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

by Jeremy Schaap

  Suddenly, as adrenaline started to surge through Owens’s veins, the pain subsided. At 3:15 p.m., the cinders crunching under his spikes, he got down on one knee, took the garden trowel that was lying on the dirt, and started digging a hole into which to plant his right foot. Runners still performed this task in 1935, because starting blocks were rarely used.

  Now Owens could see both Riley and Snyder. Both wore unfamiliar faces of anxiety, and remarkably, it took Owens a moment to remember why they were anxious. Oh, yes, the pain. But for him, it had disappeared. At the moment he was about to run, he had always been able to shut out all distractions. His ability to focus—for all sprinters an invaluable asset, because their margin for error is so slim—was one of his great strengths. Settling into his starting position, Owens felt not soreness but the almost indescribable elation he always felt when he was about to run at full speed. At a certain level, he knew that when he ran at full speed, he was capable of running faster than any human had ever run. But the joy came from a deeper place. The knowledge of his own capacity for greatness made him thankful, humble, and proud.

  Getting up from the dirt, stretching his arms, then his hamstrings, then, again, his lower back, Owens thought to himself, Pain? What pain?

  One hundred yards away, six timers were standing by the finish line, stopwatches at the ready. Like the runners, they were waiting nervously for the gun. When it was fired, Owens was off, but as usual, not very quickly. The greatest sprinter the world had ever known was never a fast starter. But he could afford to wait. “About everybody beat him off the start,” said Bob Collier of Indiana University, who was also in that race. “But after thirty yards, it was no contest.”

  As was his custom, 30 yards from the starting line, Owens exploded, like a powerful engine that has finally warmed up. His short, effortless strides attained a spectacular rhythm, his body accelerating without any apparent effort. His famous, textbook form held steady—his posture never altered, no motion was wasted, his upper body was perfectly straight. If his back was still hurting him, no one could tell. Ten yards from the tape, he was still accelerating, a blur. As he broke the tape—his eyes straight ahead, because he was confident that no one was anywhere near him—the stopwatches clicked and a wave of applause rose from the crowd.

  Three timers had clocked Owens at 9.4 seconds, the other three at 9.3. Unfortunately, the three official timers—three were alternates—clocked him at 9.3, 9.3, and 9.4, and as was customary, the slowest time would be the official time. Big Ten timers, including the head timer, Professor Phillip Diamond of the University of Michigan, were known for their slow thumbs and stodgy rules. Unlike most timers, Big Ten timers held that a runner crossed the finish line only with his so-called center of gravity, not with his nose, arm, or knee. In a further attempt to prevent his timers from being too generous, Diamond advised them to click their stopwatches only when they saw a runner’s back foot cross the finish line. His fussiness probably cost Owens a world record; as it was, his 9.4 tied the world record he already shared with the two-time Olympic gold medalist Frank Wykoff.

  In the stands, Riley was still on his feet, still cheering. On the track, Snyder, always emotional, was jumping up and down, pumping his fist. He had been worried that Owens might throw out his back; now he ran to the spot where the sprinter was catching his breath to offer his congratulations. “Jesse,” he said, “that was phenomenal. I don’t know how you did it.”

  “I could have gone faster,” Owens replied flatly. Then, stretching out his back, he turned to answer a reporter. “I’m not bragging,” he said, “but I really did get a bad start. Frankly, I am a little bit disappointed.”

  But there was no time for him to linger in his disappointment. Fifteen minutes after the 100-yard dash, he was preparing to launch his body into the broad-jump pit. In the previous day’s Los Angeles Times, Snyder had predicted that Owens would soon break the world record, then held by Chuhei Nambu of Japan, of 26 feet, 2 inches. Over the course of more than two thousand years—the ancient Greeks were broad-jump enthusiasts—the record had moved barely 2 feet. In the Times, Snyder told Francis J. Powers that Owens “can do a full 27 feet if he will concentrate on his takeoff.” For his part, Powers ventured a guess: “It may be that Owens will find the board in the Big Ten meet in Ann Arbor, and, if so, Nambu . . . and others who have planted their spikes on the records will be dismissed from the books.”

