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

by Jeremy Schaap

  It was undoubtedly the most dramatic moment of the games that Riefenstahl’s cameramen failed to capture, and the beginning of a brief, torrid affair. (Riefenstahl said that when she received a handwritten letter from Morris and saw his “strangely convoluted strokes,” she became uneasy and asked a handwriting expert for his opinion. “This is a man who is unstable,” the graphologist told her. “He’s dangerous, uncontrolled, ruthless, inconsiderate, brutal, and even has a sadistic streak.” In 1938, Morris made the most of his animal instincts, starring as the lord of the apes in Tarzan’s Revenge. His leading lady was also an Olympic champion: Eleanor Holm.)

  For Riefenstahl, the first eight days of the games had been an unprecedented challenge. She had battled Goebbels, the IOC, and the officials on the field, all of whom had tried in vain to rein her in. She had flattered and finessed Hitler into giving her almost all that she had requested while her cameramen had shot millions of feet of footage—of runners, pole vaulters, javelin throwers, marksmen and rowers and equestrians. They had captured the full scope of the games with innovative technology and an artist’s eye. There was only one problem. The star of their film-in-the-making was a black American. Riefenstahl could still foresee the problems that might pose, but she pressed on, filming Jesse Owens’s every move, capturing hundreds of heroic images of him at full speed and in midair.

  “What are we going to do with this man?” her chief cameraman asked her. “Goebbels will never let you release a film that celebrates him.”

  “There is no choice,” she said sternly. “He is these Olympics. There can be no discussion.”

  “But there will be,” the cameraman said, chuckling.

  The next day, August 9, at 3:15 P.M., Jesse Owens was about to run his final race at the games of the Eleventh Olympiad, leading off for the United States in the final of the 4 × 100-meter relay. It was the most pleasant day he had yet experienced in Berlin. The temperature was in the mid-seventies, and the sun had emerged from captivity. The crowd was the biggest ever at an Olympics, an estimated 120,000, headlined by the Führer and his guests of honor, King Boris of Bulgaria and Crown Prince Umberto of Italy. Six teams were in the final—the Argentines on the inside, then the Germans, the Dutch, the Americans, the Italians, and the Canadians. Once more the German starter soothed Owens’s nerves with his calmness and perfect timing.

  At the crack of the gun, Owens tore from his mark. Despite his exhaustion, despite all the energy and emotion he had expended in the previous week, he ran faster than he had ever run before. He ran the way Charles Riley had taught him to run—his form perfect, his head up, his eyes straight ahead, his arms churning, his feet only skimming the track. This, he knew, would be his final chance to show the Germans, to show everyone, exactly how good he was. For nine seconds he tore through the red dirt. “Owens lit out as though escaping from Beelzebub,” Gallico wrote. Wilhelm Leichum, the German leadoff man, and Tjeerd Boersma, the Dutch leadoff man, were 2 yards behind Owens when he handed off to Metcalfe. Also running his final Olympic race, Metcalfe only increased the American lead before handing off to Draper. Owens and Metcalfe built up such a lead, Gallico wrote, “that the white boys to whom they turned over the baton could have crawled in on their hands and knees.”

  Wykoff crossed the finish line in 39.8 seconds, world-record time, surprising no one. Surprising Robertson and Cromwell, perhaps, neither the Germans nor the Dutch won the silver, which went to the Italians. The Germans took bronze; the Dutch were disqualified for botching a handoff but had been no threat anyway. “The 400-meter relay was the romp everyone except Lawson Robertson expected,” Jesse Abramson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. “With Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman the team might not have broken the record, but these two sprinters had every right to be on the team.”

  When the race ended, Snyder—who had managed somehow to gain access to the field—went running to the spot on the infield where Owens had been for Wykoff. He was clutching his hat in his right hand and his program in his left. “Jesse,” he said. “You did it. Man, you did it. I’ve never seen you run so fast.”

  “No reason to hold back,” Owens said. Then they embraced, tears running down Snyder’s cheeks.

  “Come on, Larry,” Owens said, “don’t let the Germans see you cry.”

