August 9, 1936: Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal at the 1936 Summer Olympics.
One can unfortunately experience that often the free man must even fight with blacks, with Negroes, for the victory trophy. This is an unparalleled disgracing and a degrading of the Olympic idea.
In 1932, the NSDAP newspaper Volkischer Beobachter openly expressed contempt at the prospect of black athletes competing alongside white Aryan athletes for Olympic medals; in 1933, the party mouthpiece wrote plainly of the upcoming 1936 Summer Olympics: “the blacks must be banned”. In the end, Jewish, black, and other undesirable non-Aryan athletes were allowed to compete. While anti-Semitic signs and the like were removed, the event was molded into a showcase of Nazi ideals, meant to project an image of a peaceful but powerful Nazi Germany. The absolute victory of Germany’s superior Aryan athletes would complete this image.
Though Germany did trump every other nation in the overall medal count, one athlete captured international attention and became the most successful individual athlete at the games by winning four gold medals: Jesse Owens, African-American track and field athlete, Alabama native. Between August 3 and August 9, Owens won the 100m sprint, the long jump (for which he set a record that stood for a quarter century), the 200m sprint, and the 4x100 sprint relay. While Owens later famously stated “Hitler didn’t snub me – it was FDR who snubbed me” in response to the American president’s failure to acknowledge his achievements, the Führer’s response was not entirely a fountain of goodwill. Albert Speer later wrote in his memoir Inside the Third Reich that Hitler rationalized Owens’ victory by claiming that “people whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive” (referring to people of African descent) and that “their physiques were stronger than civilized whites”.
Owens was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 by Gerald Ford, forty years after his performance at the Olympics.