We start season 3 off with a bang by talking about everyone's favourite vaccine superhero, Dolly Parton. From the smoky mountains of Tennessee, Dolly set her sights on improving her lot in life from a young age. She knew she had talent, looks that she could use to her advantage, and a bedrock of confidence and ingenuity that has defined her career. Listen in to hear some classic Dolly pearls of wisdom that we can all get behind.
In timely and meticulously-planned fashion, we have an Olympics special told through the story of Wilma Rudolph. Described as the greatest athlete of all time, Wilma was the first American woman to win 3 medals in the same Olympics (100m sprint, 200m sprint and 400m relay team). After retiring as the fastest woman in the world, Wilma was one of the first celebrities to use her fame for good as an outspoken civil rights activist, and was the catalyst for desegregating her hometown in Tennessee. Listen in to also hear the story of why the Olympics was invented - spoiler alert: it was to show off how manly all the men were.
*NB - Anna gets pretty excited about the Olympics in this episode, but despite the obvious thrill of seeing awesome humans do awesome thing, there has been a major amount of fuckery in the games in general, but especially these Olympic Games 2020 (e.g. swimming caps for Black athletes being rejected; women being fined for not wearing underwear in handball; trans and cis women getting banned from competing due to having features deemed to be advantages despite Michael Phelps producing only half the amount of lactic acid as his competitors but this never being flagged as a problem even though it's the same thing.....the list goes on). So, all this to say - the Olympic Committee is not cool, but sometimes the Olympics is really cool. Find more info below:
-https://www.npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/07/28/1021503989/women-runners-testosterone-olympics?t=1628366896763
-https://www.sportingnews.com/us/athletics/news/olympic-swim-cap-ban-2021-swimmers/3526wghlsb8v1ajeilz08cx41
-https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/handball/57890430
-https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/we-celebrated-michael-phelpss-genetic-differences-why-punish-caster-semenya-for-hers/2019/05/02/93d08c8c-6c2b-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html