why did long speak to owens during the trials?
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When Jesse Owens collected his fourth gold medal of the 1936 Olympics as a member of the United States 4x100m relay team – his 12th event, including heats, in the space of seven days – he completed a unique sequence of achievement that still stands as an incomparable indicator of sporting excellence. The 22-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers and grandson of slaves, Owens was competing in the most intimidating environment imaginable. The scene of his triumphs was Berlin, where the racist ideology of the Nazi regime was building towards its full, awful intensity - and where the great instigator himself, Adolf Hitler, was a regular spectator in the stands of the Olympic stadium.
Nazi propaganda was already portraying negroes as “black auxiliaries”. And, as Albert Speer, Germany's war armaments minister, recalled in his memoirs, Inside The Third Reich, Hitler was “highly annoyed” by Owens's series of victories. Speer added: “People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilised whites and hence should be excluded from future Games.”
To maintain a peak of achievement over a whole week in such an ugly moral environment was a mark of Owens's courage and determination.
He won the 100m and 200m with relative ease, despite some high-class opposition. The margins of his victories did not diminish their sporting and cultural significance. His final track gold – he helped set a sprint relay world record that would stand for 20 years – was slightly marred by a selection controversy which was a reminder of the ugly themes that were never wholly absent from the background of the Berlin Games. Two Jewish athletes, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, were dropped from the US relay team on the morning of the first heats, and Glickman for one was convinced that the US Olympic Committee president, Avery Brundage, had adjusted the team in order to avoid exacerbating the Führer's sensibilities. It was one unedifying episode which diminished the lustre of Owens's final Olympic flourish. Yet part of the glory of his Olympic achievement was the fact that, as relentlessly as the racists of various nations tried to poison the proceedings with their messages of hate, his own personal story continued to demonstrate the other side of the Olympic ideal: not the jingoistic one, but the ideal of sport as a force that can bring the human family together. Which brings us, belatedly, to Owens's second medal.
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