The Greatest Sporting Performance Ever
Ninety years ago last week — in the early days of August 1936 — a 22-year-old black American accomplished something majestic, something so incredible, it is to be remembered as long as people celebrate the idea that no race or religion is inherently superior or inferior to another. A soft-spoken young man, Jesse Owens, was the son of black Alabama sharecroppers. Sickly as a child, he began working in the fields when he was 7, expected to bag 100 pounds of cotton a day. When he was 9, his family moved to Ohio, where in junior high school it became evident that he, maybe, had a talent for running. Talk about gross understatements! In Berlin, Germany, during that summer of 1936, Adolf Hitler was host of the Olympic Games. Hitler's main goal was to establish once and for all that there was an Aryan master race, symbolized by Germany’s Olympians. Owens, by that point a champion track athlete at Ohio State University,...