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

by Jeremy Schaap

  Like many other erstwhile rivals and teammates, Owens—who had run a sparkling 220-yard leg in the medley relay to assure victory for Ohio State—tried to console Peacock, offering unfounded hopes that he might be able to recover in time for the Olympic trials. Peacock accepted the good wishes graciously, but inside he was anguished over his reversal of fortune.

  For Owens, Peacock’s implosion was an unexpected and wholly unwanted boon. Owens was not the kind of man to rejoice in the misfortune of a respected and feared rival. Still, now only Ralph Metcalfe was standing in his way. Frank Wykoff, Sam Stoller, and Foy Draper were simply not legitimate contenders for the sprint titles. They might fight among themselves for the chance at a bronze medal, but they would not win. Sprinting isn’t like tennis or golf, individual sports in which on any given day the tenth-best or twentieth-best player in the world might defeat the best. A sprinter who runs the 100-meter dash in 10.5 seconds doesn’t suddenly run the same distance in 9.9 seconds. Peacock had proved time and again that he was capable of consistently besting Owens. No one else had—not in years, anyway.

  The day after Peacock went down, Owens won the 100-meter dash in 10.5 seconds, breaking Peacock’s meet record but not straining himself too greatly. Sam Stoller matched him stride for stride until the final 20 meters, when Owens took off. Owens won the broad jump, too, but cleared only 23 feet, ⅝ inch. There was a good reason for his lackluster performances. Having witnessed Peacock’s injury, he had decided that he would not risk everything by overextending himself at a meet that, for all its prestige, was essentially meaningless. He was heeding Snyder’s advice not to overdo it. But even at half-speed, he was too good for a field that lacked Peacock, who, it was announced, would be laid up for four weeks and was now considered unlikely to qualify for the Olympic team.

  In fact, just three weeks after the Penn Relays, Peacock was back in competition—but not running or jumping. In a dual meet against New York University, he displayed his strength by throwing the javelin. Without ever changing out of his street clothes, he threw it well, more than 163 feet, good for third place. He probably should have been resting.

  As Peacock moonlighted in the field events, Owens picked up his pace on the track. Snyder watched gleefully as his captain recaptured his form of the previous spring. In three different meets in the first three weeks of May, Owens tied his world record in the 100-yard dash, at 9.4 seconds; ran the same distance in 9.3 seconds, with a strong wind at his back; jumped 24 feet, 10¾ inches to win a broad-jump competition; and easily won all his 220-yard races. On the blustery afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, where he ran the 9.3, Snyder could not help noticing that everything the runner was doing seemed . . . well, perfect. His start was better than ever. His posture. His breathing. His pacing. It was almost as if, Snyder thought to himself, there was nothing for him to do but get out of the way.

  “Jesse, you see what they’re saying,” Snyder said a few days later as together they prepared for the Big Ten championship meet, which was about to take place in Columbus. “They’re saying you can’t be as good this year as you were last year.”

  “Come on, coach,” Owens replied, “why would they say that?” After nearly a year of doubt and turmoil, his swagger had returned. Standing on the Ohio State track, hands on hips, smiling broadly, he was the picture of confidence. Not since leaving California the previous summer had he felt so fast. But there were doubters.

  “I don’t know, Jesse, that’s what some of the writers are saying,” Snyder said. “They’re saying nobody can be that good twice.” He was only teasing—but he was right. That was what the writers were saying.

  Francis J. Powers, the Los Angeles Times’s special track correspondent, had a lengthy pseudoscientific discussion about Owens with Leo Waner, a physician and once prominent runner at the University of Kansas.

  “When Owens was smashing records on the Michigan track,” Waner said, referring to the miracle of Ferry Field, “he was in perfect balance. His endocrine, psychic, nervous, and muscular systems all were in perfect tune, and such a blend happens but rarely.” In summation, Waner said he doubted that the athlete would ever duplicate his performance at Michigan. “Owens may be in record-breaking form in one or even two events on any given day, but I doubt if he can be sufficiently perfect for four.”

