“NOT merely the fastest but incomparably the most beautiful. He seemed to float along the track like water,” The Guardian reported in 1936, as Jesse Owens blew the lid off the greatest series of individual performances of the Berlin Olympic Games. Hurtling over the finish-line to clinch gold in the 100 metres, Owens’ effortless majesty was reported all around the world as the planet stood still for all but one man. Four gold medals – in the 100m, 200m, long jump and 4 x 100m relay – were hauled home.

The landscape surrounding Owens’ feat provides startling context to the magnitude of these achievements. In the political maelstrom that swirled around the Games, Hitler sought to use the Olympics as a platform to assert the superiority of the German people, anticipating a monopoly on medals that would visibly reinforce the polemics sustaining the systematic persecution of non-Aryan people. The Nazi party’s paper had called for Jews and black people to be barred from competing, relenting only after other nations threatened to boycott the Games.

Amidst this would come the Games’ defining image, as Luz Long, a German long-jumper and Owens’ competitor, offered advice to his opponent that would see Owens win his second gold medal. Long set an Olympic record during the preliminary round and coasted through; Owens, meanwhile, notched up two fouls. With one jump left to seal a place in the finals, a defeated Owens conceded it was a step too far, and slumped down in despair. At this point, Long stepped forward, and suggested Owens take off several inches before the line. His thinking was underpinned by the logic that Owens repeatedly leapt beyond the distance needed to progress here, and would nonetheless qualify with ease. Jumping with four inches to spare, Owens slipped through under Long’s guidance.

In the final Long hit the leading jump. But it was Owens’ day. Landing a jump of 8.06 metres, he took gold; Long, silver. After the podium ceremony, Long tucked his arm under Owens’, and they strode, united, from the track.

In a climate where notions of white supremacy reigned, Owens returned to America and remained faceless to the powers that were. “When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus,” Owens said. “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.”

In truth, the rest of Owens’ life played out incongruously against his Olympic heyday of 1936. Returning to America to capitalise on the newly-surfaced lucrative commercial interest, US athletic officials responded by withdrawing his amateur status to bring the curtain down on a career that shook the world. The perceived interest quickly waned. He lived the remainder of his life stuttering between ephemeral sports projects and mundane nine-to-fives. A chain-smoker for most of his years, he died in 1980, from lung cancer.

Yet Owens’ story remains among of the greatest the Olympic Games has ever produced. His place in the pantheon of heroic sportspeople, of great mobilising historical figures, is assured forever. In less than a week, he produced four moments that challenged Hitler’s regime in the country where it first surfaced, foiling the plan the Nazis had meticulously outlined. He entered a land where the black man was anonymous; he departed festooned with four gold medals as the face that defined an Olympics.

Katie Whyatt 

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