  Now, as he readied himself to jump, Owens, in a rare display of showmanship—Riley had trained him to accept victory and defeat (however rare that might be) with the same good grace—gently placed a white handkerchief 26 feet, 2 inches from the takeoff board. He wanted a target—Nambu’s mark—even if it was barely discernible from the takeoff board. Like Snyder, Owens knew that the broad-jump record would eventually be his. In training sessions he routinely jumped farther than Nambu had jumped; it was just a question of when he would get all the details right in a competition. For Owens, like most sprinters who moonlight as long jumpers, jumping was much more punishing than running. For this reason, and because he was so much better than almost anyone he competed against, he rarely jumped more than once or twice in any given meet. Those jumps, though, were usually awe-inspiring.

  As Owens was preparing to hurl himself down the track and toward the pit, Snyder came up to him and told him, needlessly, to concentrate on his form, to generate as much velocity as possible before he hit the board—and, most important, to measure his steps carefully so that he would neither foul nor leap too far back on the board. Form didn’t matter much to Owens, because he always had it.

  At 3:35, as Riley and Snyder—and everyone else at Ferry Field—trained their eyes on him, Owens started running toward the takeoff board, 108 feet away. As the distance dwindled, his speed rapidly increased. He was moving fluidly, his arms pumping, his gait natural. He hit the board in full stride—there was no stutter-stepping to prevent fouling. Then he was in the air—for less than a second, but his body got so high so fast that it seemed he might sail entirely clear of the pit. The crowd knew somehow that they were witnessing that rarest of feats, unequaled athleticism matched with flawless execution, and gasped. Michigan State’s athletic director, Ralph Young, was standing beside the pit, which was lined with dozens of spectators. Young later told Larry Snyder that Owens jumped over his head “by about a foot,” and a famous photograph seemed to prove his assertion. Finally Owens’s feet crashed into the sand. He knew too. He had flown directly over the handkerchief.

  Still, it took a few moments to measure off the distance. Then the track announcer, Ted Canty, turned on his megaphone. “We have a new world’s record,” he said, stating the obvious. “Twenty-six feet, eight and one-quarter inches!” Nursing a sore back, Owens had broken the world record by more than half a foot.

  Albritton and Walker rushed over to congratulate him. Riley pumped his tiny, clenched fist. Snyder smiled, as if to say, “I knew it. It was only a matter of time.”

  This time Owens was tempted to jump again, just to see if he could reach the 27-foot mark. But there was no time. He was due at the starting line for the 220-yard dash. The world record, set by Roland “Gipper” Locke of the University of Nebraska in 1924 and tied by Ralph Metcalfe in 1933, was 20.6 seconds. Standing on the field not far from the track, seventeen-year-old Tom Harmon had gotten caught up in the excitement. Harmon was in Ann Arbor on a recruiting trip—the Michigan football team wanted him badly—and he would go on to win the 1940 Heisman Trophy for the Wolverines. But on this day he was simply an awed teenager. Owens, Harmon thought, was “absolutely beautiful.”

  At 3:45—just ten minutes after hurtling nearly 27 feet through the air—Owens, who had now completely forgotten how sore his back had been, threw himself down the track once more. This time his start was clean, and for all but the first few yards of the race he was utterly alone. Even without anyone to push his pace, he picked up speed with each stride, until it seemed that his feet were barely skimming the track. Then th
e stopwatches clicked again. Another world record—20.3 seconds. No one had ever before set two world records on the same day. In the stands, Charles Riley’s was only one among thousands of voices going hoarse in Owens-induced ecstasy.

  Snyder, too, was truly pleased. In two years at Ohio State, Owens had been spectacular, but barely more spectacular than he had been in high school. Snyder’s fellow coaches had not given him any credit for the records Owens had set; on the contrary, they thought—most of them, anyway—that he had either stalled Owens’s progress or that Owens had nothing more to give. “Every coach in the Big Ten was watching me with a critical eye,” Snyder said, “to see how I would handle him.” Now no one could deny Snyder’s role in the development of Jesse Owens. Owens had come to Snyder gifted but raw; now he was gifted and invincible. The victories belonged to Owens, but finally there would be acclaim for Snyder too. More than ever, their reputations were linked.

