Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

by Jeremy Schaap

  Responding to another—“How did you get to be so fast, Jesse?”—Owens said, “The coach at my old high school told me, ‘Jesse, you just make believe that track’s a red-hot stove lid and let your feet touch it as little as possible. Each foot of that pair you’ve got should try to beat the other one to it,’ so I’m using my feet and legs with one idea, and that is to get there.”

  Going through his final paces before heading to the vicinity of the starting line, Owens exchanged pleasantries with the other finalists. A fierce competitor herself, Holm watched in awe and admiration as Owens took the proceedings so nonchalantly. “Jesse gave me the day’s laugh when he shook hands with another runner before starting,” she wrote. “It strikes me he must have been saying goodbye before departing on his fast journey. Hitler and his visiting guests saw the handshake and they had grins on their faces for an hour afterwards.”

  Ruminating on the enormous crowds gathered at the stadium, Holm reported, “Hitler can sure pack them in—even thicker than Clark Gable.” She may have been the only person ever to compare the Führer with Rhett Butler.

  Although Owens was clearly the favorite in the finals, a bad start would mean victory for Ralph Metcalfe. It was really that simple. Against Metcalfe, there wouldn’t be enough time for Owens to make up for a poor start—maybe against Osendarp or Borchmeyer, but not against Metcalfe. Owens’s thoughts drifted back to the previous summer, to the long mornings and afternoons he had spent retooling his start with Charles Riley, who had not been able to travel to Berlin. He thought about all that Riley had done for him and somehow felt his old coach’s presence. He looked around and saw, at the edge of the infield, Snyder, who, as always, was worrying enough for them both but trying not to show it. Even from a distance he looked as if he was about to be sick.

  For Owens, as for other runners, a perfect start was achieved, technically, only by cheating, by beating the starter’s pistol by a split second, undetectable to the human eye. In the heats, Franz Miller had made it easy for Owens to just beat the gun. Owens felt it would happen again.

  The crowd was in a joyous mood. Karl Hein had just thrown the 16-pound hammer more than 180 feet, establishing a new Olympic record and handing Germany its third gold medal of the games, in the process outdueling his compatriot Erwin Blask.

  For Leni Riefenstahl, however, the hammer-throw competition had been ruined when a field judge kicked her cameraman, Guzzi Lantschner, off the field. “You bastard!” Riefenstahl screamed at the judge. “What do you think you’re doing?” He did not respond, but he did report Riefenstahl to his superiors.

  “It wasn’t long before I was handed a note summoning me to the rostrum,” she later recalled, “and I feared the worst.”

  Before she could reach the rostrum, Goebbels cornered her in the corridor outside. “Just who do you think you are?” he shouted, all but striking her. “Have you taken leave of your senses? I forbid you ever to enter the stadium again! Your behavior has been scandalous!”

  Riefenstahl was seething. The subtext of Goebbels’s hostility was still her refusal to sleep with him.

  “We were given permission,” she said, trying desperately not to break into tears. “The German judge had no right to pull the cameraman from his place.”

  Goebbels was unmoved. “I order you to discontinue your filming here immediately,” he said, and then he turned and walked away.

  The tears came, and Riefenstahl slumped to the ground. She heard the sound of footsteps. When she looked up, Goebbels was standing before her again.

  “Stop crying,” he said. “There’s going to be an international scandal. I order you to apologize to the judge immediately.”

  Riefenstahl grudgingly complied. She was eager to get back to work, for she knew, as did everyone else, that the main event of the afternoon was at hand. Finally the 100-meter final was about to begin.

  Back on the field, Owens did not seem even slightly apprehensive. Only his muscles seemed to tense, and only when he assumed the set position. His shirt—red, white, and blue stripes running diagonally from his right shoulder to his waist, an Olympic crest over the left side of his chest—was flecked with mud.

  With her director’s eye for detail, Riefenstahl captured the moment: “The stadium was deathly still. A hundred thousand people were almost afraid to breathe. Metcalfe crossed himself before kneeling down at the starting line; Jesse Owens had the far inside track [the least desirable]. In his white coat, Miller, the starter, gazed in unshakable calm at the runners kneeling in their starting holes.”

