[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abrumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we're gonna talk about losers. Well ...

JAD: Losers.

ROBERT: No, we're gonna talk about—we're gonna talk about some losers who are so so so driven to win that through losing beautifully, through losing dangerously, through losing lethally, they win.

JAD: Well, let me try it—let me try one on you.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Sometimes in losing, one can lose with such a flare and artistry that one actually wins.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: In the loss, there is a kind of just a sort of sublime ...

ROBERT: Triumph.

JAD: Triumph.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: We have two stories like that today.

ROBERT: Yes. This is—I hope we've gotten you interested because we were completely fascinated by both of these.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: The first one takes us to a tropical island in the Gulf of Mexico.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Or the Caribbean.

JAD: Let's just name that island: Cuba.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Okay. This comes from a journalist and filmmaker Luis Trellis. We reported it a few years ago for the podcast. And an interesting thing happened while we were doing interviews ...

TIM HOWARD: It sounds pretty clear.

LUIS TRELLIS: Yeah.

TIM: It's gotta be a landline.

JAD: Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy Vladimir Ceballos, who is a filmmaker himself. Cuban guy, exile. And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba, in the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.]

JAD: That happened just before the interview.

TIM: Hello, is this Vladimir?

RECORDER: Hey, we're recording.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yes, it's Vladimir.

TIM: Vladimir, how are you doing? This is Tim in New York. And we also have Luis.

LUIS: Hi Vlad. It's Luis.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: How are you, Luis?

LUIS: Good, good.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: How about the news, no?

LUIS: Yeah. Amazing news, right?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I was crying.

LUIS: [laughs]

TIM: Really?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yeah. I was crying, man.

LUIS: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years, and I never think that I was gonna see this day, you know?

TIM: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Because it has been 50 year—53 years since the United States, you know, broke the diplomatic relationship with Cuba.

TIM: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And nothing happened in Cuba, you know? Everything is the same. Now everything is gonna change.

JAD: Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Ambulante. Luis Trellis comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news. In many ways, it's maybe a tiny dark preamble to all of that stuff. It's a story about Cuba, the power of music, and a group of Cuban kids who decide to opt out in this crazy way that when Luis Trellis told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.

LUIS: So the reason we called up Vladi is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Well, I was born in Pinar del Río in 1964.

TIM: Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: [laughs] I was happy because in Cuba we didn't have any information. We didn't have any communication with anybody outside Cuba. And everything that we received, it was the news that they government want to give to us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fidel Castro: [speaking Spanish]]

TIM: He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time they were teaching us that Russia was the big country in the world, the big economy. And everything that we would hope is to be like them.

TIM: Yeah.

LUIS: It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: You know, I only got three toys every year.

JAD: Because of rationing?

LUIS: Exactly. And then every week, he and his folks would wake up, they would go to the nearest church.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: To throw eggs at the church building.

TIM: Throw eggs at the church?

LUIS: Why?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Because we didn't believe in God. That the government, they didn't believe in God, you know?

LUIS: That's how you showed you were a good revolutionary, and Vladimir was just being a good boy. But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of Led Zeppelin.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember that day. I remember like ...

LUIS: Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "Kashmir."

LUIS: "Kashmir!"

TIM: Oh, yeah!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yeah, "Kashmir." It was my first time that I hear rock and roll music.

TIM: How did it make you feel when you heard Kashmir?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Whoa! Different. You know, you see Robert Plant and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair and the moves that they had. And the thing that they say, it was really different. And because of that, you know, I was completely changed. Completely changed my life. Let me tell you, completely changed my life.

LUIS: He's not sure why, but in that moment ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I went from a good example to freak. I went to friki. I went to friki.

JAD: What is friki?

LUIS: So Frikis are what Cubans called the most extreme metal heads, hard rock, punk rockers.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We start wearing vintage clothes, clothes with holes, and long hair.

LUIS: Problem was ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The Cuban radio station didn't put any rock music. I remember when I was 19 years old, 20 years old, my father gave me a Russian radio. And it was a good FM. We went to the roof of some friends because on those roof, you can listen to the station from Florida. Oh man, we listened to the Rolling Stones, "Sympathy With the Devil." "Hello baby!" Man! Barry Manilow. We were excited to listen Barry Manilow. After that, I didn't like it. No, but in the beginning, everything that came from there in English, it was good, you know? Because I don't know, that kind of music give us another door.

LUIS: So Vladi's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair. And that's fine. It's a normal youth rebellion. But then in the late '80s, everything changes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The Wall went down.

[NEWS CLIP: The Berlin Wall. They are here in the thousands, they are here in the tens of thousands.]

LUIS: And in reaction, the Castro government dug in.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Fidel says, "Socialism or death!"

[NEWS CLIP: His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana: Socialism or death.

LUIS: Suddenly music you listened to became very ideological, and if you listened to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state: the United States.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The Government created a police presence in every neighborhood, every five blocks.

LUIS: And Vladimir says if the police found you and you had long hair?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They'd beat us, kick us.

LUIS: Send you away to work, cutting sugarcane in the cane fields.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Just like that. Boom!

LUIS: In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was abuse.

JAD: And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very—no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn, because into this cultural war?

LUIS: Steps a guy named ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo.

LUIS: Papo.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We name him Papo La Bala.