  The Jesse Owens whom Snyder was now watching was unlike any track-and-field athlete he or anyone else had ever seen. Owens was graceful and swift and unflappable. Soon sportswriters around the United States would take to calling him, among other things, “the Ebony Antelope.” The predominant track star of the previous decade, Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, a middle- and long-distance runner, wasn’t beautiful to watch. You can admire the stamina of a great distance runner, but you can’t really enjoy watching someone run 10,000 meters, 25 laps around a track. Owens, in contrast, brought joy to the huge crowds that gathered when he competed. His races became events.

  In the 1930s, track and field didn’t attract quite as many fans as baseball and boxing and horseracing, but it was far from a niche sport. The results of the big meets were printed in daily newspapers of every size. The big national columnists—Grantland Rice and Paul Gallico and others—dedicated hundreds of column inches every year to runners, jumpers, and weight throwers. Jim Thorpe, the 1912 Olympic decathlon champion, was widely considered the greatest athlete who’d ever lived. (These days, no one thinks that the Olympic decathlon and pentathlon champion is the world’s greatest athlete. He’s considered little more than an acutely focused specialist, someone who’s spent years mastering the intricacies of the javelin and pole vault but probably couldn’t play tight end in the National Football League.) Tens of thousands of people regularly filled stadiums from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to watch college track meets. Young men with running ability weren’t necessarily snatched up by football coaches to play running back and wide receiver; most of them went out for the track team first and then maybe the football team, if their track coaches allowed it.

  The final event in which Owens competed that day was the 220-yard hurdles. For all his gracefulness, he was an awkward as well as a reluctant hurdler. His form was nonexistent. He jumped too high and never in stride. Additionally, he didn’t much like the hurdles. He didn’t like anything that slowed him down. But as long as he was not feeling too much pain, Ohio State—and Larry Snyder—needed him to run the hurdles. At 4 p.m., having set two world records and equaled another in the previous forty-five minutes, Jesse Owens was once again ready to race. As he crouched into position, a sharp pain shot up his back—but only for an instant. It was gone by the time he had settled into position—a reassurance, actually, that his injury was manageable. Then, the gun.

  Owens ran hard, then, reaching the first hurdle, slowed considerably, cleared it, then ran hard again, slowed, cleared another hurdle, then accelerated, again and again and again. At each of the ten hurdles, the field gained on him; on the flats in between, it faded. “It was like an accordion,” Francis Cretzmeyer of Iowa, who finished third, said. Still, Owens won by 5 yards. His time, 22.6 seconds, beat the world record by four tenths of a second. But the world’s best 220-yard hurdler had so little regard for the event that he rarely chose to compete in it.

  In the stands, when the time was announced, Charles Riley shook his head slowly, marveling at what he had witnessed. The rest of the spectators were less pensive, cheering madly, rushing the field, clamoring to get near the young man who had just set his third world record in less than an hour. (Technically, Owens had set two more world records. His times in the 220-yard dash and 220-yard hurdles were also recognized as the world records for the 200-meter dash and 200-meter hurdles, respectively, because, despite the fact that the metric distance is about four feet shorter than the imperial distance, he ran the imperial events faster than anyone had ever run the metric events.) No one at Ferry Field that day could have known that Owens’s records would all prove remarkably durable, especially the broad-jump record. It would stand for twenty-five years, an eon in track and field.

  At the recent summer Olympics, in Athens in 2004, sixty-nine years after Owens’s historic day in Michigan, his 26-foot, 8¼-inch leap would have been good for ninth place. Imagine if Owens had had the advantages the athletes in 2004 had had—the equipment, the supplements, the rubberized track, the wind-resistant clothing. His records might still stand.

