Jesse Owens Won His First Olympic Gold Medal - Aug. 3, 1936

Jesse Owens won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympic Games on this day in 1936. There's a longer look at the Nazi Games in the August 1, 2012, episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "The Nazi Games and Jesse Owens."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and its August three.
Jesse Owens won his first of four gold medals at

(00:24):
the Berlin Olympic Games on this day in nineteen thirty six.
The International Olympic Committee had given Berlin the Games back
in one sort of as a post World War One
gesture of welcoming Germany back into the world community. But
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany after that point, and
by the time the Berlin Olympics were approaching, he had

(00:47):
become a dictator and Germany had passed the anti Semitic
Nuremberg Laws. These laws and ongoing suspicions of human rights
abuses in Germany led to calls for a boycott of
the games or to have the games moved. After Olympic
officials visited Berlin, a very tightly controlled visit put their

(01:07):
minds at ease, and the games went on as planned,
but a lot of athletes did elect not to participate,
and in Germany, a lot of athletes were not allowed
to participate, especially if they were Jewish, and the United
States that one of the criticisms that people brought up
about this boycott was that it was kind of hypocritical
people were refusing to go to Berlin to participate in

(01:27):
the Games because of Germany's treatment of its Jewish population.
That in the United States, black athletes were being segregated
into their own teams, into separate athletic facilities, sometimes not
allowed to compete at all. And that brings us to
Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens grew up in poverty as the
child of sharecroppers. He had an amazing athletic ability from

(01:48):
a very young age though he was known as the
fastest man in America, and he had reached this point
in spite of facing discrimination all through his life. That
included not being able to stay with the rest of
his team when he tried leveled with the Ohio State
University track team, and he wasn't even allowed to live
on campus because Ohio State University had no housing for
black students. At the Berlin Olympics, though he won the

(02:10):
one hundred, two hundred, four hundred relay and long jump.
In the four hundred meter relay. There was actually a
pair of two Jewish American athletes who were supposed to
be on that team, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman. They
were swapped out at the last minute, and instead Jesse
Owens and Ralph Metcalfe ran in their place. Stoler and

(02:30):
Glickman always asserted that anti Semitism played a part in
this decision. There were rumors that the German team had
come up with some people that might actually beat the
Americans regardless, though the Olympic Committee saw fit to comment
on it, saying we regret this injustice and feel it
was an injustice. A lot has been made to the

(02:52):
fact that Adolf Hitler didn't shake Jesse Owen's hand at
the Olympics, but this is a little bit of a
historical misunderstanding. It's true that Adolf Hitler didn't shake Jesse
Owens's hand, but he hadn't been consistent about shaking people's hands,
and the International Olympic Committee had asked him to please
stop doing that into either shake hands with everyone or
shake hands with no one. He ultimately decided no one,

(03:14):
so it doesn't appear that he specifically singled out Jesse
Owens to not shake hands. However, when America's black athletes
got back to the United States, they were intentionally snubbed.
They got no invitation to the White House like many
other medalists did, they got no congratulations from President Roosevelt. Today,

(03:35):
people focus on the fact that Jesse Owens won so
many gold medals, and they talked about how it proved
Hitler's racist ideas about arian supremacy wrong. And this leads
to this perception that somehow the Berlin Olympics went badly
for Hitler by undermining his racist ideas. But at the time,

(03:56):
it was a really impressive Olympic Games. It was the
first time Olympics were televised. Over All, the games went
really well. The German people were really welcoming for a
lot of the world outside of Germany, it put people's
minds at ease about the Nazi Party. Germans also won
by far the most medals. This whole thing went so

(04:17):
well and went so well specifically for Adolf Hitler, that
he actually thought that after the next Olympics in Tokyo,
they would come back to Berlin permanently, but there were
no Olympic Games for the next twelve years because of
World War Two, and that meant that for a lot
of German Jewish athletes who were barred from competing because

(04:38):
of Germany's racist policies, they never got to go to
the Olympics. Twelve years is a long time for a
competing athlete, long enough for the competitive window to close,
and of course a lot of those athletes did not
survive the Holocaust. Thanks tod Eve jeff Cote for her
research work on today's episode and Terry Harrison for her

(04:59):
audio skill on this podcast. You can learn more about
Jesse Owens in the August first twelve episode of Stuff
You Miss in History Class, and you can subscribe to
This Day in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts,
really wherever else you want to get a podcast, and
you can tune in tomorrow for some famous wax