BOB ARELLANO: Papo La Bala. You know, Papo the bullet. I really want to say that he tried to embody that. That kind of bullet to your brain, that wake up.

LUIS: That's Bob Arellano. He's a professor at Southern Oregon University. He went several times in the '90s to Cuba to interview Papo, who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the Frikis.

BOB ARELLANO: Yeah. He looked very intense. He was cocky and confident and just charismatic.

LUIS: Super tall.

JESUS DIAZ: Skinny.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. He always wear an American flag.

JESUS DIAZ: Oh yeah, yeah. Like a bandana.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: He use only ...

LUIS: Those are two friends of Papos, Jesus Diaz and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bandmate of his.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: So Luis remembers the first time he met Papo, and it was on a night that a Communist Party meeting was taking place right outside his house.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Outside the building. And when Papo's coming, he's coming in a bicycle. And we—his head, a flag, United States flag. And when he's coming ...

LUIS: On his head?

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. My father, my father going down. [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: Your father, when he saw him come with the American flag on his head ...

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. [speaking Spanish] "Are you crazy? Taking your flag out of your head." Papo say "Why?" And everyone outside the building, silence.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo was a weird guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other Frikis. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Father is an alcoholic. Mother, abandoned.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: By age 14, he's in the streets and a few years later he makes a decision that's really at the heart of this story.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: Just to set it up so that you can understand the context.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: What happened was that in 1989, I think. Or 1990 ...

LUIS: Somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola. It's backing a leftist liberation movement, and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States. And in the late '80s, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And some soldiers from the Cuban army, they were in Africa, they came with HIV. HIV positive. And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.

LUIS: If you belong to a high risk group, you were tested.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They went to your place of work. They went to your apartment, they went to the school, they went to everybody.

LUIS: Wow!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember. They went to my work and they test everybody over there in the radio station. 50 people over there.

LUIS: Wow.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "Give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood."

LUIS: Vladi says they would come in, take your blood. And if they found that you were positive ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The police came, put you in the police car and go straight to the sanitorium.

JAD: They just locked you up?

LUIS: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And I remember one day I was talking to him ...

LUIS: Papo and his wife.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo said, [speaking Spanish]. "I want to live free. Look, they're kicking me out. They're beating me out. They don't want me to live like a rocker here. They are doing a lot of things to me. I'm going to do a lot of things to them." And he told me, "Look, I went to this rock concert in Villa Clara.

LUIS: Papo told him, "I met up with these other rockers. They were HIV positive and I went and took a syringe, drew some blood from their arm and I put the needle in my own arm."

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "And I jam myself with HIV."

LUIS: Whoa!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "I gave myself with blood contaminated with HIV, you know?" And I look at him, and said, "Man, do you know what you did? Do you know what are you doing? You're going to die, man!" And he said to me, "I don't care."

TIM: That's crazy, though.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: That's crazy!

TIM: He knew for sure that when he did that, that he—that that was a death sentence?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: For him, yes. He knows.

LUIS: Vladimir's not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing, but Papo knew.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Remember, he says "Socialism or death." And Papo said to me, "Death is a door. When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door."

JAD: Coming up. That door gets wider. Others walk through. And for at least a beat, they find something besides death—something quite the opposite.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[LUIS: Hi, my name is Luis Trellis, and Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End this message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abrumad. This is Radiolab.

LUIS: Yes. One two, one two. Mic check.

JAD: That's Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late '80s and '90s. And so far, a dude has made a crazy decision—dude named Papo—to inject himself with HIV.

JAD: Would you call it a protest?

LUIS: I think Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after.

JAD: This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castro government and anyone it deemed 'antisocial,' which included kids with long hair who listened to rock. And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.

LUIS: So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the sanitarium.

JAD: And can you describe that place? Like, what did he find?

LUIS: Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pinar Del Río countryside.

JAD: Really?

LUIS: It's full of palm trees. Very green, very lush. Farm animals roaming in.

JAD: Huh. And you went there?

LUIS: Yes. Yes, I was there. I was there. And there are still farm animals over there. [laughs] Actually, they were roaming, a couple of cows and chickens. It's like kind of an idyllic place. So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place, Gerson Govea and his wife Yohandra. And they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there, the memories.

JAD: Uh-huh.

LUIS: So I spent a couple of days with them, and they walked me around. And it's full of, like, these little housing units.

JAD: And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?

LUIS: Yeah. Gerson and Yohandra are walking me through it and they're like, "Okay, so we would be walking around here 10 years ago and Nirvana would be coming out of here."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: "Metallica would be coming out of the next house."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]]

JAD: No kidding!

LUIS: Yeah! So it was like a headbangers' ball in Pinar Del Río, you know?

JAD: Wait, but why? I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the sanitarium but not outside?

LUIS: Initially, the sanitarium system was under the military, and it was more of a gulag. But in the late '80s, early '90s the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine.

JAD: Huh!

LUIS: And these were by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients. They gave them all the food and medicine they needed and they were like, "You want to rock out? Go ahead!"

JAD: Huh! So it's like a prison but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom.

LUIS: Yeah. And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power, power they didn't have before. Vladi told me this story, the patients inside the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip, and some of the Frikis would go out, and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember on two or three occasions, that the police came after, and one of them has a syringe.

LUIS: A syringe?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: A syringe full of blood.

BOB ARELLANO: And Vladi says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And said, "You want to come to me? Come on, come to me." And they were afraid of that.

