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The Current Transcript for October 12, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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I long for the day that we would have an effective vaccine against this ancient and terrible disease, and today is that day an historic day.

MATT GALLOWAY: 750 children die every day because of malaria. The majority of them are in Africa. And for decades, public health officials have been waiting for a vaccine that could save those kids. Now, as you heard, one is on the horizon. In an hour, we head to the continent to hear what the shot will and won't do in the fight against malaria. Also this morning, Globe and Mail health columnist Andre Picard on mandatory COVID vaccinations for health care workers here and why that is pitting some of them against their governments. Plus,

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There was an exhilaration, too, to moving your body through space and time. I know that sounds corny or abstract, but I relished that.

MG: In the 1960s, Bruce Kid was about as big a Canadian sports star as they came. Now, after a lifetime of promoting equal access to sport, he's here to talk about a life on the track, why he believes the Canadian athletes should go to the Olympics in Beijing and what he misses about running. We begin, though, with the CBC's Margaret Evans in Greece and a migrant crisis that shows no signs of abating. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Migrant crisis in Greece shows no sign of abating

Guest: Margaret Evans

MG: The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is already causing ripple effects in Europe. Officials in Greece announced yesterday an increase in the number of guards patrolling the border with Turkey for fear of a spike in migration. Most southern European states have been tightening their borders to stem the tide of asylum seekers, but people have not stopped taking dangerous journeys to get there. CBC's Europe correspondent Margaret Evans has been covering the migrant crisis for almost a decade, and she brings us this story from her recent trip to Greece.

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MARGARET EVANS: It's not what you expect to hear at the morgue, but if you follow the sound of jazz playing deep in the bowels of a teaching hospital in the Greek city of Alexandroupoli, hopefully it will lead you to the offices of the coroner, Pavlos Pavlidis sitting at his desk, sipping an iced coffee cigarette, dangling between two fingers and the jazz he has on in the background a stark contrast to the pictures of bloated corpses flitting across his computer screen.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: This woman from Somalia. This is a missing people.

MARGARET EVANS: Yes, for two decades now, Pavlidis has been documenting the tragedies along the migrant trail in northern Greece. Those who've come this far only to be taken by the Evros River along the Greek border with Turkey. 36, have died this year alone, 500 over the course of his career.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: The river is very dangerous river and keep the boat is about two or three months, maybe six months in the water. After that, we have nothing. And for that reason, identification is very, very difficult as well.

MARGARET EVANS: Pavlidis keeps a compendium of the dead locked away in the room next door, at least of their belongings. Gently sifting through boxes of ordinary brown envelopes all numbered.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: The unique number of the case and this is it, our protocols before 2018.

MARGARET EVANS: Yes, each one holds a potential link to those who might be looking for the missing a touchstone.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: Every case is one story, but the most important for us is the personal belongings, which in keeping the water, the metal, watch, some jewelry, some rings. Everything except paper. Because in the water the paper disintegrate. But the metal is very, very good for us.

MARGARET EVANS: A surprising number of families, he says, know when their loved ones are going to try to cross the border and so might file a missing persons report with the Greek police if they don't hear from them. Other times, bodies are simply found by fishermen making the preservation of personal belongings all the more important.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: For me, it's conduct between the relatives and the body. If they recognises the ring, I take DNA from the bodies, I take DNA from the relatives and I have identification and I can give them both relatives.

[Sound: Muslim prayers].

MARGARET EVANS: In the hills above Alexander. Properly, there is a place where the unclaimed dead are buried. A migrants graveyard wait headstones, most of them blank. Reach up out of heavily churned Earth, as if to catch hold of the last rays of the day's warmth as the Sun begins to set. Not all who are buried here are Muslim, but they're tended to by Mehmet Serif Damadoglou, a mufti from the nearby village of Sidiro home to a Turkish speaking Muslim minority in Greece.

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M S DAMADOGLOU: Humans, when they're alive, they have a value. They have a dignity. This dignity doesn't disappear upon their death.

MARGARET EVANS: Darmadoglou also happens to own the local gas station in Sidiro, which is where we first meet him, sitting on a porch overlooking the pump, a slight young man in a ball cap is seated on a chair in the yard just beyond him. You've come for the dead, said the mufti. But you found one living. Isn't that better? The young man, it seems, is called Mahmoud, an 18 year old Syrian from the city of Deir Ezzor, who crossed the border from Turkey along with some friends, he says, were then caught by Greek border guards, apparently losing heart and wanting to turn himself in. He found the mosque in Sidiro and so the mufti who called the police.

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M S DAMADOGLOU: He says he'll be sent back to Turkey.

MARGARET EVANS: They've already been waiting hours when we arrive. Damadoglou won't offer him a bed for the night for fear he'll be accused of assisting illegal immigrants or worse, smuggling rings. You can be arrested just for giving a migrant or an asylum seeker arrived in Greece. Even our translator tells us he won't ride with us if we offer to drive Mahmoud to a police station. The young man says his plan was to try and get to Germany, where his brother lives, and he uses our phone to call him. His brother tells him to ask the police to take him to a refugee camp, and we leave him with a note written in Greek saying as much. Less than 24 hours later, we hear from Mahmoud's brother that he's already been sent back to Turkey. The Evros River follows the geographical border between Greece and Turkey, and much of its length is a closed military zone. Relations between the two countries already steeped in long seasons of distrust in the past, people trying to cross the river would have had to contend with the prospect of anti-personnel land mines. This past August, Greece finished the latest stretch of a wall or fence it started building along the border. Back in 2012, it's kitted out with surveillance cameras, and many Greeks are grateful for it.

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[Greek speech]

MARGARET EVANS: Melahrini Martidou is with an Evros Delta Protection Group and asked this economic. We'd like this area to be known for something other than just where legal or illegal migrants cross over, she says. Nearly 4000 people have crossed into Greece via the land border so far this year. That's more than those who've arrived by sea. But it's a big drop in numbers compared to last year and the year before. But Athens insists the wall is necessary if Greece is to avoid the kind of crisis it faced in 2015 and 16, when more than one million, mainly Syrian refugees arrived in the hopes of reaching the European Union. More specifically, Greece is warning it will turn back any potential influx coming from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover there this summer. Maridou Do says people in Greece also worry about the number of Muslim asylum seekers. Countries that will have to help. First are the ones nearby. She says there are countless Muslim countries all around Afghanistan, and there's Turkey. Alexandros Adalis is also a member of the Evros Delta Group. I flew as a fisherman, he can move in and out of the closed military zone along the river, but we can't. So he's come out to meet us at the delta, long stretches of glinting water full of flamingos and herons. Adalis says the European Union should be taking more migrants.