  For his part, Powers theorized that Owens was not quite as good as he had been a year earlier, because in 1936 he was so far injury-free. “A few hurts seem necessary for him to do his best running and jumping,” he wrote.

  Frank Hill, who as Northwestern’s head coach had been routinely victimized by Owens, also subscribed to the injury theory. He said that Snyder “should give Owens a good belt with a club before each event, just to get the boy in the proper mental frame . . . If Owens ever is hurt badly enough,” Hill said, “he’ll jump twenty-seven feet.”

  Maybe Powers and Hill had a point. Without an injury to sharpen his focus, Owens did not set any world records at the 1936 Big Ten meet, in the 220-yard dash. He did, however, manage to win the events he had won in 1935, but without breaking any records. The finals were in Columbus, on May 23, and more than 14,000 spectators came out to see him take part in the 100-and 220-yard dashes, the 220-yard low hurdles, and the broad jump. They had no complaints. Nor did Snyder. Owens’s victory in the hurdles was typically ugly—and inspiring. Tripping over the first hurdle, he was in last place by the fifth; then, running the rest of the race nearly at full speed, he edged Michigan’s Bob Osgood to win.

  Owens had run the hurdles for his team and for Snyder, for whom the Big Ten championship was of critical importance. Of course he had no intention of running the low hurdles at the Olympic trials; it was not an Olympic event. Even as he won his four events, the Buckeyes could not hold off Indiana, which won the Big Ten title largely—and literally—on the strength of its weight throwers.

  As Owens was racking up wins in Columbus, Peacock announced that he would soon be ready to run again. Every day for the next several weeks his trainer worked on his injured hamstring, hoping somehow to have him ready to compete at the regional Olympic trials at Harvard. First he raced at an AAU meet in New Jersey—but could not finish. Then, at Harvard, he struggled again, in both the 100-meter dash and the broad jump. Still, Peacock would not give up. Having been granted a special exemption to attempt again to qualify for the national Olympic trials on July 11 and 12 in New York, he went to Princeton on July 4 to participate in another regional qualifier.

  Jesse Owens was also in Princeton, as was Ralph Metcalfe. It was awful to watch strong, swift Eulace Peacock hobble around the stadium with his right leg heavily taped. Owens didn’t know quite what to say to him, other than “Good luck.” Peacock, meanwhile, had no more luck at Princeton than he had had anywhere else recently. He barely cleared 22 feet in the broad jump and withdrew from the 100-meter dash. The AAU decided, however, that it would nevertheless allow him to compete in both events at the trials at Randall’s Island.

  If it was now clear that Peacock was a broken man, it was equally clear that Owens was again a force of nature. He won the broad jump handily, and the 100-meter dash, slightly ahead of Ralph Metcalfe.

  After Princeton, Owens went home to Cleveland for a few days, to catch up with the wife and daughter he had been too busy to see. He would be leaving for New York soon and, barring catastrophe at the trials, would then be on his way to Germany for the most consequential three weeks of his life. Since there were plans for him to tour Europe with the rest of the American track team following the games, Ruth and Gloria would not see him for almost two months. Neither would the Cleveland press corps, which, for all its Owens enthusiasm, could not afford to be in Berlin, not at the height of the Depression. The Ohio trip therefore became a whirlwind of interviews and appointments. Reporters asked questions, friends offered their best wishes, and some businessmen made promises of employment that they had no real intention of honoring.

  Then there was Jesse’s family. Emma, his mother, was m
elancholic but proud as she sent her son off on what would be his defining journey. “Now don’t go dancing with any of them German girls,” she cautioned.

  Ruth was also sad to see Jesse go, but she knew exactly what was at stake: everything. “Jesse, just do what you always do,” she said to him in their bedroom on their final night together. “You know you’re better than anyone else. Just stay healthy and everything will work out.”

  In the wake of all his recent triumphs, Jesse was brimming with confidence. “Baby,” he said, squeezing Ruth’s hand, “from here on out, everything for us is going to change.”

