He's the five-time champ of America's fastest growing sport. His fights sell out arenas and millions of fans in 36 countries worldwide tune in to telecasts weekly and pay top dollar for exclusive pay-per-view events. He's Randy Couture: the Ultimate Fighting Champion. The simple title belies the near inhuman strength it has taken to kick, choke and claw his way to the top of professional fighting. From early days on his high school wrestling team to the Army and Olympics, this Washington native has built a career on years of training--perfecting his signature style referred to as the "ground and pound." Losses on and off the mat take their toll, but also drive Couture to cement his title as "the best fighter of all time."
Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.
A finale that puts history's verdict on trial
The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.