  Then they were off.

  Despite the poor conditions, despite his position on the extreme inside lane, the muddiest part of the track, despite the pressure, Owens started perfectly, maybe a nanosecond before Miller pulled the trigger, and instantly surged to the lead. All those hours with Riley the previous summer had paid off. As he climbed out of his crouch and came to his full height, his legs started churning, his stride lengthened, his arms pumped rhythmically, and at 50 meters it seemed to be over. Wykoff was his closest pursuer, a full yard behind. Only by falling could Owens lose—or by turning behind to see the rest of the field. But Owens did not fall. Or look backward. In the final 20 meters, Metcalfe closed the gap slightly, but Owens maintained his form and his focus. With one last surge, he suddenly felt the tape break against his chest. It was over. He had done it. The gold was his. Metcalfe had lost by 4 feet—then had come Osendarp, Wykoff, and Borchmeyer. At 10.3 seconds, Owens’s time equaled the world record, a stunning feat considering the muck on which he had run.

  Snyder threw his hat into the air and whooped in pleasure. From the crowd, a deep roar rose up and filled the stadium, crashing onto the infield, where Owens soaked it up—a black American in a sea of Aryans. A representative of a supposedly inferior race had won the games’ most prestigious competition—and the master race did not seem to mind very much. For the Führer, whose hopes of a Nordic upset had been dashed, the crowd’s enthusiasm was probably as confusing as the affection showered on the French in the opening ceremony.

  After a moment, Jesse Owens talked to some reporters. “Metcalfe ran a great race,” he said. “So did Wykoff.” Then, catching his breath, he continued, “This is the happiest day in my life. I guess it’s the happiest I will ever have.”

  Then he slipped on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and moved to a wooden platform where a microphone and a camera had been set up to record his victory statement. “I’m very glad to have won the one-hundred meters at the Olympic games here in Berlin,” he said, “a very beautiful place and a very beautiful setting. The competition was grand and we’re very glad to have come out on top. Thank you very kindly.”

  The political implications of Owens’s first victory were immediately apparent. “I can’t help wondering,” Bill Corum wrote from the press box shortly after Owens broke the tape, “if Herr Hitler was thinking about the racial superiority of pure Aryan strains as he saw the Midnight Express whip past. And Jesse, he doesn’t even stop to whistle for the crossings.”

  As Owens mounted the medal stand and the announcer stated that the gold medal had been won by “Jesse Owens, U.S.A.” the crowd, perhaps winded by its earlier effort, offered warm if not overwhelming cheers. “Candor compels me to report there was even a finer cheer when Osendarp, the Hollander, standing on the same platform, was announced as having come in third,” Gallico reported.

  Then, after the medalists were announced, a band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As two American flags were slowly raised—one for Owens, one for Metcalfe—Owens could be seen wiping moisture from his eyes.

  When the music ended, he was led by an Olympic official from the field into the grandstand, and it seemed for a moment that, unlike Cornelius Johnson, he might be introduced to the Führer. “There was considerable excitement in the press box when it looked as though local Jim Crow rules might be off to honor Owens’ victory,” Gallico wrote, “and in charge of an official, he was steered towards the box of Chanc
ellor Hitler in which was also seated Herr Streicher, Germany’s number one hater.” The writers stood up from their seats to get a better view of the meeting that they thought was about to take place. “However,” Gallico wrote, minutes after sitting back down at his typewriter, “Owens was merely led below the honor box where he smiled and bowed and Herr Hitler gave him a friendly little Nazi salute; the sitting down one with the arm bent.”

  This was the moment Owens would later recall, then choose not to recall—the birth of the myth of Hitler’s snub.

  Alan Gould of the Associated Press saw it like this: “Chancellor Hitler exchanged hand waves with Owens, who later said the track seemed heavy and he regretted there will not be another opportunity to regain the world record taken away from him because the wind exceeded four miles per hour.”

  Owens himself disputed that Hitler had shown him any disrespect and told several reporters that Hitler had indeed waved to him.

  William L. Shirer, no friend of the Third Reich, wrote, “Hitler’s salute to him after the race pleased Owens. He said: ‘It strikes me, he’s a good sport. I like his smile.’”

