Character Analysis
The Buckeye Bullet
You might have noticed that one of the running themes (pun intended) for our Olympic athletes is that many of them came from pretty rough childhoods. Jesse Owens is no exception.
Born in 1913, he was the son of sharecroppers, and grandson of a slave. Even as a young child he worked several jobs in order to help feed his family, but he had a happy childhood despite all that. In one interview, Owens once said,
"We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?" (Triumph)
Despite their limited financial means, Owens drew the attention of running coach Charles Riley after his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Riley picked him out of the crowd of boys because of his long, muscular legs, and speed that seemed nearly impossible for someone of his age.
Together, they honed Owens' running skills—which were naturally impressive anyway—into the fine-tuned athleticism that later became Owens' trademark.
Young Love
Meanwhile, Jesse Owens fell in love. Jesse and Ruth Solomon, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.
Well, actually: first comes love, then came the baby carriage when they were still juniors in high school…but in later years Jesse claimed that he and Ruth had secretly wed a few weeks before his daughter's birth in 1932.
When he went off to college, Coach Snyder at Ohio State took over where Coach Riley left off, and his eccentric coaching style didn't seem to hurt Owens at all. Snyder became famous for making his athletes run while listening to music and in a heel-and-toe style when most American distance runners had always run flat-footed.
In 1935, when Jesse Owens earned national infamy for breaking three world records and tying another one in four different races held in under an hour (whew…we're tired just typing that), people started to really take notice. Will Rogers (here's a profile, if you're not familiar with him) even wrote in to a newspaper editor a summary of the weekend's sporting highlights, saying:
A Mr. Owens, a colored lad of 21 years from Ohio State University, broke practically all the world records there is, with the possible exception of horseshoe pitching and flagpole sitting. (Triumph)
In short: Owens was amazing. Which sets us up for the story that is featured in Triumph: the time Jesse Owens crushed Hitler's "master race" at the Olympics.
Those Dang Nazis
You probably already know that there was a fair amount of political intrigue during the 1936 Olympics, held in Hitler's Berlin. It was a well-known fact that Hitler and the Nazis weren't only wildly anti-Semitic, but they didn't even perceive Black people to be the same race as their Aryan counterparts.
So, it's safe to say there was a strong undercurrent of racist behavior during the competition, particularly because the Black athletes representing the United States were taking home a great number of gold medals.
As Schaap writes in Triumph:
From the crowd, a deep roar rose up and filled the stadium, crashing onto the infield, where Owens soaked it up – a black American in a sea of Aryans. A representative of a supposedly inferior race had won the games' most prestigious competition – and the master race did not seem to mind very much.
It was in the midst of this racial tension that a myth was born. On the first day of the track and field competitions, Hitler welcomed the winners up to his podium, to give out handshakes and congratulatory messages.
However, when at the end of the day three Americans won medals in the high jump, Hitler conspicuously left the stadium...ostensibly to "beat the traffic." Huh. We thought only disheartened fans did that.
Anyway, this got ol' Hitler in trouble. The next day, he didn't receive any winners into his podium, although if they were ushered in front of him he would give them a wave or a Nazi salute.
But the myth that was born happened when Jesse Owens, Black athlete extraordinaire, was brought before the Fuhrer after he won the 100-meter race. Owens, and several other witnesses, say that Hitler gave him a disheartened little seated Nazi salute. Others in the press, however, widely proclaimed that Hitler had rudely snubbed Owens because of his skin color.
Yeah. We're not surprised.
Hugs Are Good
There's one other moment in the book (well, other than the moments when Owens just pwned all of his competitors) that really highlighted the spirit of the Games amidst the controversies present at the 1936 Olympics.
When it came to the long jump, Owens was widely reported to have the gold in the bag. Only a few weeks before the Olympics he'd smashed a world record at a meet, and no one there was reputed to be able to even come close to that distance…except for the Aryan specimen of perfection Luz Long, who was jumping for Germany. He's one of the few athletes that Owens says he was actually in awe of, which was intimidating as all get out for someone who so readily won most of his competitions.
After Owens faulted on his first jump due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, Long picked up on the fact that it had messed with his head. Here, another myth was born. Either Long kindly offered Owens some friendly advice, or he placed Owens' sweater about a foot before the board, in order to show him where to jump from.
That way, he'd make the minimum distance needed to qualify, but wouldn't even come close to faulting again. This proved to do the trick because Owens not only qualified, but he absolutely destroyed a world record in the finals later that day.
But even more notably:
Before Owens could dust himself off, Luz Long ran to congratulate him, throwing his right arm around Owens's shoulders. Then, turning to the side of the stadium where Hitler was seated, Long clutched Jesse's right hand with his left and hoisted their arms into the air. Together, Long and Owens paraded across the infield, hand in hand. (Triumph)
This show of sportsmanship didn't really quell the German press's need to trash-talk the Black American athletes, but it does show the true spirit of the Olympic Games. So, not only did Owens make a name for himself by being one of the greatest athletes in a prestigious sport, but he earned worldwide infamy for daring to do so while being Black.
Edward R. Murrow sums it up:
"Jesse Owens is generally recognized as the greatest track star of the last half-century. His performance in Berlin stands unmatched in modern times. Statistics will never indicate Adolf Hitler's reaction as he watched a twenty-three-year-old boy from Danville, Alabama, run the athletes of the master race right into the ground." (Triumph)