the dominant Soviet teams of past Olympics to recent doping scandals and international sanctions. With new research from Olympic archives, records of the Soviet bloc and current Russian media, Berglund shows how Moscow’s leaders have defied the rules of the game for decades as the world’s governing bodies turned a blind eye.

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Daniel Boone is considered one of the United States' first folk heroes for his exploration beyond the thirteen colonies into Kentucky. His exploits are rightfully legendary. He famously rescued his daughter and two other captives from Shawnee raiders by tracking them down on foot for three days. He survived a grueling ten-day siege at Boonesborough after escaping captivity by the Shawnee. Despite the frontier conflicts of the era between Indians and white settlers, he was so respected by his adversaries that he was formally adopted as the son of Chief Blackfish, cementing his status as a hero of the wilderness.

He was the founder of Fort Boonesborough, a settler colony in Kentucky. The settlement itself was a large hollow rectangle measuring approximately 260 by 180 feet, with twenty-six one-story cabins whose outer log walls formed part of the defensive perimeter. To defend against Shawnee and British attacks, Fort Boonesborough featured thick log walls and two-story corner blockhouses that provided vantage points for shooting down at attackers. During the Great Siege of 1778, the settlers used diverse tactics such as digging counter-tunnels to stop an enemy mine and dressing women in men's clothing to trick the Shawnee into overestimating their military strength.

Today’s guest is Nancy O’Malley, author of “Kentucky Frontier to Commonwealth: Historical Archaeology at Daniel Boone's and Hugh McGary's Stations.” She provides insight into Kentucky colonial life through research into station site remnants. We also discuss another settlement called McGary's Station—abandoned soon after the end of the Revolutionary War— and bears the markers of settlers who endured more primitive conditions.

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The most valuable shipwreck of all time is the San José galleon—an 18th century Spanish ship that carried 11 million gold coins, silver, and emeralds—and worth $20 billion in today's currency. It sunk in a battle with British ships during the War of Spanish Succession and remained completely lost for centuries.
That is until a clue to its final resting place was found by the most unlikely person: Roger Dooley, a Cuban-American underwater explorer who helped establish Cuba's national diving program and spent years scouring Caribbean waters for sunken shipwrecks at the behest of Fidel Castro. Dooley wasn’t looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain

Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Today’s guest is Julian Sancton, author of “Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire.” We look at the story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of, one man’s obsessive quest to find it, and the ongoing fight over excavating this historic shipwreck.

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