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

by Jeremy Schaap

  When the parade of nations finally ended, a man speaking French bellowed over the loudspeakers. “L’importance aux Jeux Olympiques n’est pas d’y gagner, mais d’y prendre part, car l’essentiel dans la vie n’est pas tant de conqueror que de bien lutter.” These were the words of Baron de Coubertin: “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” Hitler apparently listened to these words without comment.

  After a lengthy, dull address by Lewald, it was the Führer’s turn. Mounting the speaker’s stand, he said in German, less excitedly than usual, “I announce as opened the games of Berlin, celebrating the Eleventh Olympiad of the modern era.” Then, a few moments later, a sleek, handsome, platinum blond, twenty-nine-year-old runner named Fritz Schilgen appeared at the east portal. In his right hand he held aloft the Olympic torch that had been borne all the way from Greece. His white track suit was emblazoned with a German eagle. For a moment, with a light rain falling, he simply stood at the top of the gray steps that led from the portal to the field. “Then,” Paul Gallico wrote, “he trotted down the stairs and made a half circle of the track with a pretty stride, the torch dropping little, blazing pieces at his heels.”

  Nearly 5000 officials and athletes occupied the infield. They stood there watching as Schilgen neared the west portal. Their eyes followed him as he climbed the stone staircase that led to the platform on which the stone Olympic chalice rested on three legs. “For one magnificently dramatic moment,” Gallico continued, “he paused there, as true a symbol as ever appeared in human guise, with his torch held up to the gray heavens.” Then Schilgen turned toward the enormous tripod and dipped his torch into the caldron. Exploding in blue and orange, the fire took but a moment to catch. Extinguished four years earlier in Los Angeles, the Olympic flame had been rekindled in Hitler’s capital.

  Wrapping itself in the ceremony, Nazism had enjoyed one of its finest hours. With the assembled multitudes whipped to a frenzy by martial and patriotic pageantry, the scene resembled nothing so much as one of the party rallies in Nuremberg, which had been the goal. While adhering to the letter of the Olympic laws, the Germans nevertheless violated the spirit of those laws by showcasing their Führer above and beyond the Olympians themselves. Clearly, Hitler had been the star of their magnificent spectacle. As Al Laney of the Herald Tribune saw it, the ceremony was a wholly successful “demonstration of Nazi organizing efficiency, a personal tribute to Adolf Hitler and pageant such as the modern world seldom has witnessed.”

  As the crowd inside and outside the stadium drank deeply of the Olympic spirit, Larry Snyder was concerned with a more mundane but nevertheless critical issue. Shoes. Kangaroo-leather running shoes, to be precise. Jesse Owens had no shoes in which to run. That is, he had one pair, which he had been wearing since the Olympic trials, when the other two pairs he had taken east with him were stolen by memorabilia hounds. In its wisdom and parsimony, the American Olympic Committee decided at one of its interminable meetings on the Manhattan that the athletes would be responsible for furnishing their own footwear. Sensibly, at another meeting, in Berlin, the committee reconsidered its earlier stance and decided to order one pair of kangaroo-leather running shoes from England for Owens to wear as he attempted to win three gold medals. “If he had to have two pairs,” Snyder later recalled, “Ohio State would have to pay for the other pair.”

  But the English shoes had not arrived, and Snyder was frantically scouring Berlin’s sporting goods stores for exactly the right kind of shoe. Finally he located a pair that was just right. Thin kangaroo. Virtually no sole. Of course, there would be no time for Owens to break them in and corns would sprout almost immediately, but Owens did not care all that much. In this respect, he was still very much the sharecropper’s son. “Jesse wasn’t half so worried about the corns as I was,” Snyder said.

  By the time Snyder reached the athletes’ village, shoes in hand, the opening ceremony was nearly over. He found Owens and Albritton together, in a crowd outdoors, near their brick-and-stucco cottage, standing in front of what appeared to be a small movie screen.

  “What’s going on here?” Snyder said. He was disheveled after his long search for the shoes. “What is this thing?”

