Helsinki Olympic Stadium

This guide to Helsinki Olympic Stadium centers on its concrete tower, and the surprising reason architects Yrjo Lindegren and Toivo Jantti gave it exactly seventy-two point seven one metres: the length of Matti Jarvinen's world-record javelin throw at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, stood on end. You'll hear how construction ran through the 1930s toward a 1940 Olympics cancelled by war, before the stadium finally hosted the Games in 1952. It also traces how renovators decades later had to work around the tower's protected shell rather than through it. Stand at its base as you listen.