  Moments later, one last time, Owens took to the medal stand—although he insisted that Metcalfe take the highest step. He was presented with another laurel wreath and stood at attention for the flag-raising. As the Stars and Stripes was hoisted, alongside the fascist flags of the Mussolini and Hitler regimes, he caught sight of Luz Long, who had come out to the stadium to cheer him. At that moment, all his emotions washed over him in a wave—his euphoria, his pride, his guilt. Gathering himself, he looked up into the stands to the Führer’s box. He thought he saw Hitler waving at him.

  Epilogue

  AS JESSE OWENS was in the process of receiving his fourth gold medal, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were chatting amiably with each other in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.

  Six weeks earlier they had fought twelve brutal rounds at Yankee Stadium, Schmeling destroying the myth of Louis’s invincibility. Now, as Louis trained for his fight the following week against the former heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey, they had their first opportunity to discuss the fight they had fought with each other. Instead, they talked about Jesse Owens.

  “Did you see the games?” Louis asked, leaning on the ropes of the ring in which he was about to spar—poorly, it turned out—four rounds with four different men.

  “Oh, sure,” Schmeling replied. He was in heavy flannels, despite the Jersey heat.

  “Did you see Jesse Owens run?” Louis asked. He knew that Schmeling had just arrived on the Hindenburg the night before.

  Schmeling nodded slowly. “Oh, yes,” he said.

  Louis nodded too. “Man, can’t that boy run.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  That night, with four gold medals in his suitcase, Jesse Owens left Berlin. To cover the cost of sending its team to Germany, the American Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union had arranged an exhibition tour that would feature its most visible stars, who of course would receive no compensation for their efforts. So Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, among others, were shipped off to Cologne, a few hundred miles south and west of the capital, where 35,000 fans came out to see in person the men—most of them black—about whom they had been hearing so much. To say that the Americans were less than enthusiastic would be a huge understatement, but it would have been unacceptable to perform indifferently. Still, Metcalfe was less indifferent than Owens, defeating him for the first time in more than a year, by one tenth of a second. For his part, Owens did win the broad jump, but leaped only 24 feet, 4½ inches.

  The results in Cologne were not nearly as newsworthy as Owens’s announcement that he was ready to turn pro. “I’m anxious to finish college,” he said to Alan Gould just before leaving Berlin, “but I can’t afford to miss this chance if it really means big money. I can always go back and get a degree. It would mean giving up my future athletic career, but I have had a fair share of track-and-field honors and I feel I could hang up my spikes without any serious regrets.”

  In the previous week, Owens had received dozens of offers to cash in on his Olympic achievements. Eddie Cantor offered him $40,000 to appear in his act for ten weeks. An orchestra in California offered him $25,000 to spend ten weeks telling jokes as it warmed up. Wilberforce College in Ohio made him a much less lucrative offer to coach its track team, promising only “to take care of him.”

  Owens had one year of eligibility remaining at Ohio State, but Larry Snyder, for one, wanted to see him capitalize on his medals. “It would be foolish for me to stand in Jesse’s way,” he said. “He’s absolutely at the height of his fame now. Nothing that he could do in his remaining year of college competition would lift him to a higher peak in the athletic world than he now enjoys. He has a good chance to make $75,000 to $100,000. I’d be glad to se
e him do it.”

  Snyder was right. In August 1936, Owens was as famous as any man in America—praised equally by the white and black press, celebrated for refuting Hitler’s claims of Aryan superiority. But then there was the reality of his status as a black man in the United States—and as an amateur athlete competing at the pleasure of a man who, as his power increased, would come to be known as Slavery Avery.

  After Cologne, Owens participated in exhibitions in Prague and in Bochum, Germany, flying around Europe with so little cash that he was often fed by the strangers seated next to him. Still the offers kept coming. By August 15, he and Snyder were in London for another AAU event. There he showed a reporter the telegram from Cantor, Will Rogers’s one-time colleague in the Ziegfeld Follies. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Owens said, reading the telegram for the hundredth time. “All I know is that I want to get back to my family. I’m going to Sweden Monday, then back to London, then home—and I’ll be the gladdest man in the world to get there, believe me. All this ballyhoo is getting on my nerves.”

