Welcome to Part Four of The Road to L.A. ’84, our multi-episode retrospective on the 40th anniversary of a seminal moment in a golden era of marathoning. We’re telling the behind-the-scenes account of the athletes, the training, and the build-up races. This week we turn back the clock for a nostalgic look inside sports and pop culture one year out from the Games of the Twenty-Third Olympiad. MTV ruled the airwaves, Michael Jackson transformed his hit single Thriller into a fourteen-minute movie that still ranks as the greatest music video ever, North Carolina State Coach Jim Valvano madly sprinted around the University of New Mexico basketball court looking for someone to hug after the greatest Cinderella run in NCAA history, and the Baby Boomers grip of American culture loosened as Generation X came of age. 40 years later, this is the story of Los Angeles in the 1980s, the world’s cultural capital, and its history...