The Times Great Lives by Anna Temkin

Author:Anna Temkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008164805
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Jesse Owens

Memorable performance at the Berlin Olympics

31 March 1980

Jesse Owens, the great black American sprinter who won four gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona. He was 66 and had been ill for some time. Not only did Owens win four medals in athletics events in Berlin, an individual medal haul that was to stand as a record for many years, but his performance will be remembered as being particularly galling to Hitler who had intended the games as a showpiece for Nazi Germany and as a propaganda exercise for his repugnant philosophy of Aryan supremacy.

Jesse Owens was born in Alabama on September 12, 1913, one of 11 children of a poor share cropper. Later, when disaster struck local cotton crops, his family was forced to move north to Cleveland, Ohio. At school he became a shoe-shine boy in his spare time and his ambitions might well have been circumscribed by the aim of having a shoe shop of his own when he grew up, if he had not attracted the attention of a sports school coach named Charles Riley, who persuaded him to take training seriously.

This move soon bore fruit when in 1933 he equalled the world record 9.4 seconds for the 100 yards at an interschool athletics meeting in Chicago. Owens attended Ohio State University and broke his first world record in 1935 when, while representing the university, he ran the 220 yards low hurdles in 22.9 seconds.

In the following week at the college championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he performed the astonishing feat that first signalled his immense potential to the athletics world when he broke five world records and equalled a sixth. He opened the meeting with a time of 9.4 seconds for the 100 yards, which equalled the world record. In the second event he broke the long jump record with a jump of over 26 feet. Next to fall was the 220 yard mark (and with it the 200 metre record) and he went on to break his own 220 yards low hurdles record, rounding off the meeting by breaking the 220 yards high hurdles.

These performances assured him a place in the United States Olympic team of 1936 where he won gold medals in the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump, and the 4x100 metres relay. This success enraged Hitler, who snubbed Owens by refusing to shake hands with him. Owens, however, bore no grudges and was delighted to be invited to the Munich Olympics of 1972. After retiring from the track he had a variety of jobs in what was at first a somewhat chequered career, but eventually he settled down to operate a public relations firm in Chicago where he lived.

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