LUIS: And so word began to spread about what life was like inside the sanitarium. And you have to keep in mind that outside, Cuba was falling apart.

[NEWS CLIP: Hard economic times in Cuba. The government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices. It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.]

LUIS: Almost overnight, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies it used to get. That meant ...

[NEWS CLIP: Long lines for bread. Short tempers.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We were suffering.

LUIS: Vladimir Ceballos, who never actually lived inside the sanitarium, he says that people outside were going hungry. And he himself ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I was weighing like a hundred pounds, 98 pounds.

JAD: Oh my God!

LUIS: And as things just kept getting worse ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: You see like ...

[NEWS CLIP: Hungry, sunburned, dehydrated.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: ... 50,000 people leave Cuba.

[NEWS CLIP: They managed to escape on a raft and make it to the Florida keys. These days, more Cubans than ever are taking the risk.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era. But ...

LUIS: If you were in the Sanitorium, you were fine.

BOB ARELLANO: Yeah. Just being able to get milk and an egg and beans.

LUIS: Bob Arellano says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids.

BOB ARELLANO: Yes, I'm not gonna be harassed. Yes, I'm free. And yes, I also get meals.

LUIS: And it went from being a couple of self injectors, a couple of dozen self injectors to being hundreds.

JAD: Whoa! And did the government know that this was happening?

LUIS: Well, there's this Swedish documentary from the time. It's called "¡Socialismo o muerte!" and in it there's this bishop of Havana ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: His last name is Cespedes. And he says that he met some of the kids that were injecting themselves with AIDS, and that at a state dinner he approached Fidel. He told him ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: ... that these kids, they're injecting themselves. And Fidel couldn't believe it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore. They put a law that injecting self with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison.

LUIS: But it didn't matter.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was like a movement. It was like a movement.

LUIS: And all of a sudden you have all these bands forming across the island in different sanitariums. In the biggest one of them all, in Santiago de Las Vegas, which is like a half hour, 45 minutes South of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed, it's called VIH, which translates to HIV. But then in center of the island, in this town called Santa Clara. You had the Cuban punk band, Eskoria. And Eskoria translates as ...

BOB ARELLANO: 'Scum,' right? Escoria.

LUIS: And according to Bob, if you look back to the '80s, the people who were fleeing Cuba ...

BOB ARELLANO: The balseros, the rafters, one of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said, "Que vaya la escoria. Se vaya." "Let the scum leave." So to call yourself Eskoria, to call yourself scum, that is punk rock.

JAD: And were these bands big outside the sanitorium too?

LUIS: Eskoria is—I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without—I mean Eskoria is like ...

JAD: So their tapes got out or something.

LUIS: Yeah, totally.

JAD: And what happens next? I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self injecting. Does it just keep growing and growing?

LUIS: Yeah. There's tape of Gerson and Yohandra saying that it got to be so fashionable that kids started to think that in order to be a Friki you had to have AIDS."

JAD: Really?

LUIS: Yeah. No, there was some tape of Yohandra saying ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: ... which is, "And the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS.

BOB ARELLANO: It's like the fact that it went from 10 or 20 to 200 or more was obviously like this kind of just joiner phenomenon of, like, "That's so cool, I'm gonna do it too." There was even talk among some of the young people I met, of thinking that, oh, eventually Fidel and those guys will find a cure.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They're gonna find a cure for this.

BOB ARELLANO: Cuba, with one of the best health care systems in the Western hemisphere.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We're gonna live forever. Then everything started to change when the first of them died.

LUIS: According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinar del Río was a guy named Manuel. We don't know his last name or his age.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: He was the first. And when the second die and when the third die, everything stop.

BOB ARELLANO: At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994, Papo says that in two years about 18 people died.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And when they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a normal person who had a heart attack or anything, no. You transform yourself.

LUIS: A lot of them went blind. Then they went insane. They started getting opportunistic diseases. You know how AIDS works.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Seeing that, this time thinking about what they did.

JAD: Did kids start saying they wished they hadn't done this?

LUIS: Well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary, ¡Socialismo o muerte!, which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets. You have one of them saying, "I regret this. I regret it a million times."

LUIS: How about Papo?

BOB ARELLANO: Well, I don't—I never heard Papo ever question that he had done it.

LUIS: And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo, and he's clearly sick. He's rail thin, his face is swollen. And we see him stepping into an evangelical church. He's wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, but he's become a fervent Christian.

JAD: Really?

LUIS: He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients. And he's still taunting the government because he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: ... he's still a rocker, and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist. If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect. It's interesting though, because in that last video we also see him taking English classes and he's saying like, "You know, the other patients in the sanitarium, they're, like, sick like me. They won't go out at night. They won't rock out 'til the early morning. But I'm like, 'This is my life.'"

JAD: So he was sort of defiant to the end.

LUIS: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: And a few months later, according to Gerson, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth and eyes. He had a parasite in his brain. He became violent, and he died from that disease.

JAD: God. Part of me wonders like, is this strong and fierce or is it just dumb and sad? And maybe fear. It's also like, I can't figure out how to feel about this.

LUIS: Yeah. Well I think it can be all those things, right? It was dumb and stupid and immature, and it was also nihilistic and anarchic.

JAD: And do you think in the end it had any impact?