  “I don’t know what they call it,” Albritton said, “but we’ve been watching the opening ceremony.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, coach,” Owens said. “It’s like radio, with pictures.”

  “Not very good pictures,” Snyder said. He could barely make out anything on the screen, which measured less than a foot across.

  They were watching one of the first major television broadcasts ever. The Germans had rolled out their version of the technology just in time for the opening ceremony, with the feed routed via closed circuit to screens in a few select viewing areas. Judging by the image of Hitler that Snyder was trying to see, the fine points of color and tint had not been mastered.

  “Is that Hitler?” he asked.

  “Guess so,” Owens replied. “These the shoes?”

  “Of course. I told you we’d find them.”

  “Where are mine, coach?” Albritton said.

  “Yours are just fine. Now, Jesse, be careful with these. Stretch them out good. No blisters. No corns.”

  Turning his back on Hitler, Owens smiled his winner’s smile. “The corns will make me jump farther when they begin to hurt,” he said.

  15

  Day One

  * * *

  BERLIN: SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 1936

  THE NIGHT BEFORE he would finally compete at the Olympics, Jesse Owens sat on his bed in his cottage in the Olympic village and chatted with Henry McLemore, a sportswriter who would eventually make his mark as a general columnist for the Hearst syndicate. As Owens spoke, McLemore had to strain to hear him over the noise emanating from the room across the hall. Frank Wykoff had traveled with his phonograph, and he was playing his blues records as loud as possible.

  “What was that, Jesse?” McLemore said, cupping his hand behind his ear.

  “I said, I always thought I had run as fast as I could,” Owens said, raising his voice, “until last Friday night, when I got to Berlin. When we stepped off the train in this foreign country, I knew I could run faster.”

  “What about the broad jump? Have you done all you can?” It was suddenly quiet. Wykoff was changing records.

  “No, I don’t think so. Larry is always afraid that I will pull a muscle jumping, so he warned me to be careful and take it easy. In the Olympics, he can’t blame me for doing my best, so I plan to let fly all I got.”

  Scribbling on his notepad, grateful that he had been able to speak to Owens one-on-one, McLemore asked, “What about Larry? What kind of advice does he give you about your jumping?”

  “To me there is no such thing as jumping form,” Owens said. “If you can jump, you can jump, that’s all there is to it. All I can do is just run as fast as I possibly can, yank my legs up under me at the takeoff, and try to sail as long as I can.”

  Like so many other observers who had been schooled in the legend of Ferry Field, McLemore subscribed to the theory that an injured Owens was a dangerous Owens. “Maybe it would be a good idea,” he said, “to drop you off the roof of this cottage.”

  “No, sir,” Owens replied. “I am going to be in good shape this week. All these years of hard work—I’m going to make sure they were worthwhile.”

  With that, Owens politely concluded the interview, told Wykoff to knock off the racket, climbed into bed, and quickly went to sleep.

  The next morning, as a cold rain fell on Berlin, Owens was up early, eating a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast. He drank two cups of coffee. Soon he was on a bus headed to the Olympic stadium. The ride would take nearly forty-five minutes, and he was anxious to feel the Olympic track under his feet for the first time. As the bus rumbled through the western part of the city—really, through its leafy outskirts—he thought about all that w
as at stake. But he felt no fear. A supreme confidence had washed over him, and the possibility of failure seemed as remote as the cotton fields of Oakville.

  Dave Albritton, seated next to him, was jumpy—this would be the only day he would compete at the games, and he knew that it would require a supreme effort to defeat Cornelius Johnson. As he drummed his fingers anxiously on the back of the seat in front of him, Owens was in a reverie. His utter lack of nervousness unnerved his friend.

  “Jesse, why are you so calm?” Albritton said. “My stomach is in knots.”

  “Come on, Dave,” Owens said, stretching his shoulders gently, “we just have to do what we always do. The competition was tougher at the trials. There’s nobody here tougher than our teammates.”

  “I guess so,” Albritton said as he resumed his tapping. “Still . . .”

  For Owens, it would be a busy day but not too challenging. First, at about noon, he would run in the twelfth and final heat of the first round of the 100-meter competition. To reach the semifinals and then the final, both scheduled for the next afternoon, he would have to survive the first round and then the quarterfinals later in the day.

