Athletics · 1936 · Berlin, Germany
Four Gold Medals in Hitler's Berlin
An American sprinter and long jumper wins four Olympic gold medals in the host city of Nazi Germany, quietly demolishing a regime's racial propaganda in front of its own crowd.
4
Gold medals
2 (outright)
World records
100m, 200m, long jump, 4x100m relay
Event
The 1936 Berlin Olympics were built as a stage for Nazi Germany to broadcast a myth of Aryan supremacy to the world. Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of enslaved people, spent eight days on that stage taking it apart event by event.
He won the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the long jump, and anchored the 4x100 metre relay team to a fourth gold, setting or equalling world records along the way. The long jump win came after a tense qualifying round in which German officials appeared to disqualify two of his early attempts, only for a rival competitor, Luz Long, to publicly advise him on his run-up, a moment of sportsmanship Owens credited for the rest of his life.
Owens returned home to a country that still would not let him stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. The four gold medals stood for decades as the enduring, undeniable answer to a regime that had tried to script the opposite result.
Watch the Moment
