While some observers, such as Henry McLemore, considered the 200 meters Owens’s surest bet, another school of thought was in favor of the broad jump. Arthur Daley, for instance, said that the jump was the event Owens was “most certain of winning.” And Alan Gould used precisely the same phrase. But about fifteen minutes after Owens arrived at the stadium to begin warming up, he spotted the man who would provide a serious challenge.
Owens and Snyder had both been curious about Long. Like the rest of the track community, they had been hearing his name for months but had never seen him. Most of the pre-Olympic prognosticators had assumed that Long would win a medal—not a gold medal, but a medal. Even Hitler had been talking about Long, whose blue eyes, blond hair, chiseled features, and athletic physique embodied the Aryan ideal. Just three weeks before the games, Long had jumped 25 feet, 7⅞ inches—more than a foot less than Owens’s personal best, but still a European record, still long enough to pose a serious threat if Owens had an off day.
As the competitors milled about, Owens and Snyder kept their eyes peeled for Long. Owens knew him when he saw him. A dashing figure in gray sweatpants and coarse black turtleneck, Long was even blonder than he had imagined. He was taller too, an inch or two taller than Owens.
“That’s him,” Owens said, stretching his arms above his head.
“Long,” Snyder said, eyeing the German. “He sure looks like a Nazi.”
“He looks like he’s in pretty good shape to me,” Owens said. It was not his custom to eye his opponents. But there was something about Long. Something compelling—and vaguely threatening. For one thing, there was his Aryan coloring and features. And as confident and relaxed as Owens was, it worried him to know that Long had the advantage of not having been recently at sea, that he had been eating familiar food and would be competing in front of his own people.
Years later, recalling the moment when he first caught a glimpse of the German, Owens wrote, “Long was one of those rare athletic happenings you come to recognize after years in competition—a perfectly proportioned body, every lithe but powerful cord a celebration of pulsing natural muscle, stunningly compressed and honed by tens of thousands of obvious hours of sweat and determination. He may have been my archenemy, but I had to stand there in awe and just stare at Luz Long for several seconds.”
Perhaps not since he had first competed against Ralph Metcalfe had Jesse Owens been in awe of anyone. It was the other guy who was supposed to be in awe of him. But Long was not awed. He was poised and self-assured. More than his physical bearing, it was Long’s confident mien that truly made Owens uncomfortable. How can he look so calm? Owens, renowned for his evenness, thought to himself. Doesn’t he know who he’s up against? Long unnerved him, and he was suddenly and sickeningly reminded of the way he had felt a year earlier when he was running and jumping against, and losing to, Eulace Peacock. Long, like Peacock, was conspicuously bereft of the fear Owens had grown accustomed to recognizing in the eyes of his competitors. But against Peacock, Owens had been worn out; there was no such excuse now. And in an instant, he could actually feel all the confidence he had built up drain from his body. For a week, everything had seemed so easy and natural. His mind and his body had been in perfect sync. Now, like a golfer suddenly afflicted by the yips, he was filled with uncertainty. He tried to banish the negativism from his thoughts, to no avail. Okay, don’t worry, he said to himself. This is my best event, I am the best ever, I have jumped almost 27 feet. For a moment that thought soothed him, and he allowed himself to believe that mentally he was back where he had come from, in that zone where everything was effortless.
Considering that the spectators would see only preliminaries, the crowd that morning was enormous—about 90,000 strong. Still, compared to the finals for the 100 meters—when about 110,000 people had crowded Werner March’s bowl—the atmosphere was intimate, and having already claimed one gold medal, Owens should have felt fairly relaxed. Even if the world was expecting three gold medals from him, no matter what happened now, he would still walk away with the most prestigious championship in sports. Additionally, to qualify for the afternoon semifinals, competitors needed to leap only 23 feet, 5½ inches. That was a distance Jesse Owens had been regularly surpassing since high school—as Charles Riley, if he had been in Berlin instead of in Cleveland, would have reminded him; as Larry Snyder, at that moment, did remind him.