  Owens went out and ran the third leg in the sprint relay, this time run at the nonmetric distance of 440 yards, and this time with Ralph Metcalfe, Frank Wykoff, and Marty Glickman. They set a world record, but Owens was done. After the race he told Larry Snyder that that was it. There would be no trip to Stockholm. They were going home as soon as possible.

  The next day, back in Berlin, on the final day of the games in which Jesse Owens had won four gold medals, set record after record, and upheld the honor of the United States in the face of Nazism, Avery Brundage indefinitely suspended him for refusing to proceed to Stockholm, making him ineligible to compete in AAU-sponsored events. “We had no alternative under the circumstances but to disbar Owens,” Daniel Ferris, the AAU secretary, said at the Olympic stadium.

  Snyder, still in London, was apoplectic. “Last Sunday,” he said, his face reddening, “Jesse was informed by Ferris just forty-five minutes before time to leave that he was going to compete in a meet at Cologne. This was Sunday night, after Jesse had won the relay for the United States following a tough week of competition. He had to hurry and pack one suitcase, leaving the rest of his things for Dave Albritton to pack. The day after he met Ralph Metcalfe [in the 100 meters]. It looks to me like a deliberate attempt to have the boy beaten. It was absolutely unfair. It doesn’t matter whom the AAU sacrifices to get its 10 percent. You wouldn’t ask the poorest show troupe to work the way these boys worked immediately after the games—all without a cent of spending money with which to brighten an otherwise drab picture.”

  “There’s nothing I can gain out of this trip,” Owens said when Snyder finally stopped talking to take a breath. “This suspension is very unfair to me. All we athletes get out of this Olympic business is a view out of a train or airplane window. It gets very tiresome, it really does.”

  Then, his own ire rising nearly to the level of Snyder’s, he added, “This track business is becoming one of the great rackets in the world. It doesn’t mean a thing to us athletes. The AAU gets the money. It gets all the money collected in the United States and then comes over to Europe and takes half the proceeds. A fellow desires something for himself.”

  In Cleveland, reporters knocked on Ruth Owens’s door. She was at home with Gloria and her mother-in-law.

  “Mrs. Owens, what do you think of this suspension?” the man from the Plain Dealer asked.

  “It is pretty terrible,” Ruth said. Then Emma Owens waved her hands. “Terrible isn’t a word for it,” she said, cutting off Ruth. “It’s scandalous. Hasn’t my boy done everything that was asked of him? Didn’t he run his legs off to bring victory to the team? If he fails to get the money now, he’ll simply be a forgotten Owens in ten years.”

  For three days Snyder and Owens sat around in their hotel in London, mulling over the offers to appear on Broadway, or with Bojangles, or with Eddie Cantor. Finally, on Wednesday, August 19, they boarded the Queen Mary for a weeklong voyage home. Ruth went to New York with Jesse’s parents to see her husband for the first time in two months—but together they spent a frustrating and humiliating night being rejected for service by hotel after hotel. Finally the Hotel Pennsylvania gave them rooms—on the condition that they use the service entrance. Even in New York, it didn’t matter whether you were the world’s greatest athlete, if you were black.

  Not surprisingly, the promises of easy wealth were all lies. No one was actually willing to pay Owens tens of thousands of dollars to do anything. All those telegrams—with the exception of the offer from Wilberforce—were publicity stunts, designed to place names in newspaper columns.

  Eventually Owens tried to cash in on his fame with a chain of dry-cleaning stores. They failed. He owned and operated a barnstorming black baseball team. To attract crowds to the games, he sometimes raced a horse across the outfield. Of course the horse would spot him 20 yards—and Owens, sometimes in a suit, sometimes in shorts, would sometimes win. If the horse got a bad start.

