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

by Jeremy Schaap

  The finalists drew black pills similar to marbles to determine their lane assignments. Mack Robinson was in lane 1, on the inside, Draper was in 2, Wykoff in 3, Owens in 4, Glickman in 5, Metcalfe in 6, and Stoller in 7. Three Californians, three midwesterners, and one Brooklynite. Three blacks, four whites. Five Christians, two Jews. The race, if nothing else, proved that in the United States, if not in Germany, virtually everyone had an opportunity to make the Olympic team. If the Germans had been paying attention—and they were—they would have noticed that five of the seven finalists in the most prestigious race in the Olympic trials of the leading track nation in the world would not have been permitted to train or compete in Germany. Only Wykoff and Draper would have been eligible to run in the fatherland, where the heterogeneity of the United States was viewed as a deadly sin.

  For all seven men except Robinson, who was a 200-meter specialist, the 100-meter final was the culmination of several years of training and expectations. The first three finishers would represent the United States in Berlin and be in good position to win the Olympic gold medal, which they had good reason to believe would immortalize them. They all knew that it would be harder to succeed in this race than in the Olympic final—the field was much deeper. Still, if they didn’t win, place, or show, they assumed they would help form an unbeatable 4 × 100-meter relay team. Lawson Robertson had indicated that the men who finished fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh would make up the relay team.

  The starter, Johnny McHugh, was a familiar figure to New York track fans—and to Glickman. Just after he called the finalists to their marks, McHugh noticed that Glickman was trembling so violently that he couldn’t get his left leg into position. McHugh said, “Everybody up,” and called Glickman over. “Walk a little, Marty,” he said. “Jog up and back a bit, relax.” Three years younger and much less experienced than anyone else in the final, Glickman took a moment, walked around, then returned to his position in the fifth lane.

  Jesse Owens, meanwhile, was perfectly placid in lane 4. It never occurred to him, not for a second, that he might not win. Even if he started poorly—now unlikely, thanks to Riley’s and Snyder’s relentless efforts—he knew that there would be enough time to recover. He still felt sorry for Peacock, but his rival’s failure also somehow empowered him. Rather than thinking that what had happened to Peacock might happen to him, Owens allowed himself to think that somewhere a choice had been made by a higher power, between himself and Eulace—and he, Jesse, had been chosen.

  Finally McHugh fired his pistol and they were off. Owens did not make a brilliant start, but Sam Stoller did. At 60 meters, the Michigan man was in the lead. Glickman was keeping pace with Owens, who was on his left, and Metcalfe, who was on his right. Suddenly, with about 30 meters to go, Owens and Metcalfe accelerated, “as if they were on a moving escalator at an airport and I was not,” Glickman said. As their five rivals faded, Owens and Metcalfe rushed toward the tape. But Metcalfe could not keep up. Effortlessly, typically, Owens gained speed in the final 10 meters and broke the tape at full speed, in 10.4 seconds, 2 meters ahead of Metcalfe. Then came Glickman, Wykoff, Draper—they were bunched together—and then Stoller and Robinson.

  The Owens-Metcalfe one-two was expected. Glickman’s strong showing was not. When the judges lined up the top three finishers, they determined that Glickman had finished third. Ted Husing, the preeminent sports announcer of the time, interviewed Owens and Metcalfe and then said, “Now here’s Marty Glickman, the kid from Brooklyn who finished third.”

  But within moments, Dean Cromwell had collared several of the officials. The man who was to coach the sprinters in Berlin argued that they had misjudged the order of finish. His Trojans, he told them, had been robbed. Wykoff was third, he said, and Draper fourth. Glickman, he insisted, had finished fifth. In the absence of photographic evidence, the officials were swayed and bumped Glickman all the way from third to fifth. Glickman later said that it was quite possible he had finished behind Wykoff—who was running his third 100-meter race of the day—but he was sure he had outrun Draper.

  The reporters covering the trials took no note of the disputed finish, concentrating their efforts instead on finding new and better ways to praise Owens. To Associated Press sports editor Alan Gould, Owens was “machine-like.” To Arthur Daley of the Times, Owens, clad in Ohio State’s colors, was “a scarlet comet.” In the Chicago Tribune, simplicity was prized. There, Owens was “the great colored athlete.”