  “I broke out that Saturday in Michigan,” Owens later recalled. “It wasn’t only overcoming physical pain; it had to do with overcoming something psychological inside myself.” He could not have known that there were still greater moments ahead. Physically, perhaps, he peaked at Ferry Field. But in every other way he was still improving.

  That afternoon, Alvin Silverman of the Cleveland Plain Dealer managed to track down Owens for a phone interview. To Silverman, whom he could barely hear, he repeated what he had said earlier. “I want to tell you something, if you won’t think I’m getting swell-headed. I really believe I can run the 100-yard dash in 9.3 seconds. I’m not bragging, but I really did get a bad start.”

  Silverman then asked Owens how Charles Riley had reacted to his feats.

  “Mr. Riley? He didn’t say anything to me. He started to give me the big rah-rah, and then I’ll be doggone if he didn’t break down and start to cry. He put his head on my shoulder and cried like a kid.”

  The crowd that gathered outside the locker room was so thick that Owens decided he had to escape through the back. Snyder said farewell to him, then he hopped out the bathroom window and into Charles Riley’s Model T. Together they would ride back to Cleveland—and a hero’s welcome.

  2

  Out of Alabama

  * * *

  CLEVELAND: 1929

  THE LEGS. They were what Charles Riley first noticed. They were perfect. Before he knew the boy’s name, before he knew whether he could run, before anything else, there were those legs. “My father’s long, lion-spring legs,” Jesse Owens called them.

  A fifty-year-old coach and physical education instructor at Fairmount Junior High School in Cleveland, Riley had observed thousands of boys and girls. But he had never seen legs like these. Even when Jesse Owens was just walking, his oddly symmetrical and powerful legs made it seem as if he were moving more swiftly than everyone else. Immediately Riley knew there was something special about this Owens kid.

  Born on December 11, 1878, Riley had grown up in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, and as a young man had worked in its mines. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mauch Chunk was one of America’s richest cities—the so-called Switzerland of the United States—with more millionaires per capita than anywhere else. But the Rileys were no millionaires. (Oddly, Mauch Chunk is the only town in the United States deeply associated with America’s two greatest track-and-field athletes—probably the two greatest track-and-field athletes anywhere, ever. In 1954, in an effort to attract tourists as its economy stagnated, Mauch Chunk and neighboring East Mauch Chunk agreed to merge and become Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, despite the fact that Thorpe had never been to either Mauch Chunk or East Mauch Chunk.) Riley was slight, pale, and nearsighted, but physical exertion thrilled him. When he saw Jesse’s legs, he recognized in them limitless potential.

  For about a year Riley simply watched and waited. When Jesse was running and jumping at recess or in his gym classes—naturally, no one could catch him—Riley was there,
taking mental notes, planning the boy’s future without the boy’s knowledge. Then finally, one day when Jesse was thirteen, Riley decided it was time to introduce himself.

  “Your name’s Jesse, am I right?” he said.

  In Alabama, where Jesse had been born and had spent the first nine years of his life, it had been rare for him to be addressed by white men. In Ohio, that had changed. Still, he was too nervous to speak. He could only nod.

  “How would you like to be on the track team when you get into high school?”

  “I’d like that plenty,” Jesse said. He had noticed the coach watching him. He had hoped that he would make him an offer.

  “Well, then,” Riley said, “you’ll have to do more than we do in gym class. Are you willing?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jesse said.

  Riley explained that if Jesse agreed, he would spend about ninety minutes every day after school learning the finer points of running. Unaccustomed to the attention of adults other than his parents, Jesse was thrilled to have someone paying so much attention to him and simply kept nodding.

  “Well, then, see you tomorrow, Jesse,” Riley said, and walked away.

  In his eagerness to run, Jesse had forgotten that he could not train after school. He had a job delivering groceries and another working in a greenhouse. He didn’t work just to have pocket change. These were jobs that helped feed his family. Now, in an instant, his elation turned to anxiety. In his thirteen-year-old mind, he could see his whole life falling apart because of a scheduling conflict. He chased after Riley, caught him—of course—and laid out his dilemma.

  Riley said, “That’s no problem. You’ll run before school, won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jesse said.