Olympic Affair by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

For Leni, the stadium on the first day of competition was a studio, a stage, and the spectators were only bit players and a collective backdrop. She deliberately dressed a bit frumpily, almost matronly, with an especially conservative and baggy suit with long skirt and white hat, to emphasize her seriousness as the woman in businesslike charge.

In the afternoon, Jesse Owens lined up for his second race of the day, a quarterfinal heat. As she had been for Jesse’s easy win at the morning session, Leni was on the infield, near the finish line, with Erich Nitschmann and a big tripod camera. She was perched underneath the camera, looking up. She knew one of her crews was stationed in the pit along the outside of the track, at the corner past the finish line. She was gratified to see several of her cameramen, as ordered, again focusing on Owens at the starting line area, from the outside of the track and from the inside. Watching him run for the first time that morning, she had noticed that rather than concentrating as if he were wearing blinkers, he sensed the cameras’ presence and even played to them. Leni always had maintained that cameras invigorated—rather than distracted—true “performers,” including athletes and leaders speaking at podiums. She pictured the cameras’ film of the powerful Negro, tense as he moved into the set position and then broke at the sound of the starter’s gun. Owens won easily, and the judges announced his time was a world-record of 10.2 seconds. As he had at his morning race, he found a camera after the finish and walked right at it, smiling.

Leni was thrilled: The nigger is a showman!

She was mildly surprised to see the Führer arrive in his box during the afternoon. He already had backed down from his resolve to skip the frivolity of athletics after the opening ceremony! After Owens’s race, she looked up at Hitler’s box to see if the Führer had a noticeable reaction to the runner’s dominance. He didn’t seem to be paying attention.

For the next three hours, as she hustled from position to position, checking in with cameramen through the women’s javelin, shot put, 800-meter heats for the men, and the 5,000-meter finals, one of the Führer’s aides breathlessly caught up with her, saying Hitler asked that she visit him at some point. She could see that Göring was in the box with the Führer, but she didn’t see Goebbels. After she climbed the private stairway under the stands, she went through the room and into the box. Hitler spotted her and brightened.

“Fraulein, we can see you running around down there faster than the athletes—except the niggers, of course.”

“I’m glad you changed your mind and came,” Leni said.

“I decided that when there aren’t more pressing matters, I can play the good host for the athletes . . . at least most of them.”

Göring said, “And we have started off with a bang . . . two German gold medals already!”

Leni

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