“No problem at all, Jesse,” Snyder said, employing his gentlest tone, fretting inside—because that’s what he did—but outwardly the picture of calm. “Smooth and easy. And remember, don’t overdo it. You don’t need to set any records this morning—they won’t do you any good in the finals.” But Snyder could not conceal his concern from Owens, who in turn tried to comfort him.
“Come on, coach,” Owens said, “Twenty-three five? I won’t strain anything.”
Asking Owens to jump such a short distance was akin to asking him to run the 100 meters in 11.0 seconds—a staggeringly easy threshold. When his turn came, Owens, still in his sweat suit, scampered over to the runway. His mind still racing, filled with visions of Luz Long, he did what he always did—what all American broad jumpers always did: he jogged down the runway and through the landing pit, just to feel the path under his feet, just to get a sense of where he was. But as Owens stepped out of the landing pit, he turned and, to his horror, saw the white-jacketed official who monitored the jumps holding aloft a red flag. He was signaling a foul.
“What?” Owens nearly shouted. “What do you mean? Why?”
It was explained to him, in broken English, that his practice “jump” had counted. The American custom of running through the pit was unknown in Europe. Robertson was in the officials’ faces, demanding that the jump not count, but his entreaties were dismissed. The rules were the rules—especially in Berlin. Snyder wanted to berate Robertson for not knowing the European rule, but at that moment he couldn’t get to him, so he turned his anger inward, berating himself. Dammit, he thought, now Jesse has only two chances to jump the minimum distance required to reach the finals.
Owens tried to calm down. “Forget it,” he said to himself. “Get that out of your mind. Just bear down.”
But Owens was upset about the foul and nervous about Long, who had already qualified easily and for whom the crowd had cheered wildly. It had been a long time since anyone had mounted a serious challenge to him in the broad jump—not since Peacock. “Second by second,” he later wrote, “home seemed farther away. Much more than the 6000 miles. I wanted to be here, in Berlin, in the Olympics, but it wasn’t my turf. It was Luz Long’s turf.” A sure thing minutes earlier, the broad jump was now his moment of truth.
For any athlete, self-doubt is deadly. When technique and timing are essential, as they are for long jumpers, self-doubt is doubly lethal. No jumper wants to be thinking as he’s charging down the runway. He wants his reflexes, not his brain, to do all the work. Now Owens was thinking too hard—and all his thoughts were negative. His rhythm was off. His strides were choppy. His form was flawed. In his mind, he could suddenly do no right. Stop thinking those thoughts, he said silently to himself. This was one of those moments, again, when he reached into his reservoir of Charles Riley bromides. Don’t worry about your opponent, he thought. Just do what you are capable of doing.
Soon it was time for his second attempt. He set himself, then started running, picking up speed, but he couldn’t stop those thoughts. As he approached takeoff, he found himself unconsciously measuring his strides, trying to space them so he would hit the board cleanly but not beyond the line. As he kicked into flight, he knew he had not fouled. He also knew that his gait had been too hesitant. It was a wobbly jump, and as soon as his spikes hit the sand he knew he was short. He had jumped only 23 feet, 3 inches—2 inches short of what he needed, a laughable effort for the world-record holder. Long’s qualifying jump had been more than 2 feet longer. “The situation,” Arthur Daley wrote, in his understated style, “was getting to be alarming.”
Hanging his head, Owens could barely fathom what was happening. No, he thought as he kicked at the dirt, this isn’t why I came here! Did I come all this way for this? To foul out of the trials and make a fool of myself? He tried to talk himself out of his funk, reminding himself that he was the greatest long jumper ever, that no one else in the competition was comparable, but his mind kept returning to the sight of the red flag—and to the sight of Luz Long.
Then Owens felt a tap on his shoulder.
“What has taken your goat, Jazzee Owenz?” the stranger said slowly in a German imitation of British English, his accent thick but understandable. He was wearing a white shirt emblazoned with an eagle and a swastika. “I am Luz Long. I think I know what is wrong with you.”
“Hello, Luz,” Owens said. At moments like this, even under enormous pressure, he could project infinite calm. This time, Long’s casual introduction really did drain all the tension from him.