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ALEXANDROS ADALIS: I feel for them. On the other hand, Greece cannot sustain them all.

MARGARET EVANS: last year in a dispute with the European Union, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opened his side of the border, encouraging migrants to head to Greece. He even sent buses for them. People found themselves trapped between Turkish police pushing them forward and Greek security forces pushing them back. Reporting from the Turkish side of the border at the time, we met a group of Afghan men dripping wet. They told us Greek police had strip them of their belongings before sending them back across the river.

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VOICE: They take our shoes, our pants, our everything, I.D. cards, money.

MARGARET EVANS: Adalis says at the time. He and others helped form a kind of citizen's defence in the form of a flotilla, at the request of Greek authorities.

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ALEXANDROS ADALIS: We have been we have been positioned on the border to stop the invasion that Erdogan had organised.

MARGARET EVANS: Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country in the world, and Adelies believes Erdogan will keep on weaponizing them. He also says he doesn't believe many of those sent across then or coming now are genuine refugees. He says they're economic migrants.

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MARGARET EVANS: Canada is full of Greeks, all who've come...

ALEXANDROS ADALIS: I know I have many friends from my village in Canada.

MARGARET EVANS: Why? Why is it OK for the Greeks to go across the world to try to make a better life? But it's not OK for somebody from Somalia or Pakistan or Afghanistan?

ALEXANDROS ADALIS: There's a difference between the two, like the Greeks that have gone to Canada, came with papers and entered the country legally. Like here, they're trying to cross into the country illegally. If you want to do it, like if you want to make an experiment, let's try now and go and cross towards Turkey illegally and see what happens.

MARGARET EVANS: Legal channels, of course, are increasingly rare in a war zone or not. Athens, Syntagma Square and the ritualised, carefully choreographed a changing of the guard outside parliament. Human rights groups continue to accuse the Greek government of endorsing pushbacks both along the land border as well as at sea, potentially endangering the lives of migrants. Just last week, the European Commission urged Greece to investigate media reports allegedly documenting the Greek Coast Guard, forcing migrants back into the sea. Athens has consistently denied the allegations. What's not in doubt, though, is that the country has moved to toughen its migration policies since Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was elected two years ago.

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ANGELIKI DIMITRIADI: They are heavily oriented towards deterrence, preventing people from entering the country as much as possible.

MARGARET EVANS: Angeliki Dimitriadi is an expert on migration with the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

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ANGELIKI DIMITRIADI: Those who do enter this rhetoric around quick separation of economic migrants from the genuine refugees. So we've gone back to this bogus asylum seeker discourse we had in the 90s in the EU returns, but I would say mostly deterrence.

MARGARET EVANS: The 40 kilometre long border wall in Evros is just one manifestation of that policy. Plans to create closed and controlled holding centres on five designated islands is another. The government opened the first on Samos in September, saying it would provide clean, safe housing for 3000 migrants. At a ribbon cutting ceremony, Greek Migration Minister Panagiotis Mitarachi called it a vast improvement in the squalid and overcrowded camps that have dotted the islands up to now.

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MINISTER MITARACHI: This close control centres, which provide, on the one hand, much better living conditions, a lot more space for each asylum seeker. With all the necessary facilities and the kind of standard of living that you would expect from a European Union country, but at the same time, increased security provisions for the benefit of asylum seekers, of the benefit of the staff and of the benefit of the local communities.

MARGARET EVANS: But they are to be placed far from population centres, and the Samos camp is surrounded by guard towers, barbed wire and fencing.

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ANGELIKI DIMITRIADI: They're going to have a closed perimeter. Access will be regulated and controlled, as well as exit from the camps they're called controlled. But in my view, it's a bit of a euphemism for detention.

MARGARET EVANS: Dimitriadi points out that they're being funded by the European Union. Increasingly comfortable, she says, with Greece acting as a buffer zone for the rest of the EU. Last spring, Greece changed its laws to declare Turkey a safe third country for people from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Roughly two thirds of asylum applications registered in Greece last year came from those five countries. Experts say the new legislation essentially means Greece has given itself permission to send asylum seekers from those countries back to Turkey without having to assess the merits of their claims.

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ANGELIKI DIMITRIADI: If we want to be honest, we are witnessing the dismantling of the 1951 Convention on Refugees. You know, if nobody sees them, then nobody remembers that they're there. So we don't really have to talk about migration because that's the other angle that this government very much pursues. They would like to start talking about migration as most of the EU, to be fair.

MARGARET EVANS: It's not something Pavlos provides, and his small team will be able to stop seeing, though back at the morgue, tucked away in the hospital basement. Refrigeration unit donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross in sitting just outside his office in a parking lot is already full. The hum of the generator competing with the jazz music inside. Pavlidis has already asked the Red Cross to donate a second. He's not convinced the new wall will stop the flow of people trying to reach Greece and the gateway to the European Union.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: The land the border, it's about 200 kilometres. 200 kilometres, it's very long, amazing. For me, it's difficult, with a fence, to stop the refugees.

MARGARET EVANS: Pavlidis will keep doing his best to name those who don't make it. The one thing he says he can sometimes offer to the dead and to their loved ones left behind, not knowing their fate.

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PAVLOS PAVLIDIS: It's ethical for me to give the answer. It's not good answer, it's not good answer, but it's answer.

MG: A documentary from the CBC's Europe correspondent Margaret Evans, with producer Lily Martin and cameraman Adrian de Virgilio and Margaret Evans joins me now. Margaret, hi.

MARGARET EVANS: Hi, Matt.

MG: Thank you for that. You have been reporting, as I mentioned on the migrant crisis for almost a decade. You were in Lesvos in 2015 and 2016. From your perspective, what's been changing in that time?