LUIS: Well, that's hard to say. It must have. It must have.

JAD: Here's how Luis puts it: not even five years after Papo died, things did start to shift in Cuba. Make it of what you will, but December 8, 2000, Castro unveils a statue of John Lennon. That same year, Bob Arellano and a bunch of rock musicians ...

BOB ARELLANO: Including Will Oldham, David Pajo

JAD: ... they're given permission to play a bunch of rock shows in Cuba out in the open. And at one of those shows in Pinar Del Río ...

BOB ARELLANO: They announced, "Listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo La Bala and the Frikis."

LUIS: And everyone sang along.

JAD: Now it would be impossible to draw any kind of cause and effect and say one thing led to another. That would be ridiculous. But Luis says that back when the Frikis were streaming into the sanitorium ...

LUIS: Cuba wasn't changing back then. It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures big and small.

JAD: He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.

LUIS: And then you have the Maleconazo, which was like the first serious civil disobedience that Castro had in '94 where just a mob in Havana rose up because they were so tired of the power outages. They were angry at their poor living conditions. They were leaving the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds. Castro literally had to come down to the Cuban Malecon, the beautiful seaside road that circles around Havana, and he literally had to talk the mob down.

JAD: So at this moment, you know, late '80s, early '90s ...

LUIS: There's this breeding ground of discontent all over Cuba, and I think the self-injector movement is the best crystallization we have of that.

JAD: It's like this sort of a thousand points of light, and this is the brightest point.

LUIS: Right.

JAD: Or the darkest point, frankly.

LUIS: Right, exactly.

JAD: Huge thank you to Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. We were thrilled to collaborate with Radio Ambulante, and a thank you to Daniel Alarcon for making that collaboration possible. If you don't know Radio Ambulante, check them out. Radioambulante.org. They tell these incredible stories from around the Spanish-speaking world in Spanish. There are some very hard-hitting stories. Radioambulante.org. We'll also point you to them at Radiolab.org. Also, they've created a Spanish version, a Spanish-language version of this story, which goes in a different direction. It goes into way more depth into Luis's visit to Cuba, and the story of Gerson and Yohandra, the last two remaining self-infected Frikis. And we may just put that story in our podcast feed for the Spanish speakers out there who want to hear their story. Thank you to Vladimir Ceballos and Bob Arellano for use of their documentaries. This story was produced by Tim Howard. We had production support from Matt Kielty and Andy Mills, and original music from Alio Die and the Cuban punk bands, HIV and Eskoria.

ROBERT: Okay. Put down your instruments and pick up your shuttlecocks and your small badminton—what are those?

JAD: Yeah. Rackets?

ROBERT: Rackets. Yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Because what we're gonna do next is we're going to go meet a group of people who also have to lose in order to win. That is our theme. In this case, it's embarrassing, revolting to some, shocking, career ...

JAD: Career suicidal?

ROBERT: Suicidal. And yet in its own and strange way, it is a triumph.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah. So get ready for another lose to win. Right after this.

[LISTENER: This is Brie calling from Austin, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Okay, one more time, Krulwich. And I will keep it—I'll keep to the business.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: Today, we're bringing you stories of people who lose, yes, but they lose in such a way that you could argue that they actually win. In our last segment, we told the story of some punk rockers living in Cuba who purposefully injected themselves with AIDS as a—as an escape? As an act of resistance in order to sort of free themselves from an autocratic regime. Now we ...

ROBERT: We're gonna play badminton.

JAD: [laughs] Yes. Natural move.

ROBERT: And so this next story comes to us from producer Latif Nasser and ...

LATIF: It's a sports story.

ROBERT: Sort of, but like none you've ever heard, and therefore, we found a reporter who is a sports reporter like none you've ever heard.

LATIF: Yeah.

MIKE PESCA: I've been to a gym lately.

LATIF: Mike Pesca. He's the host of The Gist podcast, put out by Slate. Formerly of NPR, still sometimes works with NPR. And now he's here telling this story to us.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah.

LATIF: And how did you even first hear about this? Were you covering it?

MIKE PESCA: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Renée Montagne: This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Renée Montagne.]

MIKE PESCA: I was covering the 2012 Olympics for NPR.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Renée Montagne: Good morning.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Pesca: Hello!]

MIKE PESCA: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I declare open the games of London.]

MIKE PESCA: The stories of the Olympics. You try to find your own stories that are obscure, but if there was a big story, you chase it. So in those Olympics ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Renée Montagne: So for you, what were the most notable achievements in the first week of the games?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Pesca: Well ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's history of the best kind.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Pesca: ... Michael Phelps breaking the all-time record, obviously]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So in over 100 years, nobody's won as many medals at the Olympic Games.]

MIKE PESCA: And everyone knew that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: On their way ...]

MIKE PESCA: ... Bolt ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And here comes Usain Bolt!]

MIKE PESCA: ... and his record-setting quest in the 100 would be huge.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh, he's retained his title in the most emphatic way. Brilliant, brilliant!]

MIKE PESCA: But then this badminton story pops up, and everyone rushes to figure out what the heck's going on with badminton.

LATIF: Because the 2012 London Olympics' badminton tournament just it took this somewhat obscure sport and it morphed it into this bizarro thought experiment about competition and integrity and what it means to win.

ROBERT: Okay.

MIKE PESCA: But mostly, I think that the players ...