  10

  Olympic Trials

  * * *

  NEW YORK CITY: JULY 1936

  AS IT HAPPENED, the Olympic track-and-field trials were not the most important event taking place on Randall’s Island, New York City, on a sweltering July 11 that saw the temperature reach 97 degrees. Little Randall’s Island, at the confluence of the East and Harlem Rivers and formerly the site of a potters’ field and the Idiots’ and Children’s Hospital, had also attracted several giants of the New Deal: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor Herbert H. Lehman, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, Works Progress Administration chief Harry L. Hopkins, Postmaster General James A. Farley, and New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, among others. The first day of the Olympic trials happened to coincide with the dedication and opening of the Triborough Bridge, a Y-shaped span linking Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens as well as both Randall’s and Ward’s islands.

  Construction had begun seven years earlier, on October 25, 1929, the day the stock market crashed, and naturally soon thereafter slowed to a halt. But with the support of Ickes’s Public Works Administration, Moses willed the bridge into existence. It was the first of his mammoth utopian projects—and less misguided than most of the others. Ickes had convinced the president that he should attend the opening ceremony, if only to thwart Moses’s ego. “If you go to this affair,” Ickes had said to Roosevelt on June 23, “credit for the building of the bridge will go to your administration, where it belongs. Otherwise, Mr. Moses can be counted upon to bring glory to himself.”

  To celebrate the grand opening, thousands of New Yorkers lined the streets of Harlem as a parade of dignitaries made their way from midtown to the bridge. (Harlem, incidentally, needed a parade. Just three weeks earlier, the community had been plunged into a state of shock and depression when, across the Harlem River at Yankee Stadium, Max Schmeling had knocked out Joe Louis in the twelfth round of a fight Louis had been expected to win easily.) President Roosevelt left his townhouse on East 65th Street and, with the streets cleared of traffic, was driven up Fifth Avenue to 72nd Street, through Central Park to 110th Street, then northward on Seventh Avenue and finally onto 125th Street, Harlem’s central thoroughfare. “Fully half of the men on the sidewalks were stripped to their undershirts and women wore as little as possible,” the New York Times reported. “They gave the President an enthusiastic greeting.”

  Finally the caravan arrived at Randall’s Island. Before the speeches began, Anthony Benedetto, a nine-year-old boy from nearby Astoria, Queens, sang for the crowd that had assembled. (Later, he became known as Tony Bennett.) When the singing ceased, Roosevelt spoke. Still fairly vigorous, the fifty-four-year-old chief executive stood supported at a lectern for the entirety of his brief speech. “Many of you who are here today,” he said, “can remember that when you were boys and girls, the greater part of what are now the Bronx and Queens was cultivated as farmland. Not much more than one hundred years ago my own great-grandfather owned a farm in Harlem close to the Manhattan approach to this bridge.”

  Roosevelt went on to explain why the bridge and works like it were so needed. From his lectern, he could clearly see the hastily constructed stadium, just a few hundred yards away, where the Olympic trials were about to commence. Neither he nor any of the other speakers saw fit to mention the goings-on at the stadium, the lone structure on the 194-acre island, which had been cleared for the construction of the bridge.

  More than seventy years after the Triborough Bridge made the island readily accessible, the stadium remains New York’s primary venue for outdoor track-and-field events. But no event ever held there has led to more controversy than the Olympic trials that took place on July 11 and 12, 1936. The results of the 100-meter final in particular resonated for decades. Not because Jesse Owens won—that was almost a foregone conclusion—but because of the order in which the other sprinters finished and how those performances positioned them for the 4 × 100-meter relay race in Berlin three weeks later.

  “This may be the best track and field meet ever staged in this country,” John Kieran wrote in the New York Times, “and produce the best team the United States ever sent to Olympic Games.” Even with Eulace Peacock hobbled, the sprints were expected to attract thousands of spectators.

  At this point, American participation in Berlin was assured, yet some commentators were still fighting the boycott battle. It had become clear, especially to those few American writers who had covered the winter games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, that the Nazis fully intended to use the Olympics in Berlin as a platform to promote their agenda. Brundage’s promise to the contrary was dangerously naive. And so were all the statements made by the prospective Olympians, including Owens. As Walter White had passionately pointed out to him, at length, several months earlier, Americans had no business being in Berlin, regardless of the situation for Negroes in the United States and regardless of the laurels they might win for themselves in the fatherland.

