Athletics · 1936 · Berlin, Germany
Four Gold Medals in Hitler's Berlin
Four Olympic gold medals for an American sprinter and long jumper, won in Nazi Germany's showcase capital, in front of the crowd the regime had gathered to watch its racial theories confirmed.
4
Gold medals
2 (outright)
World records
100m, 200m, long jump, 4x100m relay
Event
Nazi Germany built the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a stage, and the script called for Aryan supremacy to be demonstrated in public. Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and the grandson of enslaved people, spent eight days on that stage dismantling the argument one event at a time.
He took the 100 metres, then the 200, then the long jump, and anchored the 4x100 metre relay team to a fourth gold, setting or equalling world records on the way. The long jump nearly did not happen at all. German officials appeared to disqualify two of his early qualifying attempts, and it was a rival, Luz Long, who walked across in front of the home crowd to advise him on his run-up. Owens talked about that for the rest of his life.
Back in the United States, he still could not stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. The four medals were left to make the argument on their own, and for decades they did, against a regime that had gone to considerable expense to script the opposite result.
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