LATIF: But to be fair, Mike, he jumped on this story for very personal reasons.

MIKE PESCA: As a New Yorker, I say a lot of words and they're mispronounced, and the NPR audience would jump on them. But I always can say the "N" in badminton and get a lot of plaudits. So, I'm attracted to badminton.

LATIF: Oh!

ROBERT: But what's the wrong way to say badminton?

MIKE PESCA: Most people say, "bad-mitten."

LATIF: "Bad-mitten."

ROBERT: "Bad-mitten."

LATIF: Like you're talking to some handwear in wintertime.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. Like you're chastising a playful cat.

LATIF: Right.

MIKE PESCA: "Bad, mitten! Bad!"

ROBERT: I see.

LATIF: And then also, you know, you and I probably think of badminton as this backyard, fun, silly game. But according to Mike ...

MIKE PESCA: No!

LATIF: ... this is anything but.

MIKE PESCA: It has nothing to do with the badminton you play in your backyard. It's much faster than you think it would possibly look.

LATIF: You get these players ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Wow, what a shot!]

LATIF: ... flying all over the court. Stretching, reaching, diving.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: How on Earth?]

MIKE PESCA: The skill of the competitors is, you know, readily apparent.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is pulsating badminton!]

MIKE PESCA: A shuttlecock is a funny thing, and perhaps not as impressive a thing as a tennis ball, but it looks, you know, a lot like tennis. And there's a lot of tension.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Severe pressure!]

MIKE PESCA: And there's a lot of grunting. and it totally seems like every bit of a legitimate and highly-skilled sport.

LATIF: Wait. I'm gonna start. Okay, so Robert?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: If you haven't seen this yet, but I would like to show you something. Okay, this is an ad.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah, this—okay. This is the game that is at the center of this whole story.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Women's doubles group A.]

LATIF: Women's doubles badminton. It is not a medal round. It's in the group play stage. There's a huge crowd here. Like, the place is packed.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Please welcome, representing the People's Republic of China, Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang.]

LATIF: So these two teams come out. You got China.

ROBERT: Yellow and red uniforms, yellow shoes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And their opponents. Representing the Republic ...]

LATIF: Versus Korea.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm. Purple and white.

LATIF: Yeah. And let's just skip ahead here.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Kim Ha-na, Jung Kyung-eun.]

LATIF: All right, so here we go. Game on. This is the first serve.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So the Korean pair ...]

LATIF: Korean serve. So the Korean player flicks her wrist, the shuttlecock goes over the net. China returns.

ROBERT: Hmm. Right into the net.

LATIF: That was it. That was the whole thing.

ROBERT: Oh, that was just a bloop.

LATIF: All right. So Korea, second serve. And Chinese return. And same thing happens.

ROBERT: And they hit the net again.

LATIF: Yeah. So the service is turned over. Now the Chinese are serving.

ROBERT: Okay.

LATIF: China, Korea, China.

ROBERT: Into the net again!

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: This is not exactly scintillating, I just gotta tell you. This is like ...

LATIF: Okay. Well, just watch this next point. So the Korean player serves it.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: It sails over the net. And then it goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, and the Chinese player clearly is right there. She has it. She then winds up just a slight bit, like, you can see it's like she has this deep, ingrained muscle memory from years of doing this. She winds up, she's about to hit it and then she stops. And the shuttlecock just plunks onto the floor inbounds, point to Korea. And then, tellingly, she looks back at the back corner of the court where her coach is sitting.

ROBERT: Ah. They both are!

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: This is a fix. They're fixing this, like ...

LATIF: Well ...

ROBERT: This is ...

LATIF: Yes. But ...

MIKE PESCA: There have been plenty of occasions where one side wants to lose, and it ain't hard to lose. And the more important thing is it ain't hard to get away with it.

LATIF: Usually you wouldn't even notice it.

MIKE PESCA: You know, it's the difference between a couple serves over the line, a couple balls into the net. But ...

LATIF: In this case, as the match goes on, you start to realize ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Very lethargic start from the Koreans.]

LATIF: ... the Korean players seem to be trying to lose, too!

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're serving faults!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: True. Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're serving ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're trying to get them to rally, of course. But ...]

ROBERT: Why would everybody be trying to lose? Like, both sides?

LATIF: Well, it's actually a strategy. Because the way the tournament is laid out, both these teams are gonna be moving on to the medal rounds. But whoever wins this game is gonna have to play another Chinese team, a really strong team.

ROBERT: I see.

LATIF: And whoever loses is gonna play a way easier Danish team.

ROBERT: Ah!

LATIF: So both teams are hoping to lose.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. And it is the rare instance where you have both sides incentivized to lose that you get something that should be scored by Spike Jones. It's a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, right? Either side could lose, but when both want to lose ...

LATIF: It becomes this surreal waiting game.

MIKE PESCA: Right.

LATIF: You know, who's gonna crack first and score a point?

MIKE PESCA: And so ...

LATIF: You got the best players in the world who just start hitting the shuttlecock out of bounds. [ARCHIVE CLIP: They're serving fault after fault.]

MIKE PESCA: Faulting on purpose, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're just hitting the ball straight in the net.]

MIKE PESCA: ... hitting the shuttlecock into the net.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm sorry. You know, it's blindingly obvious what's going on.]

MIKE PESCA: And, you know ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're both trying to lose.]