  He took a job with the state government of Illinois, working as a kind of physical education guru in the school system. Here he excelled, sharing the lessons he had learned from Charles Riley and Larry Snyder with thousands of children. He traveled the world spreading the Olympic gospel, mostly leaving to Ruth the responsibility of raising their three daughters. He also worked as an executive at Ford Motor Company and with a sporting goods company. All the while he maintained close friendships with Larry Snyder, who spent his entire career at Ohio State and served as the head coach of the 1960 U.S. Olympic track team; Ralph Metcalfe, who eventually served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; Marty Glickman, a pioneering sports broadcaster; and even Eulace Peacock, a sometime business partner.

  Owens’s friendship with Luz Long was not as enduring. For several years the two athletes maintained a correspondence, sharing their troubles and their hopes, but shortly after receiving his law degree, Long was compelled to join the German armed forces. By the time he wrote the following letter to Owens, the United States and Germany were at war, and he was too:

  My heart is telling me that this is perhaps the last letter of my life. If that is so, I beg one thing from you: When the war is over, please go to Germany, find my son and tell him about his father. Tell him about the times when war did not separate us—and tell him that things can be different between men in this world.

  Your brother,

  Luz

  One of Hitler’s more reluctant soldiers, Luz Long was fatally wounded during the Allied invasion of Sicily. He died in a British field hospital on July 13, 1943, at the age of thirty. In 1951, Jesse Owens did what Long had asked him to do. He found Kai Long and told him about his father. “I’ve seen Luz again,” he said, “in the face of his son.”

  In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement turned increasingly militant, black radicals took to calling Owens an Uncle Tom. After John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their black-gloved fists on the 200-meter medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Owens—hoping to control the damage—met with the U.S. track team. The black athletes all but spat in his face.

  Then, in the early 1970s, he embraced black militancy, publishing I Have Changed, a book that reflected the evolution of his political philosophy. Still he continued to speak at corporate gatherings, to the Elks and the Rotarians and the Boy Scouts. He became, in the words of William O. Johnson of Sports Illustrated, “a professional good example,” sharing his stories of Adolf Hitler and Luz Long, of Charles Riley and Larry Snyder. Owens gave his audiences what he thought they wanted—more than anything else, the false impression that he had been snubbed by the Führer and that the German crowds had been hostile to him and his black teammates during his fortnight in Berlin. In his mind, he easily justified his dissembling. Denied by white America the opportunities for wealth that he thought he was owed, he exaggerated his stories to make a good living. So what?

  In 1980, at the age of sixty-six, James Cleveland Owens died of lung cance
r. In his obituaries, he was called, unfailingly, the greatest of all Olympic stars. Even today, more than 110 years after the revival of the games, he remains their ultimate champion.

  Leni Riefenstahl spent two years editing Olympia. When it was finally released, in 1938, critics hailed it as one of the greatest achievements of the cinema. Olympia remains a staple of film schools, and its technical and stylistic innovations have influenced generations of filmmakers. Riefenstahl did have to fight Goebbels to keep all her beautiful shots of Owens, who emerges from the film as the god of the games. His beauty and grace were a rebuke to the regime that Riefenstahl had done so much to glorify.

  The most spectacular image of Owens in Olympia shows him making his last attempt in the broad-jump competition, the jump that stood as an Olympic record for twenty-four years. Actually, like much of Olympia, the shot is a re-creation, with Owens jumping just for Riefenstahl’s camera. First he is seen from the side, in his famous, revised starting position. Then he is hurtling down the track, and as he hits the takeoff board, Riefenstahl cuts to a head-on shot. The camera stays with him as he leaps several feet off the ground, folds his legs, stretches his arms straight ahead, and then crashes into the dirt. Then Riefenstahl cuts to the actual jump. Owens leaps up from the pit, sand clinging to his dark legs. Then he is standing facing the camera, a disembodied white arm on his shoulder. On his face there is a smile of deep satisfaction. He is serene and handsome.

  Riefenstahl’s message is clear: Look closely. Here is your superman.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  vii Epigraph: Grantland Rice, The Tumult and the Shouting, (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1963), p. 254.