MARGARET EVANS: I think a pretty good metaphor actually for this question is, you know, you remember all the bright red life jackets that people would leave behind on the beaches in Lesvos. And there were so many. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands in this kind of they called it the life jacket graveyard. And when we were there on this recent trip, it is no longer there. And it'spretty symbolic of where Greece wants to be. Doesn't want to talk about this on that terrible camp that was on the island. [Unintelligible] burnt down about a year ago and they have reduced the numbers of people on the islands. But there's a really kind of a different lack of transparency here. We were not granted any government official interviews. We went to the camp, we had permission to go to a camp and when we tried to talk to, people were basically kicked out. And even when we were, try it, you know, we talk to this young man, the Syrian man in the dock. When we left there, we were pulled over by the police who wanted to know why we'd been talking to him, why we'd been talking to the mufti. So it was quite different in terms of that hostility and a bit of fear mongering, I think because the numbers have dropped dramatically in terms of those coming through.

MG: Now what about for those refugees? I mean, how do they feel in the midst of all of this as the situation continues? And I mentioned in the introduction, I mean, the take over in Afghanistan of the Taliban is already leading people to wonder what's going to happen down the line.

MARGARET EVANS: That's right, and I think you find the Afghan refugees will tell you they were hoping that their status would change. We saw no evidence of that. You see the European Union saying it's terrible what's happening there, but we don't want them to come. And it's not just in Greece. You have other countries who say, Oh, Greece has built a wall. We see Poland starting to build a wall because it's neighbouring with Belarus and and there are migrants there, you know, some people say, being weaponised against the European Union. But psychologically, this is huge for people who've made these journeys. They've spent money to get there. A lot of people will say we're really worried because I mean, the locals will say we're worried because there used to be families during the Syrian crisis, but now it's all young men. There are still families. We saw single women from Congo, you know, single mothers, but they have no way of going beyond that. And now they're being held in these kind of these camps and the intention is to keep them away from the population. And there's anxiety about that. Psychologically, what's their future? And I really remember vividly seeing meeting, you know, a young man at the outskirts of a camp on Lesbos, and he was not being allowed to leave. And that was the change for him that the camps are now being fenced in. And having come all of that way and not knowing what their fate is going to be, it's, you know, really worrying for them.

MG: Margaret, it's great to hear from you as always, and thank you for the work that you're doing.

MARGARET EVANS: Thank you so much for having me.

MG: Margaret Evans is the CBC's Europe correspondent. The CBC News is up next. And then.

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I was known for my lack of acceleration and my lack of explosive speed. Gord Cardwell, who was very fast on his feet, dared me to race him. He running backwards and me running forwards. And he beat me.

MG: Bruce Kidd was not beaten very often after that schoolyard humiliation. These days, he's known for his records on the track and his advocacy off the track. Bruce Kidd will be here in six minutes to talk about his remarkable career. Sports for all. And why he still loves being in motion. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

Athletes shouldn't be forced to boycott Beijing Games, but they should feel free to speak out, says Bruce Kidd

Guest: Bruce Kidd

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. Still to come, it is a medical breakthrough, decades in the making and desperately needed. The world's first ever malaria vaccine was approved last week in about 30 minutes. Why? It's good news, but no silver bullet. But first, the simple joy of being in motion. In the 1960s, Bruce Kidd was about as electric a track star as one can get. He ran long. He ran fast. He was a national champion many times over a Commonwealth Games medallist, an Olympian. And in the way he moved and the joy he brought to the sport he made running look easy and wonderful.

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Excellence is a gift amongst mankind to one is assigned already wit to another swiftness of eye or foot. Art which raises nature to perfection, itself demands the passion of the elect we expect to win. As Pindar long ago in Greece was proud to hail the Salian [unintelligible] even so, it is meet we praise in our days, fleet footed Bruce Kidd from Toronto.

MG: It's poetry by the great W.H. Auden in an NFB documentary about Bruce Kidd from 1962, when Bruce Kidd stopped lining up to compete, he started advocating instead. He's been a lifelong champion for equity in sport. His new memoir is called A Runner's Journey and the Fleet Footed. Bruce Kidd is with me. Bruce Kidd. Good morning.

BRUCE KIDD: Morning, Matt.

MG: How is it that someone has Auden write poetry about their running?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, Don Owen, who directed that film, admired the [unintelligible]. And so he taped an interview with me, took those tapes over to Switzerland, gave them to Auden, and Auden came up with the script for that short film read by the great actor Don Franks. And I love what Auden says about writing and life. The idea that that running a race is a glorious improvisation like a jazz improvisation is very much how I came to see running. Just keep going and white space will open up.

MG: What did you love about running when you were a kid?

BRUCE KIDD: It gave me a physical joy. It gave me a confidence in my own physical energy. It. It opened up spaces. For me, it was a way of discovering the places where I lived and going farther and farther. And there was an exhilaration, too, to moving your body through space and time. I know that sounds corny or abstract, but I relished that. I relished the power that that gave me. And to this day, I can't run anymore, but I can certainly ride. I prefer to be covering ground on my bicycle rather than being on a stationary bike or on a treadmill. Covering space, covering neighbourhoods, discovering new areas, regardless of what the season is, that has always brought me great joy.

MG: This is something that I mean, you wrote in the book that you got into distance running on a dare.

BRUCE KIDD: Well, that's true. I grew up known for my lack of acceleration and my lack of explosive speed. And I don't know how it originated. But Gord Cardwell, sadly no longer with us, who was very fast on his feet and could run backwards very fast, once dared me to race him over 50 yards. He running backwards and me running forwards. And he beat me. So I challenged him to a rematch in the Malvern Harrier Championships that were being held soon afterwards, which was a one and a half mile race. I started off the line with what seemed to be a jog, and within half a mile I was ahead of everybody by 50 to 100 yards, so I just kept on running and I won the race and the coach, the phys-ed teacher immediately recruited me for the school team and that led to other races and that eventually led him to saying, Bruce, I can't take you any further. But I've called the University of Toronto track coach Fred Foote, who just happens to be the Olympic coach, and he's agreed to take you if you want to train with his club and with that team. And really, that accelerated my journey in a big way. I was 15 years old, but I was immediately thrown into runners in their late teens, their 20s, even their 30s in a world class or a worldly, ambitious sports programme. And that changed my life. At U of T they dreamed of about beating the world.