  The old lie that politics and sport were separate was betrayed by the Nazis’ own publications. “Athletes and sport are the preparatory school of the political will in the service of the state,” the political trainer Kurt Münch wrote in a Nazi-sanctioned book titled Knowledge About Germany. “Non-political, so-called neutral sportsmen are unthinkable in Hitler’s state.” More bluntly, Münch wrote that sports and politics in Germany could not be separated.

  Curmudgeonly Westbrook Pegler addressed the issue of American hypocrisy on race issues. “The Nazis often point out that American Negroes are victims of discrimination,” Pegler wrote in a column that appeared on the morning of the first day of the trials. “But Negroes are not barred from our Olympic teams. Many of them have worn the American shield in the past, and some of the most formidable athletes on this year’s squad are colored.” And again Pegler assailed the decision to keep the games in Germany and to allow the participation of American athletes. “Germany was awarded these games four years ago,” he wrote. “But that was another Germany. At that time the international body which selected the site acted on the supposition that certain essential sporting conditions could be guaranteed this year. If the committee had had any idea that four years later the games would be used to ballyhoo Adolf Hitler and to endorse a regime of murder, persecution, and paganism, the program would have been awarded to another country.”

  If any of the hundreds of hopefuls at Randall’s Island had good reason to heed Pegler’s morning column, it was sprinter Marty Glickman, the eighteen-year-old son of Jewish Romanian immigrants. Glickman had just completed his freshman year at Syracuse University. He had also recently scored an impressive victory over Columbia’s Ben Johnson in New York’s Metropolitan Championships. Glickman had been born in the Bronx but grew up in Brooklyn, only a few miles south and east of Randall’s Island. He had been both a track and a football star at James Madison High School, whose great rival, Erasmus Hall High School, featured at the time a Jewish quarterback named Sid Luckman. Glickman would eventually be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a broadcaster, and Luckman would be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player. After the Berlin Olympics, Glickman used his speed to tremendous effect for the Syracuse varsity football team as a running back, and then, after serving in the Pacific during World War II, segued into the burgeoning field of sports broadcasting. From the 1940s through the
1980s, he was one of the most widely respected and widely listened-to of all play-by-play announcers. But in 1936 he was just a poor Jewish kid trying to make the Olympic team.

  Like almost everyone else at Randall’s Island, Glickman stood in awe of Jesse Owens. He had advanced to the Olympic trials by defeating Johnson again at 100 meters in the eastern regionals in Boston. At Randall’s Island, there would be two heats, and the top three finishers in each would advance to the final. A runoff comprising the four men who finished fourth and fifth in the two heats would determine the seventh finalist. Glickman was to run in the first heat, against Sam Stoller, of the University of Michigan, who was also Jewish and had competed frequently against Owens in the Big Ten; former Olympian Frank Wykoff; George Boone, of the University of Southern California; Billy Hopkins, of the University of Virginia; Ben Johnson; and Owens.

  As the runners neared the starting line, John Kieran of the New York Times walked toward the east straightaway, where a crowd had gathered to see the Buckeye Bullet up close. “Which is Owens?” a man asked him.

  “Wait a minute and you’ll see,” Kieran said, winking.

  At the gun, Owens exploded from his crouch, charged to the front, and won easily, in 10.5 seconds. A few yards behind him, Sam Stoller finished second. Glickman was third. They would see each again in the final. Ben Johnson had pulled up lame at 60 meters and did not finish. In the other heat, Ralph Metcalfe won, Foy Draper placed, and Mack Robinson—whose younger brother Jackie would become the first black major-league baseball player of the twentieth century—showed. Sadly, Eulace Peacock all but limped home in last place. With his Olympic sprinting aspirations officially shattered, he would now concentrate on the broad jump. The seventh and final place in the 100-meter final went to Frank Wykoff, who had finished fourth in the heat won by Owens. In the runoff, Wykoff defeated Harvey Wallender, George Boone, and Edgar Mason, Jr.