Matter-of-factly, Long said, “You know, you should be able to qualify with your eyes closed. Why do you not draw a line a few inches in back of the board and aim at making yourself take off from there? You’ll be sure not to foul, and you certainly ought to jump far enough to qualify.”
“The truth of what he said hit me,” Owens later said. “I drew a line a full foot in back of the board.”
In some versions of this oft-told story, Long placed Owens’s sweatshirt behind the board as a visual aid, but no one who was covering the event mentioned such a gesture in their stories. It seems much more likely that Long simply offered Owens some friendly advice—an act of sportsmanship that embodied the Olympic spirit.
Among the myriad technical innovations Leni Riefenstahl pioneered specifically to chronicle the games, she had had a trench dug near the broad-jump pit so that her cameramen could capture the jumpers in midflight from a low angle. Now her cameraman was frantic. Like everyone else in the stadium, he knew that Owens had only one chance remaining. This was a shot he could not miss. If he did, Riefenstahl would never allow him to forget it. He could already hear her: “Did you get it? Did you get it?”
Seated in the stands, Snyder wished he could tell Owens to forget where he was, just to pretend they were in Columbus—and not to foul. Whatever else, not to foul. To give himself some room near the board. But then he realized that it would be best to give Owens a moment to himself. What he needed was not advice but simply a cocoon in which he could gather himself.
Now Owens was alone—the noise of the crowd blocked, his peripheral vision narrowed to the length of the path at his feet. From his spot high above the field, Grantland Rice tried to locate on Owens’s face “some telltale sign of emotion,” but found none. Then Owens took off, building speed, measuring his steps, looking for that spot behind the board. Timing his strides perfectly, he leapt from well short of the board and sliced through the muggy air, his legs folded beneath him. An instant later he was crashing into the pit. He knew immediately what had happened. He had succeeded. In fact, he had jumped more than 25 feet, despite allowing himself about a foot of leeway on takeoff. Riefenstahl’s cameraman had the shot, but now it probably would not make the cut—just another preliminary jump.
As Snyder breathed deeply and shook his fist, Luz Long went over to pat Jesse Owens on the back. “See,” he said, “it was easy.”
Owens just smiled and clasped Long’s hand in both of his. “Danke,” he said. It was the one German word he had picked up. Nearly forty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, he pointed to Long’s gesture as the defining moment of his Olympic experience—and his life.
In the meantime, though, Owens still had to spend the long afternoon waiting around the Olympic stadium for his 200-meter quarterfinal race and then the broad-jump semifinals and, he hoped, the final. Disaster averted, he and Snyder and Albritton, who had remained in Berlin mostly to watch Owens, rested in their training room, Owens napping on the Spaniards’ cot.
For Snyder, the interval between the morning and afternoon events was a time to contemplate his own failings. He felt that he had let Owens down by not knowing and warning him that he could not make a practice run through the pit. Yes, it had all turned out okay, but still, Owens’s scare gnawed at him. He pledged to himself that there would be no subsequent oversights; he would be vigilant.
At 3:45, though, in the third heat of the 200-meter quarterfinals, there was no need for any coaching whatsoever. Owens simply outran his five competitors, again finishing in 21.1 seconds, equaling the Olympic record he had set five hours earlier. Again the crowd embraced him as if he were one of its blond, blue-eyed Teutons. He felt good. The anxiety of the morning had dissipated. Now all that remained before the sun set was the broad jump.
As Owens was setting records on August 4, so too were many of his teammates. John Woodruff, another black man, won gold in the 800 meters, as expected, and Glenn Hardin, who was white, won gold in the 400-meter hurdles.