LATIF: Sometimes they hit it below the net.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And that is unforgivable.]

LATIF: They're hitting it straight into the ground.

MIKE PESCA: All but tripping over their own shoelaces purposefully.

LATIF: Until what you get is ...

ROBERT: Serve. Uh-oh, into the net.

LATIF: ... point ...

ROBERT: Serve ...

LATIF: ... after point of just terrible badminton. And it just devolves into this absurd, repetitive crazy-making lose-a-thon.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is an absolute disgrace.]

ROBERT: It's so obviously lame. I mean, this is not—this is not sport. This is ...

LATIF: But it is kind of a sport because—and this is why I really love it—at a certain point, these two teams have to start competing with each other to lose.

ROBERT: What?

LATIF: Let me play you this point. So China serves it, Korea hits it back. But it's going way out of bounds. Now in a normal world, China would obviously let that fall so that they could take the point, but they lunge to save it, right? And they're hitting it back. Now Korea then, they are like, "No, no, no. You know what? We're pretty sure we want it out of bounds." They hit in the opposite direction even further out of bounds. So now China goes to save it once again, but they don't get there in time. So the point goes to China, which China actually didn't want, and the Koreans wanted the whole time.

ROBERT: So what are you saying then? Is it ...

LATIF: Well, it's like—it's like they invented a whole new sport, which is the exact opposite of badminton. It is—it is photo-negative badminton. But then, towards the end of the first set ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: From the referee, has been pulled forth.]

LATIF: ... out comes the referee.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And here comes Torsten Berg.]

TORSTEN BERG: Hello, Torsten speaking.

LATIF: Hi! How are you?

LATIF: Torsten Berg was the head Olympic badminton referee who got that call.

TORSTEN BERG: And I also heard the spectators' boos. So I went to watch. It looked pretty awful. This was not right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The referee is pulling the players together.]

TORSTEN BERG: And told them that they were not playing seriously, and they were making a very serious mistake. And they played stupid and said, "No, we're playing. We're trying our best."

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: We were actually able to get in touch with three of the four players in that match. Both Korean players ...

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: ... Jung Kyung-eun, and ...

KIM HA-NA: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: ... Kim Ha-na. And also, one of the Chinese players.

WANG XIAOLI: [speaking Mandarin]

LATIF: Wang Xiaoli. And ...

WANG XIAOLI: [speaking Mandarin]

LATIF: And Wang Xiaoli told me they were trying to lose in that match.

WANG XIAOLI: [through interpreter] But what we didn't expect is South Korea would do the same thing.

WANG XIAOLI: [speaking Mandarin]

LATIF: And as for the Koreans, Jung Kyung-eun said that they too were trying to lose, at least during certain moments in the game. But when the crowd started to boo ...

KIM HA-NA: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: ... and the ref came out, her partner Kim Ha-na said that ...

KIM HA-NA: [through interpreter] I was surprised and embarrassed.]

LATIF: ... they were just scared.

KIM HA-NA: [through interpreter] We just wanted to get out of the court as soon as possible.

KIM HA-NA: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: So Torsten walks off the court.

TORSTEN BERG: They went on court again.

LATIF: And then the second serve after Torsten walks off the court, nothing but net.

TORSTEN BERG: [sighs]

LATIF: So for the next few points ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [boos]]

LATIF: ... it does not get much better.

TORSTEN BERG: No, it didn't look like world-class badminton at all.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: No, no, no.]

LATIF: So the set comes to an end. Korea wins the set. And while the players are waiting on the sidelines ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Here comes the tournament referee again.]

LATIF: ... Torsten comes back onto the court. He walks up to the players and he pulls out of his pocket almost subtly and shows to the players this black card.

TORSTEN BERG: The black card, which means disqualification.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is absolutely extraordinary. He has given both teams a black card. Or has he threatened them with a black card? I'm really not terribly sure. The players have returned to court.]

TORSTEN BERG: It was now that they should play or they would be in deep [bleep]. Sorry, maybe I shouldn't say ...

ROBERT: No, no, no. The black card says that pretty clearly.

TORSTEN BERG: The black card. The black card was out, and I was ...

LATIF: The [bleep] card.

TORSTEN BERG: I told them in very clear words and very seriously that in order to help themselves, they better play now.

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: The Korean player, Jung Kyung-eun ...

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: ... said that she turned to her partner ...

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [through interpreter] And I told her, they are them and we are we. So let's just play and do our best.

LATIF: The second set starts, and pretty quick ...

WANG XIAOLI: [speaking Mandarin]

LATIF: ... China's Wang Xiaoli told me ...

JUNG KYUNG-EUN: [through interpreter] Both sides changed a little bit.

TORSTEN BERG: Instead of just serving into the net ...

LATIF: Things start to get better.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: A rally.]

TORSTEN BERG: ... they would get the rally going.

LATIF: But then as the points kept coming, you started to notice, like ...

TORSTEN BERG: They were playing very slowly.

LATIF: ... there's something still really off here.

TORSTEN BERG: They were not hitting the board very hard.

WANG XIAOLI: [speaking Mandarin]

LATIF: Now the Korean team wouldn't admit this, but Wang Xiaoli said that both teams ...

WANG XIAOLI: [through interpreter] Didn't change the basic fact.

LATIF: ... were still trying to lose.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [boos.]]

