Jesse Owens

Vanity Fair September 1935

flashback

Competitive sports are "war minus the shooting," noted George Orwell. And Jesse Owens, one of the finest athletes of the century, fought some of the toughest battles. The youngest of thirteen children bom to an Alabama sharecropper, Owens became an overnight sensation at age twenty-one, when on May 25, 1935, he matched one world record and broke three more—all in the space of an hour. By then the revered athlete was a sophomore at Ohio State, where he was barred from dorms and restaurants, worked nights pumping gas, and was subjected to medical tests to see if blacks were pretematurally endowed to run fast. But Owens found his moment of glory at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. With a fierce grace immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl's controversial documentary Olympia, Owens triumphed over Hitler's Aryan will by winning four gold medals and setting three records— including an 8.06-meter long jump, which was not beaten until 1960. This month the twenty-fifth Olympiad opens in Barcelona, where the thirty-one-yearold Carl Lewis is scheduled to run for the gold once again in the categories Owens made his own.