FROM READER’S DIGEST , OCTOBER 1960
![My Greatest Olympic Prize](https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/232/259616/5a4defd768e68/My-Greatest-Olympic-Prize.jpg)
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.
This story is from the January 2018 edition of Reader's Digest India.
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This story is from the January 2018 edition of Reader's Digest India.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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