  Owens’s day did not end, though, with the 100 meters. There was still the broad jump, the event in which he was most dominant but, unlike the sprints, in which one or two errors might prevent him from qualifying for the Olympics. As Eulace Peacock limped and cleared only 23 feet, 3 inches—3 feet less than his personal best—to finish ninth, Owens nonchalantly jumped 25 feet, 10¾ inches, a full 7 inches farther than the best effort of John Brooks, who finished second. Eddie Gordon, the defending Olympic champion, a black man from Iowa, was sixth. The 1932 gold medalist was no longer in Owens’s league.

  In the gleaming new locker room under the stands, Peacock mourned his career—he would never be an Olympian—and Owens looked ahead to Berlin. “I can’t wait to get over there,” he said. “You know, I’ve never been to Europe.” Reminded that the 200-meter trials were looming the next day, he tried to summon a little bit of humility, but he could not even feign nervousness. “Well, really,” he said, tearing off his shirt, “the two hundred I think is my strongest event. I know Mack will give me a good race, but that’s my distance.”

  Owens was right. It was his distance, especially on July 12 at Randall’s Island. He dominated the first heat, finishing in 21.2 seconds. Then, in the final, he decided to run really hard; he broke the tape in 21 seconds flat, equaling Ralph Metcalfe’s unofficial world record for 200 meters around a turn. Mack Robinson finished second and Bobby Packard of the University of Georgia third. Ralph Metcalfe, five times the national champion at 200 meters, wasn’t quite at full strength on July 12. He barely qualified for the final, finishing third in his heat and then, in the final, fourth. It seemed he would compete only in the 100 meters in Berlin.

  In fact, the United States would enter three men in each individual track-and-field event—for a total of fifty-one places—and forty-nine men qualified for those slots. Only one man qualified for more than one event—Jesse Owens, who had qualified for three, all events in which he held the world record, all events in which he would be favored to win the gold medal.

  None of the reports of Owens’s dominance mentioned the possibility that he might actually compete in four events and contend for four gold medals. Everyone assumed that Owens and Metcalfe would not run in the 4 × 100-meter relay, because they had qualified in the 100-meter sprint—and neither would Mack Robinson, because he had qualified in the 200-meter sprint. That meant that the 4 × 100-meter team would be made up of Wykoff, Draper, Glickman, and Stoller, who had finished third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively, in the 100-meter final. Why would the American coaches choose not to include Owens and Metcalfe, their two best runners, on their relay team? Mostly because they had never needed to and rarely had. In 1932, for instance, none of the three best American sprinters—Eddie Tolan, who won the Olympic 100 meters; Ralph Metcalfe, who finished second; and George Simpson, who finished fourth—ran the relay, which the United States nevertheless won, in world-record time.

  It was enough for Owens to have qualified in three events—enough for the writers, certainly, who expected him to equal Paavo Nurmi’s 1924 Olympic trifecta, when he won three individual gold medals. Overall, including relays, Nurmi had won nine gold medals in the 1920s, at distances from 1500 meters to 10,000 meters. As the 1936 Olympic trials wrapped up, it was clear that Jesse Owens was the Nurmi of the sprints. “The great track and field meet closed as it had opened,” John Kieran wrote, “with a lot of fellows chasing Jesse Owens and failing to catch him.”

  In the wake of the spectacular dominance of the black athletes at the O
lympic trials, an effort was again afoot to explain their superiority. It had to be more than mere coincidence that black men won the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 400 meters, the 800 meters, the broad jump, and the high jump. In both sprints, the broad jump, and the high jump, they finished one-two. “The Negro race’s triumphs in every big track meet of the past few years are shockingly inconsistent with their relative number of performers,” Shirley Povich (eventually a legend, but not yet) wrote in the Washington Post on July 13. “This department has always held its own theory concerning the sensational rise of colored athletes in track and field. Firstly, it is one of the sports in which they are permitted to contest against the best of the white race and thus the bulk of the Negro talent is directed into that line.”