MG: There's a real element of nation building. At the time, when it came to amateur sports, people saw success in amateur sport as something that the country should celebrate. And when you were 17, the mayor of Toronto, Nathan Phillips, called you a symbol of Canadian manhood. What are the nation building? Part of amateur sport mean to you at the time?

BRUCE KIDD: I knew about it because I read the newspapers avidly. I was familiar with- it was narratives and those aspirations connecting my own experience to that took a while because I ran for myself. I ran for the joy of it. I ran for my team-mates and I didn't initially see myself as a representative candidate. But as I became more successful, it was conferred on me. And when I won an important race in Boston in January of 1961, it was thrown at me. I was immediately identified with a representative of Canada and Canadian youth, and I had to learn to act. And it took a while and it was it was bumpy. I learnt to accept that. And also, you said, in a way that was consistent with my values and my ambitions. Not everybody you wanted me to represent Canada, wanted me to do it in a progressive way, or they wanted me to do it as an athlete who was spoken to but did not speak. They wanted me to accept the old British narratives of Ready I Ready for the British Empire, and I wanted none of that. I wanted to represent my own generation. I wanted to represent values that my parents and my friends held, some of which were at distance with the dominant sports paid narrative. So part of my journey, which I recount in this book, is learning to speak for the Canadian values that I thought were important, not necessarily the dominant Canadian values and to express them effectively.

MG: What were those values that you say perhaps weren't the dominant Canadian values?

BRUCE KIDD: I shared the aspiration to two Canadian independence and Canadians doing well on a world stage and not being subservient to either the declining British Empire or the growing American Empire. I also grew up in a social democratic family, and I always identified Canada with a commitment to equity and fairness, Canadian independence, Canadian self-expression, but not at the expense of others in a way that recognised, respected and tried to assist others. And even as a little kid in the stumbling interviews and speeches that I began to give, I tried to articulate that and I was always in favour of a form of sport for all. A form of integrity for sport of opposition to cheating. And as I say, it's hard to believe that. But when I was 17 years old, lots of people and lots of media people ask me for my opinion. And I realised that that would be on the front page or certainly in the newspaper the next day. And it took me a while to learn how to do it properly and respectfully. But that was part of my journey.

MG: When you competed at the Olympics in Tokyo in 64, you wrote about how that trip made you realise these are your words. The Olympics and international sports were inescapably connected to progressive politics. What did you learn about the connection between sports and progressive politics at those games?

BRUCE KIDD: Even in its clumsy way, the Olympic Movement was embracing decolonisation and the real engagement of the global south. It was engaging with Asia. And I remember Canada was pretty parochial in the 1950s and early 1960s. If the Olympic Movement was open to all of the very best from whatever countries they came from. And there was something really heady about that. And at the time of the Cold War, there was a tremendous openness to athletes and coaches from the Soviet bloc countries. And again, I'm this little kid, but I made friends amongst athletes from those countries. I began to develop relationships between some of the athletes and coaches, and that was really exciting to be part of that sense of community.

MG: What does that tell you at that moment about the power of sport to change the world?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, I'm answering your question on the next thought about this through a 2021 lens, but the other thing that really knocked me out in Japan was the way that the Japanese government linked staging the Olympics to redevelopment to rebuild this war torn country, to come out from under the U.S. occupation, to assert progressive values around education, and that they saw sport as a driver for that. And as the linchpin for that. And, you know, people said over and over again in the 50s and 60s that the sport has no relationship to society at large. Sport and politics do not mix. It's a wonderful opportunity to detach from society. And in Japan, there was this case study writ large about sport was intricately connected to every aspect of a society that was rebuilding. And I would say a fourth year student in political science and of course, everything I saw in Tokyo and then in Japan afterwards, you know, connected to that and people who couldn't speak a word of English would come up to me, and this is still moving today. And they would bow and they would move their hands together and they would say, No more Hiroshima. As a sports person, please, please speak to the world powers to stop another nuclear bomb. Please, please use your influence in sport to effect that. That was really, really powerful, Matt.

MG: Do sports still have that power now in 2021?

BRUCE KIDD: I think that is a great question. The extent to which people are concerned about the genocide against the leakers and the repression in Hong Kong and are asking Olympic athletes to carry that message forward is an indication that the people still believe in that symbolic power of sport to communicate progressive values the way in which during the last two or three years of MeToo and Black Lives Matter, athletes have become much more active than spewed forth to powerfully communicate progressive messages and really force companies and force leagues to change. I mean, there are there are lots of things that sport can't change, but sports and athletes and leagues and the Olympics can get a powerful, progressive messages. I have no doubt about that.

MG: Why are in the face of I mean, you talk about what's happening with the Uyghurs? Parliament has recognised China's treatment of its weaker minority as a genocide. There is widespread human rights violations. People believe elsewhere in the country, we've just had two Canadians who were scooped up off the streets, been returned and what people have called hostage diplomacy. Why are we sending our athletes to the Olympics in Beijing in February?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, that's a difficult and that's a complicated question. My response is that the Olympics are going forth there and the IOC is not going to change that decision. Canadian athletes and athletes from around the world have prepared for those games, and so it's going ahead and those who are pushing for boycotts. Athletes are being asked not to go. Well, every other sphere of society continues to engage in China in some way. The amount of Canadian trade with China has gone up in the last two years. The extent of our universities accepting Chinese graduate students has not been curtailed. So I think athletes are saying we can't be the only ones who are carrying that message for it. I think it's important for athletes who are committed to human rights, go to Beijing and use the historical legitimacy of an Olympic site to argue for human rights with their Chinese hosts and Chinese competitors. The Olympics has always sought to enhance people-to-people communication, despite the differences in the world as a way of reducing tension in the world as a way of at least creating respectful dialogue through sports. That was the original raison d'etre for the modern Olympic Games and I don't think we've done a good job in that in that we. Simply, but I think that that is a tradition that we should revive and strengthen and certainly afford to go to Beijing and speak out on these human rights abuses should be protected by the IOC in 2008. The IOC told athletes to shut up or go home. That should not happen in 2022. Athletes and other Olympic guests should go with the full protection of the IOC to engage in real, honest dialogue with the Chinese about our concerns.