  When Owens and Albritton finally emerged from the athletes’ bus, they looked up and found themselves unimpressed. Hitler was right. March’s stadium was not in the least awe-inspiring. Speer’s attempt to dress it up with massive stone panels had been clumsy. More than anything else, it looked like a compromise between architects from two different schools. As they were still taking it all in—the twin clock towers at the east portal, the bell tower to the west, the gargantuan, stylized statues of heroic German athletes on either side of the main entrance—Snyder sneaked up on them.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. He was uncharacteristically chipper. Like all the Berliners, he had caught Olympics fever. In fact, he had been at the stadium for more than an hour, trying to determine where Owens and Albritton might rest in the long intervals between the different qualifying rounds, where they would be massaged, where they would warm up.

  “Jesse, how do you feel?” Snyder asked, all but ignoring Albritton. He was in his standard summer outfit—white dress shirt, white slacks, dark tie.

  “Never better, coach—ready to go,” Owens said. His blue sweatshirt was emblazoned with block-faced red letters spelling out USA.

  “Dave, what about you?”

  “Oh, you know, coach, I’m good, just a little antsy.”

  As Snyder, Owens, and Albritton retreated under the stands, Adolf Hitler was nearing the stadium from the east. He would spend most of the day watching eagerly from his box 50 feet above the field. His distaste for the games had evaporated as they approached. Among the Nazi dignitaries seated with him on that warm, mostly sunny Sunday was Julius Streicher, the virulently anti-Semitic publisher of Der Stürmer. Streicher and the rest of the crowd of about 100,000 heiled Hitler upon his arrival and throughout the day. (In fact, Streicher’s last words when he was executed in 1946 for war crimes were “Heil Hitler.”)

  Hitler and Streicher, along with Goebbels and Göring and the rest of the cream of the Third Reich, paid close attention as Albritton, Johnson, and another American, Delos Thurber, took their turns in the qualifying rounds of the high jump, but what really piqued their interest was the shot put, in which a burly Berlin policeman named Hans Woellke was among the favorites. In fact, the Chancellor’s eyes were trained on Woellke when, at about noon, the stadium announcer introduced the men who would be competing in the final 100-meter heat. There was Kichizo Sasaki, from Japan, and Dieudonné Devrint, from Belgium, and José de Almeida, from Brazil, and even a sprinter from Malta, Austin Torreggiani. Their names were greeted by the crowd with faint enthusiasm, but when the announcer said, “Yaycee Ohvens, Ooh-Ess-Ah,” an enormous cheer rose up, engulfing the stadium. For weeks Snyder had prepared Owens for an icy reception from the Aryan masses, but he had totally misread them. From the first moment they laid eyes on him, they embraced the man who they had heard was the world’s greatest athlete.

  Absorbing the adulation, Owens turned and looked around the vast arena. Despite all his confidence and calmness, a chill tingled his spine. This, he had not expected. Nor had Hitler, who was more than slightly discomfited by the crowd’s reaction to America’s black star.

  Then Owens walked to the starting line. He looked at the other men in the field—they were nobodies. There had been better runners, much better runners, at the Big Ten meets. Still, these were the Olympics, so he was methodical. He stretched, he hopped up and down on the red clay, he twisted the knots out of his neck. Then he kneeled into his start position, his heart pumping quietly, his pulse steady, his mind unfazed by the situation. At the gun he was off, an atypically perfect start. Thirty yards down the track, Owens could sense that no one was anywhere near him, but he did not let up—not until the final 20 meters, anyway. Embarrassing the rest of the field, he won by 7 yards—and again the stadium erupted. Most impressive: Owens had equaled his world record—10.3 seconds—despite the fact that he was essentially running alone, with no one to pace him, and had slowed down near the finish. Clearly there was no problem with the new shoes.

  Talking to reporters in the interval between the first round and the quarterfinals, Larry Snyder was asked about the crowd’s stunning reaction to the sight of Owens, a man who, according to Nazi ideology, was not quite a man.