  After the trials concluded, it would be three days before the U.S. Olympic team boarded the SS Manhattan, bound for Germany. In the meantime, the black Olympians remained at the Hotel Lincoln, a block off Broadway, with some of their white teammates. They could not stay with their other white teammates at the fancier hotels or at the still-restricted (to blacks and Jews) New York Athletic Club. During this lull, on the morning of July 14, a young columnist from Hearst’s New York American Journal was working the Lincoln’s lobby, sniffing out a story—he had to write seven columns a week—when he decided he would be better off knocking on Jesse Owens’s door.

  “Jesse, my name’s Jimmy Cannon,” the writer said when Owens opened the door to room 504. He extended his hand. “I write for the Journal. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Go right ahead,” Owens said.

  Also not yet a legend himself, Cannon was completely uninterested in the Olympic trials per se. Like virtually everyone else, he had assumed that Owens would qualify easily in three events.

  “What are you going to do in Berlin when the gun goes off?” he asked breathlessly.

  “I am going to go as fast as my legs will take me,” Owens said matter-of-factly. Then, somewhat more interestingly: “I think my time will depend on the boat ride. I have never been on a boat ride before, except to take a moonlight sail on the lake back home. But if I’m in good condition right now . . . if I’m in good condition, then—well, I’ll be going good.”

  Cannon took note of the “little room” and the electric fans “wrinkling” Owens’s loose blue polo shirt “with a hissing drone.” “He seemed a little boy,” Cannon wrote, “not a superman who is the best in the business of running fast.”

  “Who are the guys you got to beat?” Cannon asked, wiping his brow with his handkerchief.

  “The fellows on our team,” Owens said, getting up from the bed on which he had been sitting. “They are the toughest competition I got. The toughest. No doubt about that.”

  “Do you prefer to race against the best?”

  “Yeah,” he said, easing into the conversation, “I love competition. It makes me run faster. It makes a track meet more interesting. That’s what people like to see.”

  Then Cannon asked Owens about Ruth and how she handled all his traveling—and because Cannon had a lifelong weakness for Joe Louis, he asked about him, too.

  “She gets a big kick out of me winning,” Owens said. “She always sends me wires. I get a big kick out of that. You know, all that talk about marriage being bad for an athlete? That’s not so. It’s good for a fellow. It settled me down. I think that’s good. No, I don’t know where Joe Louis came from in Alabama.”

  Cannon wasn’t Owens’s only visitor that day at the Lincoln. Mark O’Hara of the Daily Worker also stopped by. He was mainly interested in drawing Owens into a political discussion, which Owens politely dodged.

  “What do you think of James Ford running for vice president on the Communist ticket?” O’Hara asked. “He’s the only Negro running for national political office.”

  “We’re all Americans,” Owens said, tucking his polo shirt into his dark slacks, “and if a Negro can win the position, he deserves it.”

  “What do you think of the Louis-Schmeling fight?” O’Hara continued, recognizing a dead end when he heard it.

  “Joe Louis can whip him any day in the week. He wasn’t in condition at the time.”

  Then O’Hara made another left turn, so to speak. “You know Paul Robeson will soon travel to the Soviet Union because he thinks it’s the only place that there is complete equality of the races.”

  “It’s a wonderful project there,” Owens reportedly replied. “They’re getting along.” He was certainly unaware that Stalin’s great purges were about to begin. The following month, in fact, the Soviet dictator put sixteen former party leaders on trial; all were found guilty and executed.

  Then O’Hara said, “Would you care to go there?”

  “I’d like to,” Owens said, maintaining his politeness, “but time is valuable, and school starts in September.”

  The next day, in his syndicated column, Westbrook Pegler—who had continued to lend his acerbity to the boycott movement—predicted what would happen in Berlin once Owens, Metcalfe, John Woodruff, the 800-meter runner who was also black, and the others arrived. “The Nazis face a delicate problem in the track and field events,” he wrote,

  where the Hitler youth doubtless will be defeated by a group of American Negro boys. When Max Schmeling came over to fight Joe Louis, Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest disowned him and his undertaking until he had won. It was then discovered that he had been fighting for Hitler and the Nazi philosophy after all, and had proved the racial supremacy of the Hitler youth. It was explained, too, that a Hitler youth naturally could not be beaten by a Negro. Perhaps after the Negro Olympians of the American team have beaten the Hitler youth in the sprints and jumps the Hitler youth will turn out to be Communists at heart.

