The long-jump qualifying round at the 1936 Berlin Olympics nearly ended in disaster for the fastest man on Earth. Jesse Owens, already crowned 100 metres champion, fouled his first attempt and botched his second — one more mistake and the reigning world-record holder was out. The story goes that Luz Long, Germany's tall, blue-eyed champion and the Reich's model athlete, walked over and suggested Owens mark a spot well before the board and jump from there. Owens qualified easily, took gold that afternoon with a leap of 8.06 metres, and Long was the first to congratulate him, walking arm in arm with him past Hitler's box. Owens polished the details of the towel-on-the-runway tale over the years — he was a generous embellisher of his own legend — but the friendship it describes was entirely real.
Owens had come a long way to that runway. Born James Cleveland Owens in Oakville, Alabama, in 1913, the tenth child of a sharecropper and the grandson of enslaved people, he moved north with his family to Cleveland in the Great Migration. A schoolteacher there misheard his drawled "J.C." and wrote down "Jesse", and the name stuck. At Ohio State he was nicknamed the Buckeye Bullet, yet he received no scholarship, worked lift-operator and waiting jobs to pay his way, and had to live off campus with the other Black students.
His greatest single day arguably came before Berlin. At the Big Ten meet in Ann Arbor on 25 May 1935, competing with a sore back after falling down a flight of stairs, Owens set three world records and equalled a fourth in the space of about 45 minutes — including a long jump of 8.13 metres that stood as the world record for 25 years. Sports historians still call it the greatest three-quarters of an hour in athletics.
In Berlin he won the 100 metres in 10.3 seconds, the 200 metres in 20.7, the long jump, and the 4x100 metres relay in a world-record 39.8 — four golds at a single Games, a track-and-field feat not matched until Carl Lewis repeated the same four events in 1984.
The snub that wasn't Hitler's
The most famous story of those Games — Hitler storming out rather than shake Owens's hand — is not quite what happened. On day one, Hitler publicly congratulated only German winners; the International Olympic Committee's president, Henri de Baillet-Latour, told him he must greet every champion or none. Hitler chose none, so by the time Owens won anything, the Führer was congratulating nobody. Owens himself said Hitler waved to him, and pointedly told audiences back home that in Berlin he could ride at the front of buses and stay in the same hotels as whites. "Hitler didn't snub me," he said. "It was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Franklin Roosevelt, facing a re-election campaign, never invited him to the White House. After a ticker-tape parade in New York, Owens had to take the freight lift to attend his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.
There was an uglier American subplot inside the Games too. The day before the relay, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller — the only Jewish athletes on the US track team — were dropped, and Owens and Ralph Metcalfe inserted. Owens protested that he had won enough and the pair should run; he was told to do as he was told. The suspicion that US officials were sparing their hosts embarrassment was never proven, and never forgotten.
After the flame
Luz Long took silver behind his friend and the two exchanged letters for years. Long, drafted into the Wehrmacht, died in July 1943 of wounds suffered during the Allied invasion of Sicily; in a last letter he asked Owens to seek out his son after the war and tell him about his father. Owens did, keeping in touch with Kai Long for the rest of his life.
Owens's own aftermath was harsher than the myth allows. When he cut short a post-Games exhibition tour to go home and earn, US athletics officials withdrew his amateur status almost overnight. Stripped of competition, the four-time Olympic champion raced against horses at fairs for money. "People said it was degrading," he reflected. "But you can't eat four gold medals." He later rebuilt his standing as a speaker and goodwill ambassador, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford in 1976, and died of lung cancer in 1980. Berlin, the city that was supposed to showcase Aryan supremacy, now has a Jesse-Owens-Allee beside its Olympic stadium — the theory outrun, permanently, by the sharecropper's son in ten-point-three seconds.
Quiz nuggets
- Jesse Owens won four golds at Berlin 1936: the 100m, 200m, long jump and 4x100m relay — matched in the same events by Carl Lewis in 1984.
- At Ann Arbor on 25 May 1935 Owens set three world records and equalled a fourth in about 45 minutes; his 8.13m long jump stood for 25 years.
- German long jumper Luz Long, who befriended Owens in Berlin, took silver and died of wounds in Sicily in 1943.
- Owens said the real snub came from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sent no telegram and no White House invitation.
- Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jewish athletes on the US track team, were dropped from the relay the day before it was run.