MG: Do you worry that that sounds like a dated version of what the Olympics are? I mean, you write a lot in the book about the power of sport and what sport can do with the Olympics. Now are a multibillion dollar operation. It's as political as anything in many ways, with billion dollar television contracts, with heads of state going to be seen, with the Olympics being held in some ways as a sign of legitimacy by those countries. So does that argument about the power of sport holed up in the face of what we're seeing in 2021, do you think?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, I worry about that, but I guess what I come down to is. If we only played against people who shared our values and have impeccable human rights records, we wouldn't go anywhere. I mean, would you go to Texas to compete right now with the anti-abortion law on the books? I mean, if we listed the concerns we have about other countries and if other countries listed their concerns about Canada, we would not probably have the kind of international competition we have today. And so I feel that we must at least genuinely take advantage of these opportunities to have genuine dialogue about what we believe. It's not a perfect solution that is that it's true. But in a complicated world, I'd rather have, you know, athletes and others communicating frankly with each other than not engaging at all. We don't need another Cold War. We don't need another whole series of boycott campaigns. We need to find a way to have at least a peaceful world.

MG: You use the phrase sport for all a number of times in this book, what does that phrase mean to you?

BRUCE KIDD: Genuine opportunity for everyone to participate in sport and physical activity with the supports that they need. And increasingly we're seeing that sport is not for all. It's not a level playing field in Canada. It's pay for play for the most part. We're seeing the best opportunities are now costly and they're beyond the ability of most families. We're seeing the administration of public institutions that provided my generation with good physical education and good recreation. All of the survey data show that sport is, it may be rhetorically available to all, but is not enjoyed by all. And the class and an ethnic and other barriers of discrimination are getting higher and higher and higher. I like to point out my friend and colleague Rick Grunow has an article entitled Gordie Howe would never make the NHL Today because his parents couldn't afford the cost of registering for a minor hockey programme and going to a hockey camp and so on and so forth. And you can multiply that a hundred times in what's happening in sport in Canada, and we're one of the better countries.

MG: How do you go about changing that? I mean, sports has become professionalised in many ways, and so much of this book is about the power of amateur sport. How do you level the playing field?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, I think we've got to find ways of restoring the public institutions and putting way more money into giving every, every, every child and what and young adult an opportunity. I think we need to change the way our tax system works to redistribute some of those tremendous revenues that are generated by professional sport and put them into amateur and school and community sport. I mean, in the 20s and 30s in Ontario, when I know I look back a lot, there was a tax on a professional sport that was used to fund amateur sport to build facilities, to create every child, can learn to swim programmes and a.m. hard to believe, but true, we've got to do more of that. We need to make these opportunities universal given the diversity of our population. We also need to ask people what they want. We took to sit down with those who are not participating and ask them what the barriers they face are and how they can be overcome.

MG: What's at stake if they don't. I mean, again, every segment of society is looking for more funding for whether it's health care, whether it's education. So what's at stake if you don't seize on this opportunity?

BRUCE KIDD: I have argued sometimes till I'm blue in the face that we need to dedicate a portion of our health care budget to enhancing physical activity. I mean, apart from COVID, the most serious health challenge we are facing in the world today is non communicable diseases and all of those diseases are affected negatively by active physical activity. We need to find a way as part of our population health strategy to give everyone the resilience, the self-confidence, the physical health, the mental health and mental health that comes from physical activity.

MG: You don't run anymore. Why not?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, my knees and my ankles are now arthritic. I find that the pounding of running quite painful. So I ride my bike. I walk, but I do aerobic physical activity every day.

MG: As you get older, I mean, you're in your late 70s now, what does that mean to you? What is what is staying active mean to you? Because we'll often see people ease up or give up on their physical activities as they get older?

BRUCE KIDD: Well, I think, you know, you're being an athlete teaches you to adapt. And I've certainly had to make some adaptations over my life and I've had some operations and I wear a form of a brace and so on and so forth. But I'm determined to get it at least an hour of aerobic exercise every day and in that in my life is a non-negotiable. It gives me great, great joy. One of the unexpected benefits of COVID has been that my partner and I and a good friend and I have been able to discover and rediscover the ravines of Toronto. What great beauty lies on our doorstep? You see wildlife, it just brings great joy and you're moving, and that brings some great joy.

MG: And you say it's non-negotiable. I mean, if you don't get that hour in a day, you are a different person.

BRUCE KIDD: Grumpy.

MG: There's a good lesson there for the rest of us. I think this is a lovely book about a life. Well lived, Bruce. It's great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

BRUCE KIDD: Oh, thanks, Matt. Thank you very, very much.

MG: Take good care.

BRUCE KIDD: You too.

MG: Bruce Kidd is a former Olympic athlete, a professional professor emeritus at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto and a new author as well. His new memoir is called A Runner's Journey. Your regional update is next, and then the world's first malaria shot will mean tens of thousands of lives saved every year in 90 seconds to doctors from Africa on what it will take to get the newly approved vaccine into arms on the continent. That's coming up. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

Malaria vaccine an historic but imperfect weapon, and other tools cannot be forgotten, scientists say

Guests: Dr. Fredros Okumu, Dr. Githinji Gitahi, Andre Picard

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. Last week, the head of the World Health Organisation called a media conference. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had news about a vaccine and it had nothing to do with COVID 19.

SOUNDCLIP

I longed for the day that we would have an effective vaccine against this ancient and terrible disease. And today is that day. An historic day, this long awaited malaria vaccine is a breakthrough for science. Child health and malaria control using this vaccine, in addition to existing tools to prevent malaria, could save tens of thousands of young lives each year.

MG: A malaria vaccine has been a kind of holy grail in medicine for decades. The parasite kills 400000 people every year, over half of them children. The first vaccine to be approved is known as the RTS.S vaccine or the trade name trade name Mosquirix. It has already been administered to over 800000 children during a pilot programme that was held in Ghana, Malawi and Kenya, and it's been making a difference.

[sc

Having been at trial subcounty for the vaccine, we've seen a reduction in the cases of the severe form of malaria. The numbers have really gone down. So this vaccine, for sure, it is going to help us mitigate on the suffering that has been brought about by this severe form of malaria.

MG: Malaria is a tricky parasite to inoculate against. Mosquirix has been shown to prevent 40 percent of malaria cases and 30 percent of severe cases in clinical trials. It also requires four doses. So for more on what this means in the places that need it most, I'm joined by Dr. Fredros Okumu. He's director of science at the If Akara Health Institute in Tanzania and Dr. Githinji Gitahi. He is global CEO of AMREF Health Africa and a board member of the African CDC. He is in Nairobi. Hello to you both.

