My Greatest Olympic Prize

FROM READER’S DIGEST , OCTOBER 1960

- Jesse Owens

IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1936. The Olympic Games were being held in Berlin. Because Adolf Hitler insisted his country’s athletes were members of a “master race”, nationalistic feelings were at an all-time high.

I wasn’t too worried about all this. I’d trained and sweated for six years with the Games in mind. While I was going over on the boat, all I could think about was taking home one or two of those gold medals. I particularly had my eye on the running broad jump. A year before, as an undergraduate at Ohio State University, I’d set the world record of 8.13 metres. Everyone kind of expected me to win that event hands-down.

I was in for a surprise. When the time came for the broad-jump trials, I was startled to see a tall boy hitting the pit at almost 7.9 metres on his practice leaps! He turned out to be a German named Luz Long. I was told that Hitler had kept him under wraps, evidently hoping to win the jump with him.

I guessed that if Long won, it would add some support to the Nazis’ Aryan-superiority theory. After all, I am black. A little hot under the collar about Hitler’s ways, I determined to go out there and really show der Führer and his master race who was superior and who wasn’t.