Four Golds in Berlin

In the summer of 1936, a young man stood at the end of a long-jump runway in Berlin. Above him, flags hung from the great new Olympic Stadium, and a hundred thousand people watched in near silence. His first two attempts in the qualifying round had not counted. If the third went wrong, his Olympics in the long jump would be over.

He was twenty-two. His name was Jesse Owens, and he had come a very long way to stand there.

Cotton fields and a new name

James Cleveland Owens was born in 1913 in Oakville, Alabama, in the American South. He was the youngest of ten children. His parents were sharecroppers: they farmed land owned by someone else and gave much of the crop away as rent. His grandparents had been enslaved.

The family was very poor. James was often ill, and in winter there was not always enough food or warm clothing. As a small boy he picked cotton beside his parents and brothers and sisters.

When he was about nine, the family moved north to Cleveland, Ohio, hoping for better work and fewer of the cruel laws that kept Black families down in the South. On his first day at his new school, the teacher asked his name. He said "J.C.", in his soft southern accent, and she heard "Jesse". The name stuck for the rest of his life.

Running before school

At junior high school, a teacher and coach named Charles Riley noticed how fast Jesse was. Jesse had jobs after school to help his family, delivering groceries and working in a shoe-repair shop, so he could not stay for practice. Riley offered to train him before school instead.

So, morning after morning, Jesse ran while the city was still waking up. Riley taught him to run lightly and smoothly, his feet barely touching the ground. He also taught him patience, discipline and good manners, and Jesse never forgot him.

By the end of high school, he was one of the fastest young sprinters in America. He went to Ohio State University. He could not live on campus, because Black students were not allowed in the dormitories, and he worked part-time jobs to pay his way while he trained and studied.

Forty-five minutes

On 25 May 1935, at a college meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jesse Owens had a sore back. He was not even sure he could compete.

He did. In about forty-five minutes, he set three world records and equalled a fourth: in the 100 yards, the long jump, the 220 yards and the 220-yard low hurdles. Nothing like it had ever been seen in a single afternoon.

Berlin

The 1936 Olympic Games were held in Berlin, in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler's government wanted the Games to show off its false belief that some races of people were superior to others. Some Americans argued that their team should stay away. In the end, the team went, and Jesse Owens went with them.

On the first days of competition, he won the 100 metres.

Then came the long jump. In the qualifying round, his first two attempts did not count. One more mistake and he would be out.

What happened next has become one of the best-known stories in sport. Owens later said that the German jumper Luz Long came over and suggested he take off from a little way before the board, to make sure he did not foul. Some historians are not sure the conversation happened exactly as Owens remembered it. What is certain is that Owens qualified safely, and that in the final, he and Long had a magnificent contest. Owens won gold. Long won silver, and was the first to congratulate him. In front of the whole stadium, the two young men walked together arm in arm.

They wrote to each other afterwards. Luz Long was killed in the Second World War, and Owens stayed in touch with his family for many years.

Owens went on to win the 200 metres. Then, as part of the American team, he won the 4 × 100 metres relay. Four gold medals, at the Games that were meant to celebrate a lie about race.

Coming home

Back in the United States, Jesse Owens was welcomed with a parade through New York. But America had not changed. He later described how, at a hotel reception held in his honour, he was told to use the service lift rather than the main entrance. He was never invited to the White House to be congratulated by the President.

There was little money for a Black athlete in those days, even an Olympic champion. To support his wife Ruth and their daughters, Owens took whatever work he could find, including running exhibition races, sometimes against horses. He was not ashamed of it. He had a family to feed.

In later years, he travelled widely, speaking to young people about sport, fairness and hard work. In 1976 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of America's highest honours. He died in 1980.

The boy from the cotton fields of Alabama had shown the world, in the most powerful place he could have chosen, that speed and courage belong to no single race.

Want to read more?

Jesse Owens told his own story in Jesse: The Man Who Outran Hitler, written with Paul Neimark. Jeremy Schaap's Triumph is a careful modern history of those Games, and Owens's results are listed on Olympics.com.