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: Hello.

DR. FREDROS OKUMU: Hello. How are you?

MG: Very well. Thank you, Dr. Okumu. I referred to a malaria vaccine as kind of a holy grail in medicine. Is that accurate from your perspective on the ground there?

DR. FREDROS OKUMU: Not necessarily. I think I think I mean, the way I respond to this is this is a very historic announcement itself, but also a historic vaccine. But we've got to realise that it's still a fairly imperfect vaccine. It brings a lot of hope, but we have to understand that the fight against malaria is still far from over. As you said earlier, the vaccine prevents just about 40 percent of cases and about 30 percent of all severe, prevents that 30 percent of severe malaria. So I think that, you know, it's historic in the sense that it's the first malaria vaccine, the first vaccine we have against malaria and actually the first we hope against any parasitic disease. But it is still a fairly imperfect vaccine, and it means we have to do more going forward.

MG: Why is malaria been such a difficult illness to eradicate in Africa, Dr Okumu?

DR. FREDROS OKUMU: Well, there are many reasons for this. I guess part of it we do have an important point to is that, you know, this is a disease that affects mostly poor people. It kills mostly children, not adults. I imagine that if malaria were killing adults or not necessarily poor people, there would be a lot more attention. But there're also biological reasons as to why it's been difficult to get a vaccine against the disease. That this is that, as I said, the first vaccine not just against malaria but against any parasitic disease actually is. It's a fairly difficult job to do. The malaria parasite itself has some an enormous variations on its forms that makes it difficult to make a single vaccine against all its variants. And this has been a challenge for a long time, and we are very, very lucky that you have the vaccine giving you as much as much protection as it is giving us today.

MG: Dr. Gitahi, what have you seen in terms of the impact of malaria in Kenya?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: You know, malaria is fairly common in many of the African countries. So to give my own personal experience, I worked in a national referral hospital is called Kenyatta National Hospital, and being a referral hospital, it would then end up receiving all the severe cases of disease, whether aids for mothers or children. And therefore most of the severe malaria cases would be refined to an admission hospital. Now, I would imagine that in areas where HI endemic, but like the West and Kenya, where most of these studies were going on, that is a regular occurrence in one district hospital, in a health centre before the other kids. My own experience is that we received severe cases. They are probably in, you know, in what you might call a seizure or they may be in coma because malaria manifests itself significantly through the brain what we call cerebral malaria. And then after that, of course, you have many other problems of the child have severe anaemia, so they are completely sick. And my experience is that the kids who die before you do anything, you know. You are unable to find a line to give-- at that point was to give quinine. Now at least we give what is called artemisinin. But still, it's very difficult to find even the line to inject the drug. And the kids would die in my hands and the mother would just shout and go out screaming. They are actually very sad scene, because they have been acutely. This is not a long illness. This isn't someone you knew was sick for two years, this is somebody who got sick two weeks ago or a week ago and then comes severe malaria and dies. And that is extreme shock to the health worker and also to the apartment.

MG: And so given that I mean, what do you see as the promise? There's been a lot of attention paid in the early days to this vaccine. Is it deserving of that attention?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: It is deserving of reputation, of course, with the guarded cushion of optimism of Dr. Okumu that one of the biggest fears, even when we started to look forward to this vaccine because early studies were very clear it will not be 100 percent protective against infection or severe disease. It is to deflect the fear, to deflect attention from other tools like insecticide treated mosquito nets. So as long as we make sure that is an additional tool. What I like to call the SwiftKey strategy, just like in COVID 19, we've told people to wear a mask but also wash their hands and also social distance so that no single intervention that gives you full protection. And this malaria vaccine is an additional layer, as you would layer Swiss cheese on top of the mosquito net, the insect treated mosquito net. So we must not drop our guard on the tick that trigger mosquito nets because of too much optimism on the new vaccine, which Dr. Okumu has explained fairly well that has 40 percent protection against infection and 30 percent against severe disease. So it's a Swiss cheese tragedy.

MG: What is the next step? OK, I'll use your analogy in rolling out that next layer of Swiss cheese. How do you go about ensuring that the vaccine gets to the people that need it the most?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: So there are many steps here from a policy point of view, so the clinical clock has been done, W.H.O. has confirmed based on their, you know, on the samples that have been tested, I think between 3000, 4000 cases. Sample has been used for this study. They're fairly good at safety efficacy. That is only one step. The next step is now to think about registration because that has to be registered in the countries where it's going to be used. Please note that this vaccine is predominantly plastic because it is developed for what we call the Falciparum parasite, which is very specific to Africa, not the one, not the malaria that's available in India and South America. So in Africa, the countries have then to individually register the new vaccine. That's a process of registration. Secondly, the manufacturer has to provide the pipeline for production of the vaccine, will need to see how that goes. And finally, I have to be money to budget and administer this vaccine. And that is likely to be a composition between the African countries, Africa Union and WTO and the Global Vaccine Alliance to ensure that there is resources to budget and deliver the vaccine to the country. So this could take maybe six to 12 months or even 12 to 18 months. So it's not immediate.