LATIF: Which I have to say is exactly what it looks like when you watch it, because for the rest of the match you get a bunch of these points where, like—where just they'll lob it super high, you know, as if to say, "Hey, smash it down on us. Take your point." Or they will, you know, hit it out of bounds and then facepalm. Just, you know, practice their swing after they missed one just to say, "Oh, you know, my mechanics are off. I just gotta just practice this a few more times." Because it's like we've entered a whole third iteration of this game where it's like, they're not just trying to lose, they're trying to ...

ROBERT: Cover up badminton.

LATIF: Cover up badminton. You're trying to lose, but you're trying to look like you're trying to win.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [boos.] There goes the crowd.]

ROBERT: I don't think they're fooling anybody here. No, no.

LATIF: So finally, after 20 long minutes of this, the Korean team loses the match by winning it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tonight has left me with a very nasty taste in the mouth. Tonight was not sport. It was a disgrace. Good night.]

KIM HA-NA: [speaking Korean]

LATIF: So all four players walked off the court, and Kim Ha-na told me ...

KIM HA-NA: [through interpreter] It was not a pleasant winning at all.

LATIF: ... that her parents were in the audience that day. And afterwards they asked her, "What happened?"

KIM HA-NA: [through interpreter] What happened? And why—why do you have to get the boos from the audience and et cetera? And I was—I was sad and felt defeated. So I didn't even want to talk to my mom. So I remember just going—went to the hotel and had rest.

KIM HA-NA: [speaking Korean]

TORSTEN BERG: And the next morning at eight o'clock, all four pairs in fact were disqualified according to the disciplinary regulations of the Badminton World Federation.

LATIF: Which has a rule on the books that you can be disqualified for failing to use your best efforts.

TORSTEN BERG: And the same evening they were on the plane home.

LATIF: They were just thrown out of the Olympics.

[NEWS CLIP: A scandal at the Olympics.]

[NEWS CLIP: This whole to-do about the badminton players.]

[NEWS CLIP: Everyone was talking about some losers.]

[NEWS CLIP: Shuttlecocks were going out.]

[NEWS CLIP: To be tapping the shuttlecock into the net.]

[NEWS CLIP: Like a five-year-old at a backyard picnic.]

[NEWS CLIP: It was downright humiliating.]

TORSTEN BERG: It was just sad that they were committing suicide in that tournament.

WANG XIAOLI: [through interpreter] After that time, the punishment hit me quite hard. I was very sad and I felt helpless.

KIM HA-NA: [through interpreter] I was perplexed, and didn't know what happened. We just cried.

ROBERT: So what—so then what happened to the—were the players, like—what happened to them?

LATIF: Well, all four of them did keep playing badminton professionally after this. Jung Kyung-eun from Korea even went on to win the bronze in Rio. But at the time, this was a brutal punishment for all of them.

ROBERT: Well, but, you know, they did something wrong. This wasn't right. Right?

MIKE PESCA: I—you know, I don't even—I question whether it's even unethical. I think it's ethical, in a way, what they did.

LATIF: Really? What the players did?

MIKE PESCA: I do. I think it's ethical.

LATIF: How so?

MIKE PESCA: Okay, so is the definition of ethics in sports to win? Sure. Without cheating, yes. Does that mean to win every point? No, not necessarily. You know, in baseball, there's the thing called the intentional walk.

LATIF: Sure.

MIKE PESCA: In football, a team will take a safety instead of punting and letting the other team score a touchdown. So this is a calculation where a point here or there is not as important as the whole, and the whole is the game. So okay, let's move back. Let's pan out a little more. I think an individual game is often lost. Look, we're not gonna put our good starter here, we're going to manage the lineup. Because the goal is to win the championship. And the thing to remember about these players is if what we want is players who are hyper competitive and actually want to win at all costs, that's exactly why they were losing so badly, because they wanted to win the overall championship at all costs. And the Badminton Federation had a set of rules that all but guaranteed that this would happen.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Well, yeah. I mean, it's stupid to have an event where people are trying to lose if that event is a sporting event. Especially at the apex of—you know, the only time people care about badminton. It seems really dumb ...

LATIF: So this is Chuck Klosterman. We called him in because he writes a lot about sports, and also because he wrote The Ethicist column for the New York Times Magazine.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Now is this a—some kind of tragedy? Well, it's not. I guess unless badminton is really important to you, then it probably is.

LATIF: Well in this case, I think the thing that people got really upset about is this—is this idea of the Olympic ideal.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, athlete: In the name of all the competitors, I promise that we shall take part in the Olympic Games.]

LATIF: The athletes' oath.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, athlete: In the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of the sport and the honor of our teams.]

LATIF: To transcend, the—in the way that as a superb athlete you're transcending your humanity, but then also as, like, this representative of your country. And to—I think it did poke a lot of people. Like, a lot of people did seemingly get kind of upset about it.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Well, yeah. I mean, for some reason it is disturbing to see athletes failing on purpose.

LATIF: Hmm.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: That just—it seems to kind of like tap into some, like ...

LATIF: It feels immoral, somehow.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tonight has left me with a very nasty taste.]

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Yes. Like—like, I don't know if not trying in a sporting event is a moral question, but it feels that way when you see it happen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That is unforgivable.]

