There is film of it. On August 4, 1936, in a stadium holding 110,000 people, a German long jumper named Luz Long lost the Olympic final to a Black American from Alabama — and got up, walked over, and embraced him. Then the two of them left the field arm in arm.

That happened. Nobody has ever disputed a second of it.

Almost everything else has a problem.

The famous story — that Long crossed the sand during qualifying and told Owens to move his takeoff mark back, saving his Olympics — appears in no newspaper from 1936. Its first firm appearance in print is an essay under Owens’s name in Reader’s Digest, October 1960. Twenty-four years later. And in 1965, Olympic historian Tom Ecker says he asked Owens directly, and Owens told him they hadn’t met until after the competition was over.

The farewell letter from a dying soldier asking Owens to find his son? No original exists. When the Long family auctioned his effects in 2022 — the silver medal, his passport, his identification papers, his photographs — there was no letter in it.

The Pierre de Coubertin fair play medal he was supposedly awarded? The IOC didn’t create it until 1964.

This episode goes through it line by line: the round-by-round duel that produced an Olympic record standing for 32 years, the Hitler snub that wasn’t what you think, the SA membership and what it did and didn’t mean in 1938, Long’s death in Sicily at 30, and the son who was not yet two when his father was killed — and who Jesse Owens crossed an ocean to find in 1951.

What we can prove, what we can’t, and why it might matter either way.

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The first Canadian Championships were played at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club from July 18–24, 1881 — five and a half weeks before the first US National Championship at the Newport Casino, ten years before the French, twenty-four years before the Australian. Only Wimbledon is older. It’s the second-oldest tennis tournament still being played anywhere in the world.

Almost nobody knows that. Including me, for nine straight summers of going with my dad.

This episode is about how a 145-year-old tournament gets forgotten in its own country: seven name changes, three decades of sponsorship that Canadian law required to disappear, two world wars and a pandemic that broke the streak, and records kept so poorly that the sport’s own governing bodies can’t agree on which years a man won it.

And it’s about the people buried in that record. I.F. Hellmuth, who built the courts and won the first title on them. Bobby Powell, a Wimbledon semifinalist in 1908, killed at Vimy Ridge in 1917. Lois Moyes Bickle, ten-time national champion, paid in silverware. Robert Bédard, a schoolteacher who beat Roy Emerson and remains — sixty-eight years later — the last Canadian man to win the national title. Faye Urban, who waited fifty years to stop being the answer to the question. And Victoria Mboko, eighteen years old and ranked 85th, who beat four Grand Slam champions in Montreal last summer.

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In 1908, a five-foot-two candy maker crossed the finish line first at the Olympic marathon in London — and then they took the gold medal away from him.

This is the story of Dorando Pietri, the most famous loser in Olympic history. He staggered into a stadium of 75,000 people in the lead, collapsed on the track five times, and was helped across the line by officials who feared he might die. It cost him the gold — and made him immortal: a personal cup from the Queen of England, a song by a young Irving Berlin, a rematch career in America, and the reason every marathon on Earth is run at exactly 26.2 miles.

The man who finished first and officially never finished at all — and the oddly specific number he left behind.

TimeStamp Question: They disqualified Dorando Pietri for being helped across the line. If you’d been one of the judges in 1908, would you have taken the gold away, or let him keep it? Vote below — we’ll read the results next week.

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n 1912, the King of Sweden told Jim Thorpe he was the greatest athlete in the world. A year later, his own country erased him from the record books.

This is the story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indians — the team that reinvented football from inside a school built to erase them. The “kill the Indian, save the man” mission of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Pop Warner’s bag of tricks. A 27-6 upset of Army at West Point, with a future president on the losing sideline. Two Olympic golds won in Stockholm — and stripped months later over a few dollars of minor-league baseball. And a fight to set it right that took 110 years.

The greatest athlete who ever lived. The records they erased. And the long road back.

In 1943, the University of Notre Dame was dying — not on the football field, but as an institution. World War II had emptied its classrooms and drained its budget, and the school was quietly asking whether it should shut its doors. Then the U.S. Navy made a phone call.

What happened next didn’t just save a university. It created the longest uninterrupted intersectional rivalry in college football — a game played every single year, for reasons that have nothing to do with rankings or TV deals, and everything to do with a debt one school refuses to forget. For decades, one side simply could not lose it. So why did the winning team keep showing up, year after year, to play an opponent it had every reason to walk away from?

This is the story of Navy versus Notre Dame. And it’s not really about football at all.

New episodes of TimeStamped every Sunday. That’s how forgotten stories stop being forgotten.

Two things carry the name Jules Rimet: the most famous trophy in sports, and the man who dreamed up the World Cup. This is the story of how both of them vanished.

The trophy survived a world war in a shoebox under a man's bed, was stolen in London and found by a dog named Pickles, was secretly swapped for a forgery FIFA itself would later buy at auction — and then, one night in Rio in 1983, disappeared for good. Its namesake built the biggest event on earth and was forgotten anyway.

TimeStamped traces the whole strange life of both.

Featuring: Jules Rimet, Ottorino Barassi, Pickles the dog, and the trophy nobody can find.

🎙️ New episodes every Sunday.

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In the summer of 1950, the United States sent a team of part-timers to the World Cup: a mailman, a schoolteacher, a man who drove a hearse, and a dishwasher from Haiti named Joe Gaetjens.

On a bumpy field in Belo Horizonte, they beat England, the Kings of Football — 1–0. It's still one of the greatest upsets the sport has ever seen, and almost nobody back home noticed.

With the World Cup on home soil in 2026, TimeStamped goes back to the afternoon it all started: the goal no one can fully explain, and the man who scored it and then vanished.

Featuring: Joe Gaetjens, Walter Bahr, Frank Borghi, and the "Miracle on Grass."

🎙️ New episodes every Sunday.

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He was the most feared heavyweight on earth.  A champion the public was taught to hate before he threw a punch. Promoters, managers, and the men behind them all had a claim on Sonny Liston: when he fought, who he fought, how much of the purse he’d ever see. Everyone got a piece. This is the story of a fighter who belonged to everyone but himself. I’m Rob Barbieri. This is TimeStamped.

For twenty-five years, the best basketball team in the world played out of a commercial high school in Edmonton, Alberta. They were women. They almost never lost. And the man who invented the game said no one — anywhere — played it better.

This week, the Edmonton Commercial Graduates: a dynasty that dominated for a quarter-century, went undefeated at the 1924 Paris Olympics in a sport that wouldn’t officially let women compete for another fifty years, and then disappeared in 1940 — taking women’s basketball in Canada into the dark with them.

They won everything. Then the game moved on without them.

That’s how forgotten stories stop being forgotten.

In January 1907, a mill town on the edge of Lake of the Woods — population barely four thousand — beat the Montreal Wanderers and lifted the Stanley Cup. They held it for sixty-three days. No town that small has touched it since.

This is the story of the Kenora Thistles: a roster of local boys and who climbed to the top of hockey in the last window the sport ever allowed it. We trace how they got there, why they couldn’t stay, and what the challenge-cup era looked like in the final years before the NHL made it impossible for a town like Kenora to ever try again.

I'm Rob Barbieri. This is TimeStamped.