MG: Dr. Okumu, from your perspective in Tanzania, what do you see as roadblocks that might be in place to ensuring that this vaccine gets to the people who need it the most?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: Well, I think I think the roadblocks are the same across many sub-Saharan African countries, and especially the 10 countries with the highest burden of malaria that will need it most. The estimations we have from WHO and from previous modelling studies suggest that the vaccine will give you the best, the greatest gain if you use it in places with the highest burden of malaria. This is why it's going to save most lives, and so individual countries will have to do some form of stratification to decide where exactly they should put the vaccine. And it happens that some of the places with this button are also the remotest places. They are the places farthest from the grids that the most difficult places to access. So I think that we're going to face exactly the same health challenges that we've been facing in other forms of treatment. And this, in my opinion, I think it's like Dr. Gitahi was saying, you, you have this is going to take a very long time. It's going to take some negotiation in financing. It's going to take some trade-offs on what to do here and there. I am hopeful that it will also mean that people can marshal up a little more resources so that we are not having to take funding from something else to put on the vaccine, but rather getting more financing to improve malaria control overall. But in terms of the challenges, I mean, this is going to be very much similar to the other challenges that you have. You know, people are concerned already that you have a four dose vaccine this you have to do this four times by the first three doses to give every three months after the first month. And then you have a booster dose and the second year, two to seven months. And this is a no in malaria, unlike many other diseases, infects kids multiple times in their lifetime and early childhood. So these boosters are very, very essential. And when you have a vaccine that has to be delivered in four doses, this adds a complexity to the health system challenges. This is something that, you know, countries are going to have to press forward and to get ready for but it's not insurmountable. I mean, there have been more difficult things before. And very, very fortunately the evidence the WHO has finally used from the pilot studies, it came from a programme where the vaccine was given alongside other childhood immunization and childhood immunisations generally in Africa have been amongst the most cost effective. They have been amongst the best performed health programmes. Coverage can be very high for things like polio vaccines, measles vaccines, even some vaccines that mothers have never seen kids get sick. For some people, I've never seen actually, mothers have never seen. So we have high hopes that if it's delivered as part of the expanded programme of childhood immunisations, that coverage will remain high. That's that it can be done even though it's for four doses. But yeah, we have to fix the supply chains. We have to get the financing. We have to get people to be aware of that there are limits on the efficacy of the vaccine. We have to get the health care workers to do it right and be able to deliver at their father's places. Back to you.

MG: Can I just ask you just I mean, this is a parasite that is largely affecting poor people that you referred to it a couple of times as treatable. How worried are you that this is going to detract from some of the larger, systemic issues that you have been hinting at? Dr. Okumu.

DR. FREDROS OKUMU: You know, if the other things were giving you 100 percent protection, then I would be worried about a suboptimal product diverting attention. But we don't have that luxury when we deal with malaria. First, as I say, it affects mostly poor people, affects mostly young children of the 400000 deaths that we talking about every year. Most of these are in African children. So there's a sense in which this is a neglected disease, if you like, it doesn't have as much attention as we would wish that it had. But I don't necessarily think that we should use the word distraction from existing tools. I think we should view this just language. As you were saying earlier, we should view this as an additional intervention that can be put in the arsenal and then individual countries have to do their own mathematics and say, what is the best mix? Where do we put, you know, intervention x plus the RTS.S vaccine? Where how many nets do we need? How many vaccine doses do we need? But this is a decision that countries have to make based on data from their own populations and create a package of what you would call a magic mix of tools that would give them the best outcome of that particular year. But overall, I think the international community and the countries must really look at getting more financing instead of trying to divide the existing pie into smaller pieces. If we just rely on the existing pie size, obviously, the only way to deliver this would be to take funding from other sources. Now, I am very excited that, you know, we have this likelihood of groups such as Gavi, the Global Vaccine Alliance, which, as you know, has been incredible at promoting childhood vaccinations and COVAX in Africa. And they're going to be a serious player in this, I believe. And if they do, then you'll have a little more effort because they're not traditionally worked on malaria. Now they're going to be because we have a vaccine investor. So I think that if we bring in more players, more financing, better decision making, better data use, then we can accrue the benefits that are predicted by WHO.

MG: Dr. Gitahi, do you see this as a change in the narrative for what Dr. Okumu has referred to as as a neglected disease in some ways?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: Well, this is positive I think we will need because we have for a very long time complained about neglected tropical diseases and therefore the pharma, the research and development companies, which are literally the pharma companies that have the money to do research and development, have focussed for a long time on research for diseases that are not tropical diseases because of the return on investment, because of their shareholder value. And therefore, when we see, you know, that pharma company like GSK has done focussing on a tropical disease that is positive and that would encourage that to happen with all the other neglected diseases so that, you know, research fund for research and development companies are not only focussed on diseases that are behind an investment and likely in Europe or another American, so it is a positive direction.

MG: Do you see at some point in time in your lifetime malaria eradicated on the continent?

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: It is possible. I truly, truly, as a public health practitioner working with children wherever in across the continent, I will look forward to that happening. And we have seen it eradicated elsewhere. So why not in Africa? We just need to ensure that these tools are used together, they are used together. And also, there is cross-border collaboration because malaria doesn't carry a passport. Mosquitoes don't need a visa to travel from Congo to the next country. So there has to be very close border collaboration between countries. Implementation of international health regulations as defined by WHO. And that collaboration will make sure that countries can work together to eliminate malaria through vector control. And also this multilateralism to ensure there is actually financing to eradicate malaria and the vaccine is an extreme measure, an extra measure on top of the other tools to achieve this future that we dream of.

MG: Doctors, it's good to speak with you both about this. Thank you very much.

DR. GITHINJI GITAHI: Thank you so much.

DR. FREDROS OKUMU: Thank you, have a wonderful day.

MG: Dr Fredros Okumu is director of Science at the If Akara Health Institute in Tanzania. Dr. Githinji Gitahi is global CEO of AMREF Health Africa and a board member of the African CDC. Andre Picard has been listening in. He is the Globe and Mail's health columnist and of course, has been keeping us keep on top of health news over the course of this pandemic. Andre, good morning to you. Good morning. We'll talk about COVID, of course, but what do you make of what our last guests had to say about this vaccine for malaria?

ANDRE PICARD: Yes, I thought the guest presented a very balanced view about the limitations of this vaccine. But at the same time, it's very exciting that we have this, you know, it's a proof of concept. It's going to spur interest. But it also the other point is that it's very much like cognitive vaccination is not a miracle to end a pandemic like malaria. We have to have other measures, so we have to invest more in nets, insecticide nets, anti-malarial drug spraying says a lot of other things to do. So I think both those points are very important. But it's it is exciting to be talking about a big killer like malaria in addition to things like COVID.

MG: Let's talk about the vaccines here in Canada. When it comes to COVID, there's a lot of talk around, in particular vaccines for younger kids. In British Columbia, kid

ANDRE PICARD: We don't know exactly. We know that the manufacturer Pfizer has made a request in the U.S. already that are likely going to make a request for regulatory approval in Canada, probably this week. So we expect it may be, you know, the best case scenario would be just after around Halloweens at the end of the month. If they do things really quickly, but likely around Christmas before the new year, it's coming very soon. So B.C. is, I think, being very smart to get organised to get the logistics ready. Earlier, when we had adult vaccination, we kind of waited until was approved to get going and we can't afford to do that. We can't afford to waste time.

