Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens: Forty-Five Minutes That Rearranged Athletics

On the afternoon of 25 May 1935, at the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Jesse Owens was nursing a lower back injury and nearly did not compete. Between roughly a quarter past three and four o'clock he set world records in the long jump, the 220-yard dash and the 220-yard low hurdles, and equalled the world record in the 100-yard dash. One historian called it the greatest forty-five minutes in the history of sport, and nobody has produced a serious rival for the title in the ninety years since.

Oakville

He was born James Cleveland Owens on 12 September 1913 in Oakville, Lawrence County, Alabama, one of ten children of Henry Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald, sharecroppers, and a grandson of enslaved people. When he was nine the family joined the Great Migration north to Cleveland, Ohio. A teacher there asked his name, heard the Alabama accent render "J.C." as "Jesse," and wrote it down. It never came off.

Charles Riley

The Owens children worked, so the family's move did not free the boy's afternoons. Charles Riley, his track coach at Fairmount Junior High, solved this by opening the track before school so Owens could train around his job — the single act of accommodation on which the rest of the career rests.

At East Technical High School, which he entered in 1930, he equalled the world record for the 100-yard dash at 9.4 seconds and ran 20.7 seconds in the 220 at the 1933 national championships, a high school record.

The Buckeye Bullet

At Ohio State University he trained under Larry Snyder and won eight individual NCAA titles, four in 1935 and four in 1936 — a record no one has bettered. He was also, at the same university, denied an athletic scholarship, housed and fed separately from white students, and required to work part-time to pay his way. The Buckeye Bullet was a nickname of some affection from an institution that would not give him a room.

Then came Ann Arbor. The long jump he produced that afternoon — 26 feet 8¼ inches, 8.13 metres — stood as the world record for twenty-five years.

Berlin, August 1936

The Games were Adolf Hitler's showcase, staged to demonstrate the athletic consequences of Aryan racial theory. Owens won four gold medals in six days, each in Olympic record time: the 100 metres in 10.3 seconds on 3 August, the long jump at 8.06 metres on the 4th, the 200 metres in 20.7 seconds on the 5th, and the 4×100 metre relay in a world-record 39.8 seconds on the 9th. No athlete had won four track and field golds at a single Games before. None did it again until Carl Lewis in 1984.

Two of the stories that made the performance legendary do not survive scrutiny, and Owens dismantled one of them himself. He long credited the German long jumper Luz Long with the technical advice that saved his qualifying round; he later admitted this was untrue, and that the two men did not meet until after the competition. The famous Hitler snub is likewise contested: Hitler had left before the medal ceremonies in question, and Owens's own account was that Hitler "waved at me and I waved back."

You Can't Eat Four Gold Medals

The insult that Owens actually recorded came from home. Franklin Roosevelt never invited him to the White House. Avery Brundage suspended his amateur status almost immediately after Berlin, ending his competitive career at twenty-two. The endorsements evaporated.

To make money he raced against horses, motorcycles and trucks at exhibitions, an arrangement he described without self-pity and without softening: "What was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals." Elsewhere he put it more bleakly still: "I had jumped farther and run faster than any man ever had before, and it left me with next to nothing."

He worked at Ford Motor Company from 1942 to 1946, ran a public relations agency in Chicago, headed the Illinois Youth Commission in 1953, and was appointed a goodwill ambassador by President Eisenhower in 1955. He was prosecuted for tax evasion in 1966. He returned to Ohio State after Berlin but never took his degree.

Why Jesse Is Called a Genius

The case is physical craft and competitive nerve, better made precisely.

Sprinting at Owens's level is a problem of mechanical efficiency: applying large force to the ground in contact times of roughly a tenth of a second, repeatedly, without the technique degrading as fatigue sets in. Contemporaries described his running as unusually smooth — losing almost nothing to wasted motion. The long jump compounds it, requiring a full-speed approach to arrive at a fixed board with the take-off foot in exactly the right place, a spatial calculation performed at nine metres per second. His 8.13-metre jump held the world record for a quarter of a century.

The cognitive element shows in the two defining performances. Ann Arbor was executed while injured, across four disciplines, inside forty-five minutes: an act of pacing and focus, not merely of speed. Berlin was executed over six days inside a stadium built to prove him inferior, in front of a head of state who had said so. Four Olympic records under that weight is a feat of temperament a faster man with weaker nerves would not have managed.

The counter-case is that this is where it stops. Owens made no discovery, invented no technique, coached no school, left no body of thought. Much of the mythology around him is false, and he told the truth about the most famous piece of it himself. Genius here means an extraordinary body governed by a steady mind, on a stage whose political meaning was assigned to him by other people.

Legacy

He met Minnie Ruth Solomon at Fairmount Junior High when he was fifteen; they married on 5 July 1935 and had three daughters, and the marriage lasted until his death. A pack-a-day smoker for thirty-five years, he died of lung cancer in Tucson, Arizona, on 31 March 1980, aged sixty-six, and was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.

President Gerald Ford gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, forty years after Berlin. President George H. W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990, ten years after his death. Oakville, Alabama — the sharecroppers' county he left at nine — now holds the Jesse Owens Memorial Park and Museum.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1976
• Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• IAAF Hall of Fame — 2012
• Educated at Ohio State University, East Technical High School and North Platte High School
• Worked as sprinter, athletics competitor and long jumper