  No special intellectual suppleness was required to throw Max Schmeling’s victory back in the faces of the Nazis as evidence of their disingenuousness. Expecting Louis to knock him out, they had disowned the Black Uhlan. When instead he knocked out Louis, the Nazis claimed him as a token of their superiority. As politically unaware as he was, Jesse Owens still resented the Nazis for making Louis’s humiliation a propaganda tool. It had been bad enough to listen on the radio as his friend and hero was battered. It was worse to have his defeat presented as evidence of black weakness. Millions of his fellow black Americans were as upset as Owens. Now all the hopes that Louis had embodied shifted to the Buckeye Bullet, who would carry those hopes with him to Berlin, not as a burden but as an inspiration.

  PART III

  11

  Olympia

  * * *

  BERLIN: 1936

  IN TYPICALLY DRAMATIC FASHION, Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant documentarian, was practicing high-jumping at the Grünewald Stadium in Berlin in the early spring of 1935 when she was approached by a middle-aged man in suit and tie.

  “Fraulein Riefenstahl,” he said, smiling, apparently unsurprised that someone who was not a high jumper was nevertheless high-jumping. “I’ve been planning to ambush you.”

  “An ambush,” Riefenstahl said, wiping the sand from her legs. “What do you mean?”

  “I have an idea,” Professor Carl Diem said. “I’m supposed to prepare the Olympic Games in Berlin, and I would like to launch them with a huge torch race straight across Europe, from ancient Olympia in Greece to the new Olympia in Berlin. It will be a wonderful Olympics, and it would be a great pity if we couldn’t record it on film. You are a great artist, you know a lot about sport. With your Triumph of the Will, you created a masterpiece, a film without a plot. You must make a film like that about the Olympics.”

  “Impossible,” replied Riefenstahl, who was thirty-three but looked younger.

  Undeterred, Diem, one of the two men most responsible for organizing the 1936 Olympics, persisted, and eventually the spectacle of the games and the challenge of filming them proved irresistible to Riefenstahl. “The possibility began taking shape,” she later wrote.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see the ancient ruins of the cla
ssical Olympic sites slowly emerging from patches of fog and the Greek temples and sculptures drifting by: Achilles and Aphrodite, Medusa and Zeus, Apollo and Paris, and then the discus thrower of Myron. I dreamed that this statue changed into a man of flesh and blood, gradually starting to swing the discus in slow motion. The sculptures turned into Greek temple dancers dissolving in flames, the Olympic fire igniting the torches to be carried from the Temple of Zeus to the modern Berlin of 1936—a bridge from Antiquity to the present. That was my vision of the prologue to my Olympia.

  Enraptured, Riefenstahl told Diem she would make the film.

  Riefenstahl had achieved a measure of fame as a young woman in Germany in the 1920s, first as a dancer in the mold of Isadora Duncan, then as the striking star of several adventure films directed by her mentor, Dr. Arnold Fanck, in which she was usually seen scaling rugged Alpine peaks in shorts. In 1927, when the typically titled Peaks of Destiny was released in the United States, Mordaunt Hall, the New York Times’s film critic, wrote, “Riefenstahl is an actress with no little charm. Her overacting is to be blamed on Dr. Fanck.” Hall obviously didn’t know of Riefenstahl’s capacity for self-indulgence. In 1932 she turned her talents to directing, emulating Fanck. Her first film, The Blue Light, an Alpine fairy tale, brought her to the attention of Hitler, who thought the film brilliant. Three years later, after Triumph of the Will, her propaganda film about the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, had been honored with several international prizes and her reputation had been made, Riefenstahl was pondering her next move.

  Despite the success of Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl had been quarreling with her boss, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ minister of propaganda and public enlightenment, whose romantic advances she had spurned. Goebbels was also jealous of her influence with Hitler. Riefenstahl had long been a favorite of Hitler’s. “The point is that Hitler admires you,” Rudolf Diels, the soon-to-be-deposed chief of the Gestapo, once told her, “and this arouses a great deal of envy and ill will.”