MG: Is your sense that other provinces are following suit, that they are going to have the infrastructure in place so that when this vaccine is approved, they can push a button and go?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, one would hope they should all be doing that. It makes sense. We know this is the big unvaccinated population. About half of all are unvaccinated in Canada under the age of 12, so we really have to get to that demographic. So it's in everyone's interest to get the logistics ready.

MG: If you take a look at an unvaccinated population in Quebec now, unvaccinated nurses are facing having their licences suspended by the government on Friday. And there are concerns that this could lead to stress in the health care system that there could be staffing shortages. What do you make of those concerns in this moment?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, the concerns are legitimate that are also there is a concern of having unvaccinated workers. And I think what the government taking a really hard line, I think it's the right thing to do. I think we see from other jurisdictions like New York that if you don't blink, the workers will get vaccinated. You know, if you have to choose between a good, unionised job and having some point of principle or whatever it is or pig headedness and saying I'm not getting a shot. The vast majority of people go and get the shot. So I think we're going to see an interesting couple of days, a lot of nail biting, but I think ultimately this is the right thing to do.

MG: You wrote in the paper that if you work in the health care field, you need to get a COVID vaccine or, in your words, find another line of work. What sort of pushback is there, this far into the pandemic? What kind of pushback is there to a narrative like that?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's not really clear. You know, there's the small, anti-vaccine loud people, but a small minority saying that this is an outrage, et cetera. But we don't really have a good sense of why the workers are doing this or seem to be a big pushback in the health field, a lot of it just seems to be difficulty getting the shot, a little bit of fear, anxiety, waiting to see how things play out. So it's not really clear, but I think we have to remember that health workers have all kinds of rules that they have to obey. There's a lot of mandatory vaccination already for things like hepatitis B. You can't even get into nursing school. So this is not an unusual demand to make it workers, but it's just under this very big microscope called COVID, and it's meeting the debate more complicated.

MG: Do we worry, though, and do you worry that in a sector of the health care system that is already faced a lot of stress? We've spoken with nurses over the course of the pandemic, they're burnt out. Many of them are leaving the profession that this could drive people out of the profession.

ANDRE PICARD: The number one problem in health care today, without a doubt, is labour shortages, the mistreatment of workers. I understand why a lot of workers are frustrated, why they're leaving. But the answer to it is not to say, well, the rules don't apply to you. You can put patients lives at risk. That's not the way to solve this problem. It's a huge problem that has to be dealt with. And the way to do it is not to turn a blind eye to the pandemic.

MG: You're seeing this in British Columbia as well. As of today, those working in long term care will need to be vaccinated to stay on the job. And I mean, there are reports coming from this morning, CBC has them and others, saying that because of that shortage of workers, seniors perhaps could be confined to their beds in long term care because there won't be enough people there to help them out in those long term care homes. You said earlier that, you know, governments can't blink, but do you think in the face of that that you could see some blinking that you could see governments perhaps step back from that line?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, again, it's an issue that's existed even before cold, that there wasn't a single shift that was fully staffed in long term care homes in Canada. So this is an ongoing issue. And to blame it all on COVID now, I think is disingenuous. This problem existed. It's made slightly worse by COVID, but you can't afford to put people in homes that put the lives of residents at risk, whether they're unvaccinated for COVID, whether they're going in there drunk smoking in people's faces. These are all the same things. We don't tolerate them and we can't tolerate unvaccinated workers, especially in long term care, which is the most vulnerable population of all.

MG: just in the last 90 seconds or so that we have. This time last year, you know, we did not even have vaccines that were available to people. Now you have talk of boosters. There was a story about a first nation in Vancouver Island where there were high vaccination rates, but cases are creeping up, suggesting that perhaps this vaccine can wear off. Where are we at when it comes to booster shots in this country, do you think?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, we have to look at the utility of them, especially for high risk populations. I think we have to seriously start looking at vaccinating people, elders in long term care. We see waning immunity, maybe health care workers. This is going to be the reality for COVID for years to come. We're going to have to find ways to adapt. There are going to be boosters, but for the general population at this point, it doesn't seem necessary, but very specific groups have to be targeted and we have to plan for that quickly. The good news is we have a lot of vaccines, so we can do this.

MG: That this is going to be something that we're going to be dealing with, as you say, for a long time down the road. This is not a one time or two time kind of shot.

ANDRE PICARD: No, absolutely not. And this is, you know, we're going to see this settle in like the flu, or maybe it mutates more often and we have to adapt the shots. This is a reality we're going to have to adapt to. But overall, as you said in the past year, things are dramatically better and we tend to forget that in our day to day worries that things are doing a lot, lot better.

MG: Andre, good to speak with you, as always. Thank you very much.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

MG: Andre Picard, health columnist with The Globe and Mail That is The Current for this Tuesday. Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend! Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. We were speaking earlier with the long distance runner and Olympian Bruce Kidd about his memoir A Runner's Journey. We heard a bit from Runner, which is a 1962 NFB documentary about a very young Bruce kidd who was 19 at the time. W.H. Auden wrote poetry for this film based on Bruce kidd's words about his passion for the sport. And so we'll leave you this morning with a bit more poetry about running from Bruce Kidd and W.H. Auden. I'm Matt Galloway thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

All visible, visibly moving things spin or a swing, one of the two, move is the limbs of a runner do to and fro, forward and back, or as they swiftly carry him in orbit, go round and endless trek.

So everywhere every creature is sporting itself, according to the law of its making in the rivals dance of a balanced pair or the ring dance around a common centre. The lights the eye by its symmetry as it changes police blessing the unchangeable absolute rest of the space they share.

[Music]

Speed is inborn in sprinters muscle, but long learning alone can build stamina and strength up by instruction only can limbs learn to live their movement without thinking? All important is leg action arms or a balance of more movement is mileage run than time taken?

[Game commentary]

Oh, we have the. The bombing in the three mile event hit first or second, and trucks learn. The camera's eye does not lie, but it cannot show the life within. The life of a runner or yours or mine. That race, which is neither fast nor slow for nothing, can ever happen twice.

That story, which moves like music when begotten notes new notes begin making the flowing of time a growing till when it could be at last, it is where faith is freedom, grace and surprise.

[Music]

Tuesday 12 October, 2021 Full Transcript

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