It Only Took Jesse Owens 10.3 Seconds To Stun The World And Rebuke The Nazis
This day in history
The year is 1936 …
And American track and field athlete Jesse Owens is about to stun the world and dismantle Adolf Hitler’s racial supremacist propaganda in approximately 10 seconds at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
In one of the greatest athletic achievements in American history, Owens stormed into the Nazi capital, won four gold medals, and set individual Olympic records in the 100 meters, long jump, 200 meters, and the 4 x 100-meter relay. He won his first Gold in the 100-meter sprint with a time of 10.3 seconds on Aug. 3. It was a glorious display of talent, grit, and American exceptionalism.
Not only that, Owens, as ESPN writer Larry Schwartz put it, “single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.” Hitler and the Nazi Regime believed that any human who was not a pure-blood German “Aryan” — whether Jewish, black, or from the British Isles — was physically and intellectually inferior, a subhuman creature who should be treated with contempt and cruelty. A Nazi official even whined that Americans were letting “non-humans, like Owens and other Negro athletes,” compete in the Games, according to Schwartz. It makes Owens’ victory, who was born into poverty in Alabama in 1913, so much sweeter.
Schwartz also made note of two surprising anecdotes about Owens and the 1936 Olympic Games. The first is that many Germans in the crowd actually cheered him on, with some fans seeking him out for autographs and pictures. The second is that Owens befriended a blue-eyed, blonde German long jumper, Luz Long, during the qualifying round. Owens made two foul jumps, but before his third and final one, Long suggested he mark his takeoff spot several inches back to err on the side of caution and avoid another disqualifying mistake. Owens listened to Long’s advice, and it worked.
“It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler,” Owens later said. “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II.”
Sad, indeed. Tragic. But also inspiring. Not every German was a mindless Nazi. Clearly, some saw beyond the racialist ideology and the ramblings of a madman who had brainwashed so many people. Some saw in Owens what unites humans – a love of sports and good-natured competition – rather than what divides them.
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