  “I had braced him for a stony, forbidding silence, because I had read all about the Germanic worship of the Aryan-supremacy idea,” Snyder said, keeping one eye on Dave Albritton, who, having qualified for the afternoon finals, was cooling down in the Americans’ tiny training room. “But they crossed me up.”

  After his heat, Owens caught the bus back to the athletes’ village, barely, to have lunch and rest before the afternoon quarterfinals. But by the time he got there, it was almost time to leave again. He decided that that was the last time he would leave the stadium after the morning qualifiers. He would just have to tough out the long days at the Reichsportsfeld, as the entire Olympic complex was called.

  When he returned to the stadium, he warmed up again in the muggy afternoon air. At four o’clock it was time for his race, and this time he found his rabbit, a Swiss rabbit by the name of Paul Hänni. A moment after the gun went off, Owens could see in his peripheral vision that Hänni was charging hard in front of him—and not noticeably slowing. Suddenly Owens realized that he was in a real race, even as he knew that the top two finishers would advance. Running slightly scared, he somehow reached within himself to find a gear he had never before located. The sight of him running at breakneck speed sucked the air out of the stadium, and as he broke the tape, 4 yards in front of Hänni, yet another roar rose in appreciation. His time was posted a moment later: 10.2 seconds, a new world record.

  “No European crowd had ever seen such a combination of blazing speed and effortless smoothness, like something blown in a gale,” Grantland Rice wrote. “You could hear the chorus of gasps as he left all rivals far behind.”

  As the crowd showered Owens with adulation, as he and Snyder embraced, Leni Riefenstahl shook her head in frustration. She wasn’t disappointed that Owens had run so brilliantly; she was disappointed that she had not allotted enough cameras to his quarterfinal and would have to make the race more prominent in her film. “I’ve got to chuck my manuscript,” she said. “I’ll need all the 100-meter heats for this cutting. This is totally crazy!” It was becoming apparent to her that any documentary about the games would have to celebrate the remarkable black athletes from the United States. This meant another battle with Goebbels, which she dreaded.

  Hans Woellke—who had won the gold medal in the shot put, the first Olympic gold medal ever won by a German man in track and field—was summoned to the Führer’s box. Riefenstahl entered the box too, where she made small talk with Hitler and Göring. Soon Hitler was also congratulating Tilly Fleischer, who, shortly after Woellke’s victory in the shot put, gave Germany its second track-and-field gold
medal of the day (and ever), in the javelin. A pretty blonde who had won the bronze medal in Los Angeles, Fleischer so impressed Hitler that he insisted that they be photographed together. Woellke and Fleischer “have been proclaimed national hero and heroine and were welcomed by Hitler with impressive fervor,” Grantland Rice observed as the stadium erupted in cheers and heils for its champions. “I have never seen such a demonstration anywhere at any time before. The outbreak of national feeling is beyond belief.”

  After congratulating Woellke and Fleischer, Hitler then went a step further. He invited to his box the three nearly identical blond Finns who had swept the medals in the 10,000 meters. Not coincidentally, the Finns were the most Aryan-looking athletes at the games, with the possible exception of Fritz Schilgen and Luz Long.

  The commotion in the Führer’s box was duly noted by one of its occupants—Henri de Baillet-Latour, who was already in a dark mood. The IOC president had been displeased by the way the Führer had dominated the opening ceremony; now he was convinced that Hitler would insist on remaining the central figure of the games. For the moment, while the Belgian seethed, he said nothing.

  Down on the field, meanwhile, his two heats over, his place in Monday’s semifinals secured, Jesse Owens covered himself with a towel. “What’s for dinner, Larry?” he said, teasing Snyder, completely at ease with the magnitude of the moment. Ho-hum, his body language suggested, another world record.

  “That doesn’t win any championships,” he told Royal Brougham of the Universal Service a few minutes after the quarterfinal heat. “I’m already worrying about the finals. How did I feel? Well, if you must know, this is my first Olympics, and I was nervous all over. No, I didn’t know I was running that fast. I felt easy after the gun cracked and let myself out in the last fifty.”