[transcript]

25:06 Michael Schumacher made his Formula One debut in August of 1991. Pakistan beat England to win the Cricket World cup for the first time ever. And 1992 marked the last time that the Summer and Winter Olympics occurred. In the same year, the Summer Olympics held in Barcelona saw the first unified german team since 1964, while the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania sent their own teams for the first time in many decades, while a dozen other former members of the USSR formed the unified team and competed together. The separation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into parts meant that this was the Olympic debut for the countries of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzkovina. UN sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of present day Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, meant that it could not send a representative team, though some of their athletes chose to participate as independent Olympic participants after having been banned for many years due to apartheid. South Africa was allowed back after a, quote, hotly contested women's 10,000 meters race. The gold medalist ethiopian runner Darartu Tulu, a black woman, and the silver medalist south african runner Ilana Mayer, a white woman, in a show of friendship, solidarity or mutual respect, ran a victory lap together, hand in hand. This feels cheesy saying it out loud. It felt cheesy writing it on paper. But when I imagine it, when I picture it in my head, I can see how moving it would be. Apartheid wasn't even completely dismantled at this point. Negotiations were still contentious. There had been plenty of other high profile incidences of racial tension, racial violence, and if there's one thing the Olympics is really good at, it's at grand displays of humanism. This is also the Olympics of the dream team for U. S. Men's Olympic basketball, the first Olympiad in which professional basketball players from the United States were allowed to compete. Previously, professional basketball players from Europe and South America were permitted in the games, but not us pros. The US team was usually college athletes, and japanese athlete Iwasaki Kyoko took gold in the women's 200 meters breaststroke at the ripe old age of 14 years, six days becoming the youngest gold medalist swimmer, woman or man in Olympic history, a record I believe she still holds today, which makes a decent segue into talking about Japan specifically during these two years. The prime minister for most of this period was Miyazawa Kiichi, who by the time he retired sometime after this, would have been a member of the Diet for more than 50 years. He had been minister of finance under Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, but had resigned when he'd been implicated in the recruit scandal of the late 1980s, which we've discussed before, but basically amounted to insider trading by members of the diet. During his tenure, the LDP retained control of the diet, but only in coalition and only by a slim margin. He's remembered for being the first japanese leader to acknowledge that their military had coerced women into sexual slavery before and during World War II, the so called comfort women, for which he formally apologized while in South Korea in 1992, his government also passed a law that allowed Japan to send its self defense forces overseas for peacekeeping missions, which they did during the Gulf War and would continue to do subsequently. Not an accomplishment per se, but Miyazawa was also famously vomited upon by US President George H. W. Bush during a state dinner. I can imagine how much all the political pundits would have read into this, too, like it would have been such a big deal at the time. And now it's just a weird thing that happened. Emperor Akihito made a first imperial visit to China. And just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev made the first ever visit of a soviet leader to Japan, a visit which failed to resolve the long standing dispute between Russia and Japan over the Kurel islands.