  “‘Mr. Hitler had to leave the stadium early,’” Louis Effrat of the New York Times quoted Owens as saying when he was later asked how it had felt to be snubbed by the Führer, “‘but after winning I hurried up to the radio booth. When I passed near the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.’”

  Hitler did not receive Owens, but he did not snub him—at least that’s not how Hitler’s actions were perceived by eyewitnesses such as Gallico, or by Owens. In fact, the Washington Post headline that accompanied Gallico’s story proclaimed, “Hitler Waives Jim Crow Law to Extent of Saluting Owens.”

  “Jesse swears he saw Hitler wave to him,” Snyder also said. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. I wouldn’t know. Maybe Hitler made some sort of gesture in the course of his conversation with a henchman sitting near him.”

  The black press, not quite unanimously, saw a snub where Owens said he saw nothing. The headline in the Baltimore Afro-American was typical: “‘Adolf’ Snubs U.S. Lads.”

  The Cleveland Call and Post was livid. Under a banner headline on its front page that read “Hitler Snubs Jesse,” an unidentified reporter wrote, “Herr Hitler, Nazi dictator of Germany, deliberately snubbed Jesse Owens, the outstanding athlete at the Olympic games . . . Hitler went out of his way to snub Jesse Owens after his record-breaking run [actually, it was a record-equaling run] in the 100-meter race.” The Call and Post provided no further details. It did go on to say, “Much feeling has been worked up against the whole American team because they did not dip their colors when the parade on opening day passed Hitler’s box, nor did the Americans give the Nazi salute. Then, too, the present German administration is as much anti-Negro as it is anti-Jewish. Therefore, Hitler is trying to avoid showing Negroes any courtesies that may be interpreted as granting them equality.”

  Among the black papers, the Pittsburgh Courier—which, unlike the others, had two correspondents in Berlin—offered a different take. “It has been demonstrated since Sunday that when Chancellor Adolph Hitler left the Olympic Stadium a few minutes before Cornelius Johnson and David Albritton, champion American high jumpers, were to be presented, no snub to them or colored Americans was intended,” the Courier reported. “On Monday, Robert L. Vann, editor of the Courier, cabled this newspaper from Berlin that the German Chancellor had extended the same courtesy and encouragement to Jesse Owens that he gave the other athletes. Hitler was forced to leave the Stadium when he did and Germany officially explained that he did not intend to slight our athletes.” In fact, in its edition dated August 8—the Courier was a weekly—a bold-faced banner headline declared, “Hitler Salutes Jesse Owens.”

  Then again there was the Chicago Defender, which, relying on its “foreign press service,” and perhaps its imagination, reported that Owens “has captured everyone in Germany but Hitler, who has very conveniently avoided congratulating Owens.”

  The snub story was everywhere. The editorialist of the New York Daily News, which had agitated for the boycott, wrote, “There has been a cloud over the Berlin Olympics largely because of Der Fuehrer, Hitler. He has declined to shake hands with, or receive, our colored athletes because they do not qualify as Aryans. He has conspicuously refrained from saluting them, but he has made it a point to shake hands with the true-blue Nordics. It probably galls Hitler to see his racial theories, as they relate to physical superiority, conspicuously disproved. As host to the 1936 Olympics, he has displayed very bad manners.”

  William L. Shirer, an eyewitness, said much the same. “Each time Owens trotted up the track after a smashing win the German spectators stood and gave him thunderous applause,” Shirer wrote. “But Hitler, I noticed from my seat in the press box a few feet away from him, turned his back to talk to some cronies. One of these was Baldur von Schirach.”

  A twenty-nine-year-old German aristocrat with an American mother, Baldur von Schirach was the leader of the Nazi Youth and, in Shirer’s words, “a handsome young man of banal mind.” In 1946 in Nuremberg, after rounding up and sending to their deaths thousands of Austrian Jews, he was convicted of conspiring to commit crimes against humanity. In 1936, though, he had not yet murdered anyone and suggested to the Führer that he allow himself to be photographed with Owens.

