Berlin 1936

Hitler spent $25 million turning Berlin into a movie set. Anti-Semitic posters were taken down. Buildings were whitewashed. The city was rehearsed, polished, masked, and costumed. At the center stood the Reichssportfeld — a new Olympic stadium complex carved into a Berlin hillside. Granite, limestone, Olympic rings cast in bronze. The perfect backdrop to remind every nation in attendance of Aryan supremacy — the Nazi belief in white European racial superiority.

One man took only seconds to disprove Hitler's lifetime of racist propaganda.

James Cleveland Owens — son of a sharecropper, grandson of an enslaved man — was born in Oakville, Alabama. He picked cotton as a boy. When he was nine, his family moved north to Ohio as part of the Great Migration: millions of African-Americans leaving the segregated South for the industrial North in search of a future their country wouldn't allow. A schoolteacher misheard his Alabama-accented "J.C." as "Jesse." The name stuck.

Charles Riley, a white track coach at Fairmount Junior High in Cleveland, spotted Owens' speed at age twelve — and noticed he rarely came to practice. Because Owens worked an after-school job to help his family, Coach Riley met him at six in the morning every weekday and trained him in the empty schoolyard for years, one-on-one. His career began in that morning sun.

In 1933, fewer than 1.3% of African-Americans aged 25 or older held a college degree. Though they say college opens doors, Owens found many closed in his face at Ohio State University. He was denied an athletic scholarship, couldn't live on campus, and had to eat at segregated restaurants when the team traveled. In college, Owens was breaking assumptions, barriers, and records. He won eight individual NCAA championships — more than anyone in college track history, before or since.

Coach Larry Snyder turned him into "the Buckeye Bullet." At the Big Ten Championship in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he tied one world record and set five others in forty-five minutes. Sportswriters called it the greatest forty-five minutes in the history of the sport. Owens called it an afternoon in May 1935.

He was twenty-two when he boarded the SS Manhattan in New York Harbor, in July 1936. It was the first time he had ever left the United States. In many parts of his own country, he could not be born in the same hospital, married with the same Bible, nor buried in the same graveyard as his teammates. He was going to run anyway. No matter how he felt about that country … and no matter how that country felt about him, he was ready to prove to himself what he could really do.

The American team almost didn't go to Berlin at all. The Nuremberg Laws — the Nazi statutes that stripped German Jews of citizenship and outlawed marriages between Jews and non-Jews — had been on the books for nearly a year. Jewish athletes had been systematically barred from training facilities, sports clubs, even from competing for their own country.

The NAACP and several American Jewish organizations urged a boycott. The NAACP's argument was sharp: African-Americans, of all people, knew what state-sponsored racial supremacy looked like — and should refuse to lend it the legitimacy of their athletic excellence. NAACP Secretary Walter Francis White notoriously drafted a letter urging Owens not to go, but he never sent it.

East gate of the Olympic Stadium, August 1, 1936  ·  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division  ·  Public domain

The American team that set sail was diverse — Owens was one of eighteen African-American athletes, alongside his college friend, sprinter Ralph Metcalfe. Two American sprinters never got to race. Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller — Owens' only Jewish teammates — were pulled from the 4×100 relay and replaced with Owens and Metcalfe. Glickman, who went on to become one of America's most famous sports broadcasters, spent the rest of his life calling it what it was.

Meanwhile, Germany was showcasing its one and only Jewish Olympian. Helene Mayer — a fencer who had been living in America for two years — was invited back to compete for Germany so the regime could deflect international criticism. On the podium to receive her silver medal, she gave the Nazi salute.

Owens was receiving the first customized sneaker before the races even began. Adolf "Adi" Dassler, a Nazi Party member and German shoemaker who would later found Adidas, walked uninvited into the Olympic Village with a pair of hand-made track spikes. He gave them to Owens, though accounts vary regarding whether or not Owens raced in them. The social, national, and cultural contradictions were literally placed at Owens' feet.

The story everyone has been told is simple: Hitler refused to shake Jesse Owens' hand. He walked out of the stadium, unwilling to acknowledge the implications of Owens' victory.

This story is not true. Not the way it's been told. What actually happened is more complicated, and ultimately more revealing. The myth was created by American sportswriters shortly after Owens first won the 100m. By the time Owens sailed home, the villain narrative of Hitler's snub was already running on three continents. He spent the rest of his life politely correcting it. Most people kept telling it anyway.

The 100 metres track at the Reichssportfeld, Berlin, 1936  ·  Bundesarchiv, Bild 183 series  ·  CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE

Four gold medals in eight days. A record that held for forty-eight years, until Carl Lewis matched it in Los Angeles in 1984. The crowd — one hundred thousand Germans, told for years what to believe about the people Owens came from — chanted his name. "Yes-say O-vens! Yes-say O-vens!"

And in the middle of the long-jump competition — when Owens had fouled his first two attempts and was one bad jump from elimination — a German athlete named Luz Long walked over and suggested he take off from six inches behind the board. Owens qualified. Long finished second. Owens won gold. Long crossed the field, embraced him in full view of Hitler's box, and walked him on a victory lap arm in arm. They wrote to each other for seven years. Ludwig "Luz" Long — drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German army — was killed in battle on Sicily during the Allied invasion on July 14, 1943. He was thirty.

Long had written Owens one last letter from Sicily. If he didn't come home, he asked Owens to find his son Kai after the war. The letter was delivered after Long's death. Owens kept it for the rest of his life. Decades later, he tracked Kai Long down in West Germany and stood with him at his father's grave.

The Waldorf Astoria, New York  ·  Hotel advertisement, c. 1936  ·  Public domain (US, pre-1978, no renewed copyright)

Jesse-Owens-Allee, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Berlin  ·  Photograph via Wikimedia Commons  ·  CC-BY-SA

After being on top of the world for a week, Owens returned "home" to the racialized reality of America. A sharecropper's son from Oakville, Alabama wins his first gold because his German competitor helps him. They embrace in front of Hitler's box. Owens comes home and cannot enter his own banquet through the front door.

The country that was supposed to hate him gave him a friend. The country that was supposed to love him gave him the service elevator. That's the irony — and the beauty.

Sports don't fix the world. They show us what is there. Through them, we can see the whole world in one magical moment.