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Here again, one of the interesting things about sports is that we watch these adults playing multimillion-dollar games, but they're the same games that, like, a six year old or seven year old plays. So when you have a seven-year-old kid, you would say, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it doesn't matter what happens, just play hard. You don't have to succeed, it's the trying that matters." So when you see people at the highest level not trying, there's—it almost sort of wrecks the entire idea of why we play sports at all. You know, why if you're at a playground and two kids race across the playground to see who can get to the swing faster or whatever, like, that's a biological thing. Maybe we are biologically driven to compete. So that's the baseline expectation of what we have of these badminton players. That they will try to compete, you know?

ROBERT: But it seems to me there's an opportunity here for true athleticism in a kind of topsy-turvy way.

LATIF: Flip it and reverse it.

ROBERT: Flip it and reverse it and see if you can do that as well as you do the other one.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: I mean, sports only work one way, though.

LATIF: [laughs]

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: They don't work both ways. I mean, it would—it would be like going to your wife and saying, like, "Okay, you say you really love me? Prove it by hating me in a creative way."

LATIF: [laughs]

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Or to go to a great piano player and say, like, "If you're so awesome at playing piano, bang your fist against the keys in a way that I will be—you know, I will be sickened by it." Yeah.

ROBERT: But wait. But if we take it out of matters of the heart and put it back on the field, what would be the most radical solution that you could imagine if your desire was to convincingly and astonishingly athletically lose?

LATIF: Yeah.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: I suppose if they were both trying to do it in the most convincing way, it would be. That was not really the case here.

LATIF: [laughs]

MIKE PESCA: Like I say, they never confronted it. How do you lose on purpose if the other side's also trying to lose on purpose? And I'm trying to think, there are some sports—so in football—let's say in American football, let's say both sides wanted to lose. Well, here's how the sport would go. You can't make the other team score, but you can score a safety on yourself. So the quarterback would get the ball and start running towards his own end zone. And then there'll be a jail break by the defense to tackle the quarterback before he got ...

ROBERT: [laughs] Yeah.

MIKE PESCA: Baseball is hard. You could hit the batter. That would be—that would be an interesting game.

LATIF: Yeah. What ...

MIKE PESCA: What about darts? Instead of aiming at the dartboard, just turning around and aiming at your opponent?

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: That's also—that's like the baseball strategy a little bit.

MIKE PESCA: How about the sport of bodybuilding? Think about the implications of ...

LATIF: Bodybuilding! I would win that!

MIKE PESCA: ... who would be the worst.

LATIF: I would win that!

MIKE PESCA: Would you?

LATIF: I think I would win that.

MIKE PESCA: I see like a Will Ferrell movie out of this.

ROBERT: Yes. That's what I was thinking, the loser.

LATIF: Yes, the loser.

MIKE PESCA: We get to a point, our team, "All right, this is what we need. You gotta go out there and lose."

LATIF: No, and then there's a loser on the other team who's also very happy to lose. And ...

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, and the two losers are eyeing each other down the line.

ROBERT: Two losers.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then ...

ROBERT: You can hear more of Mike Pesca on his podcast, The Gist. More of Chuck Klosterman in his latest book, But What If We're Wrong? Big thanks to all the players who talked to us, and to those who helped us get those interviews: Joy Le Li, Mikyoung Kim, Yuni Kartika.

LATIF: Thanks to Aparna Nancherla, who came in and helped us puzzle this whole match out. And in addition, a special thanks to Greysia Polii. Greysia was on the Indonesian badminton team in those same Olympics, and an hour after the match we featured, she faced off against a different Korean team. All four players in that match were also disqualified for not using their best efforts to win. She really helped us understand what it was like to be in that situation.

ROBERT: This story was produced by Matt Kielty and Annie McEwen and Latif Nasser. I'm Robert Krulwich.

LATIF: And I'm Latif Nasser.

ROBERT: And I guess that ends the game at this point.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To go to the next message, press 6.]

[MIKE PESCA: Hi, it's Mike Pesca, here to tell you that Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Tracie Hunte, Nigar Farrell—no, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, Katie Ferguson, Alexandra Leigh Young, W. Harry Fortuna and Percia Verlin. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Thanks for listening.]

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MIKE PESCA: Here's an idea I have. There's an old riddle and it goes like this: a king talks to his two sons, two princes, and he says, "Here's what we're gonna do. Get those horses out of the stable. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to jump on your horses and ride to the city gate. Whichever horse gets to the city gate last, you're gonna inherit the fortune." Maybe he was a crazy king. So the two princes look at each other.

LATIF: Oh, man!

MIKE PESCA: They both think. And then they jump on the horses and they ride as fast as they can. Why?

LATIF: I don't know.

ROBERT: To reign in their horses at the very last minute, jump off the horses and say "Whoa!" And then wait until the other one—I don't know.

LATIF: Are they—are they planning on just—just removing a section of the gate and then just smashing it up against the other horse?

MIKE PESCA: Yeah! No. That's terrible!

LATIF: No. Okay.

MIKE PESCA: You'll like the answer.

ROBERT: What is the answer?

MIKE PESCA: They jumped on each other's horse.

LATIF: Ah!

MIKE PESCA: They jumped on the other brother's horse. Maybe ...

ROBERT: Wait, let me just think about that.

LATIF: Wow! That was fun! That was great!

ROBERT: They jumped on the other's horse? Of course!

MIKE PESCA: He said whichever horse gets there last, so ...

 

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