Most notably, Helen Stephens broke the world record on her way to winning the gold medal in the women’s 100-meter dash—defeating Stella Walsh, the 1932 gold medalist, whose family, like Owens’s, had moved when she was a child to Cleveland. Unlike the Owenses, the Walasiewiczes were not escaping the prejudices of the Deep South. They were escaping the hopelessness of Poland under the Russian czar. Walsh had been in Cleveland since the age of one but nevertheless competed for Poland. In 1980, after she was shot to death, an autopsy revealed that she was as much male as female. Strangely, in the aftermath of Walsh’s Olympic defeat, a Warsaw newspaper ungallantly claimed that Stephens was a man. German officials, however, leaped to her defense by announcing that, in the words of Time magazine, “they had foreseen the dispute, investigated sprinter Stephens before the race, [and] found her a thoroughgoing female.”
Gender uncertainty was actually a major issue in women’s athletics at the time. In addition to the whispers, and shouts, about Stephens and Walsh, an elite Czechoslovakian runner who had competed as a woman decided that she would be happier living as a man—“I argued with her but lost the decision,” Ted Meredith, her coach, said—and an official statement of the International Olympic Committee regarding the gender of a Japanese broad jumper who had competed in the women’s event at the games in Amsterdam in 1928 referred to said competitor as “It.”
An eighteen-year-old Missourian known as the Fulton Flash, Stephens was received by Hitler, unofficially, after her recordsetting win, “reviving charges Owens and the Negroes are being discriminated against on racial grounds,” Davis J. Walsh reported for the International News Service, “although some sources say the Afro-American victors will be received later by the Fuehrer at his convenience.”
“Boy, what a thrill,” Stephens told reporters after shaking Hitler’s hand in a room under the stadium, away from the photographers’ lenses and the glare of De Baillet-Latour. The Führer, in his simple brown uniform, was accompanied by Rudolf Hess, his powerful deputy and oldest comrade. (In 1920 Hess had become the sixteenth member of the Nazi party.) Hitler and Hess both saluted Stephens, who had thrown a pair of slacks over her running shorts. The conversation, though, did not go anywhere. Stephens could not speak German, and Hitler and Hess could not speak English. “I said something and I guess he congratulated me,” Stephens said. “Anyway, I heard some interpreter say so.”
Stephens did not linger long with the Führer. She had to get back to the field, where she was supposed to be throwing the discus. Still winded after running faster than any woman ever, she did not throw it very far.
Like so many American athletes at the games, Stephens had been impressed with the Germans’ organizational genius and the reverence in which they held their leader. Naturally, she was thrilled to be singled out for congratulations. “It’s enough in any girl’s life to break a record,” she said, “but getting a handshake and a pat on the back from a big man like Hitler is just about my speed for one day.”
Among the other winners that afternoon was Germany’s Gisela Mauermayer, who pleased
the Führer by capturing the discus championship. “It is something,” Rice wrote after witnessing the medal ceremony, “to hear a hundred thousand voices singing ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ as the swastika flag catches the wind and a hundred thousand hands extend in the Nazi salute.”
It was against this backdrop that Owens and Luz Long would duel in the broad-jump final, which consisted of two rounds. At 4:30, in the round that would reduce the field from sixteen to six, they each jumped three times, Owens surpassing the previous Olympic record with his second jump, leaping 25 feet, 10 inches, and Long surpassing it with his third, jumping 25 feet, 8¾ inches. With each prodigious jump, the cheering of the crowd shook the stadium to its core. Then, at 5:45, less than thirty minutes after their final jumps in the elimination round, it was time for the final round, in which they would each have three more attempts. The German jumped first, clearing 25 feet, 4 inches—not good enough. After Owens faulted on his next attempt, Long jumped again, and this time he too jumped 25 feet, 10 inches—sending the crowd into hysterics. The gold medal would be decided in the final jumps.
Now brimming with confidence, Owens took his turn and again smashed the Olympic record, jumping 26 feet, 0 inches. Down to his last chance, Long, not a particularly fast runner, sped along the track, jumped—and faulted. Just like that, Owens had won the gold medal, his second of the games. But he still had one jump remaining. Instead of forgoing it—the sensible choice—he charged down the runway one more time and leaped as he hit the board. “As he hurled himself through space,” Grantland Rice wrote, “the Negro collegian seemed to be jumping clear out of Germany. The American cheering started while Jesse was airborne.”
Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics Page 21