  The Führer did not just refuse. He was outraged. “The Americans ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting their medals be won by Negroes,” he said to Von Schirach. “I myself would never shake hands with one of them.”

  17

  Day Three

  * * *

  BERLIN: TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 1936

  JESSE OWENS had no time to rest on his laurels. There were too many others to be collected. In fact, Tuesday would be the busiest day of his Olympics—and the most consequential of his life. In the morning he would have to scurry back and forth across the track to compete in both the first round of the broad jump and the first round of the 200 meters. Both events were scheduled to begin at 10:30. Then, assuming all went well, he would be back on the track at 3:30 for the 200-meter quarterfinals and then, at 4:30, for the broad-jump semifinals. Finally, the broad-jump finals would commence at 5:45, by which time, assuming he had not been eliminated, he would have run two sprints and made up to six punishing jumps. It was good to be twenty-two and healthy.

  The bad news was the weather. The sun peeked in and out of the clouds through most of the morning, but the temperature never rose to 70. It was humid and there was a constant biting wind. Again the conditions at the stadium would not be conducive to the breaking of world records—particularly not in the broad jump. The air was too heavy.

  When he arrived at the stadium, Owens took some time to speak with the American reporters. One of them asked if he thought he might be able to equal Alvin Kraenzlein by winning four gold medals at the games.

  “I think maybe I can do it,” Owens said. “I feel fine. I think I ought to cop the broad jump today and I will run the race of my life in the two hundred tomorrow. Then, if all goes well, I’m going to run in the relay on Sunday, and if we win it, that will make four of those yellow medals.” Never before had Owens mentioned the possibility of running in the relay and winning a fourth gold medal. Of course, if he were to run, someone would have to be removed from the relay—someone, in all likelihood, who would not yet have won a gold medal.

  For most of the great sprinters who have excelled at both 100 meters and 200 meters, the 200 meters has been the easier race to win consistently. It is also less nerve-racking. Often a runner can overcome a bad start in 200 meters. Luck is less important than it is at the shorter distance. The 200 meters might also be a better test of innate speed. While the 100-meter champions have always been referred to as the world’s fastest humans, the 200-meter champions actually run faster. Truly great sprinters are still building speed at the 100-m
eter mark; the average velocity of 200-meter champions has almost always been greater than the average velocity of 100-meter champions.

  Ironically, while Owens is best remembered for his other victories in Berlin, it was the 200-meter competition that he most thoroughly dominated, beginning on the morning of August 4. He was running in the third of eight heats, against runners from Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Philippines, and Denmark. Only Lee Orr, the Canadian, was of world-class caliber. After observing the first two heats from the infield with his teammates Bobby Packard and Mack Robinson, who would both run later, Owens went to the starting line for his heat. The sun had come out, and the temperature was 66 degrees. He looked at the four white men and the Asian who were also toeing the line. Then he put his head down and waited for the gun.

  With every race, Owens grew to appreciate Franz Miller, the starter, more and more. There was the even, precise way he called the runners to their marks, and the predictability of his pacing. He continued to make it possible for Owens to know exactly when the gun would be fired—which is all that a runner can hope for. Now it went off again, and Owens was again off just at the gun, or just before it. He stretched himself out, accelerating smoothly, constantly, and broke the tape 10 yards in front of Orr, his closest pursuer. Orr, in fact, had run the distance in 21.6 seconds, the fourth-best time of the forty-four competitors, but he still lost the heat by a full half second. Owens’s time, 21.1 seconds, was a new Olympic record.

  Then it was time for the broad jump.

  In the sprints, the only athletes Owens considered serious rivals for the gold medals were his fellow Americans. In the broad jump, however, there was Carl Ludwig “Luz” Long. The twenty-two-year-old from Leipzig was not quite Owens’s equal as a broad jumper, or the equal of a healthy Eulace Peacock, but he had been having a magnificent season, destroying the German and European records. For what it was worth, Long was the greatest broad jumper the Old World had ever produced. Still, Owens and Snyder were confident that an easy victory was at hand. After all, no one in the history of the world, old or new, had ever jumped as far as Owens; no one had come close. If Owens jumped 25 feet, 6 inches more than a foot less than his personal best, he was still likely to win.