October 10, 2024 • 39 mins
The most famous athlete in 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany was the American sprinter Jesse Owens, and one of the most famous stories from those Games was the unexpected, heartwarming encounter Owens had with the German long jumper Luz Long. The friendship between the two athletes would serve as a symbol of how sports can overcome national antagonisms. We wonder: What really happened at the long jump pit that day?
This is part one of a two-part crossover from Revisionist History’s ‘Hitler’s Olympics’ series. To listen to the whole series, head over to the Revisionist History show page.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin, Hey, Last Archive listeners, It's been here and I
want to share a story I made with the show
Revisionist History that I think belongs in the Last Archive
(00:36):
two because it's about history, democracy, and a question of truth.
In nineteen thirty six, the Olympic Games were hosted by
Nazi Germany. The modern Olympic movement was at a low ebb,
and without the thirty six Games, there's a good chance
that we wouldn't have the Olympics we have now. But
participating in games held in Nazi Germany raised a whole
(00:58):
lot of ethical and political questions. We tend to think
of Nazism as a geographically bounded thing, something people in
Germany in the nineteen thirties dealt with, but even just
a few years after Hitler's rise, before the start of
the Second World War, the Nazi Olympics forced countries around
the world to make a decision about whether or not
they were going to take a stand against Nazism. In
(01:21):
the US, there was a boycott movement. It failed, but
the political tensions around the games were fertile ground for myths.
Myths that tended to justify the choice to go to
Nazi Germany. In this episode, we look at probably the
most influential of those myths, a tale about Jesse Owens.
(01:42):
This episode and the next are two of a series
that revisionist history host Malcolm Gladwell and I worked on together.
It's called Hitler's Olympics, and if you like these episodes,
I strongly encourage you to check out the whole series. Okay,
here's the episode.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Collet Street tears around the Gray Serger with a speed
of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride, also.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Running about four thousand athletes impeded in the nineteen thirty
six Olympic Games. Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Streak Jesse Owens in the one hundred meters at Bulding
the outca second on him.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
already set three world records in a single day, all
in the same hour. With a bad back, the.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Worlds most runner makes the others look as if they're
walking as he wins the final and equals the worlds
record of time.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And in nineteen thirty six even the Germans were expecting
something great from him.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
How many board medals do your host to win?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
The two part time, it's to desire very athlete to
win a first place in the.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Inn the Olympic Games in nineteen thirty six, he was
slated to compete in three events.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
And since I'm in.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Three events, I hope to emerge with three victory.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I hope one meters, two broad jump, one hundred meters,
two hundred meters and the broad jump. Later they added
a fourth event, the four by one hundred meter relay.
He would win gold in all four, the only person
to win four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics. And
(03:40):
that is why you know the name Jesse Owens. But
it all could have turned out differently because of that
broad jump. You've seen a broad jump before today, it's
called the long jump, and it's one of the more
dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers sprint down the runway, hit
a takeoff board and they look like they're flying and
(04:03):
then they land in a huge spray of sand. So
the morning of August fourth, nineteen thirty six, ten thirty
am in the Reichsportfeld. It's the long jump qualifying rounds.
Best jumpers gone to the final. Owens had just run
his heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he
headed over to the pit. It was the third day
(04:25):
of the games, and by then he already had his
first gold medal, so it was a surprise when he
botched his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it
was a practice run, no sweat, though he had two
more tries, so he lined himself back up and started
jogging down the runway. He took off and came up short.
(04:48):
He had one jump left. If he screwed up that
last jump, he'd have been out of the contest, and
he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win
four gold medals in nineteen thirty six to one of
three athletes who'd won three goals, right up there with
Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbrok, who actually would have had
more total medals than him. And I asked, be honest,
(05:11):
have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika mastenbrook No,
And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying drum, you
wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
(05:34):
something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
made him a legend.
Speaker 7 (05:45):
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, Ben and daph
Haffrey and I are talking about one of the biggest
stories to emerge from the Berlin Games, A story about
two athletes making good on the promise of the Olympics,
cross cultural understanding, sportsmanship against all odds, the moment that
(06:10):
became key to the Olympic mythology and to the legend
of Jesse Owens. A powerful, incredibly important story that's hiding
a very big secret.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled
in over the stadium. Around one hundred thousand people were
in the stands watching in America's most famous athlete. Jesse Owens,
was screwing up badly, which makes no sense. All he
had to do was jump seven point one five meters
to qualify. He already had a world record for jumping
(06:50):
a meter farther than that, So what was going wrong?
Malcolm and I had decided to ask an expert a legend.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
Actually it was about ten years ago or so. The
age is sixty five, I think. And I jumped further
than my high school mark.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Is that right?
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And you're the first American who jumped fifty seven feet.
Speaker 8 (07:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time,
Milan Tiff.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
I actually jumped sixty feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize
it because I jumped out of the pit.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
And where should you do that?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Right here?
Speaker 1 (07:26):
You say, wow, Yeah, I jumped.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on
the grass. I had grass stands all over the back
of me.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 7 (07:40):
So when I was in high school, starting at the
age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribed to
Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
it's called. And Miller Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
(08:02):
of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
But I was I was just obsessed with him as
this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure, and
(08:26):
he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
be He's going to be a little bit. He might
be a little I don't know, but I have a
sense that he might be. He might be a little
out there.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff,
I felt like I had taken some kind of intense
psychedelic the effects of which I've yet to wear off.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
The first humans. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I understood that to walk is just to take a
number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed by
an actually gorgeous painting of Milan's portraying a pair of
empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space called
Mysterious slee palm springs.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And the birds and the trees would all fly down.
They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have
when I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
he could take us out to the UCLA track, And
when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above
us the whole time, which only made everything a little
more surreal, and Olympic legends just walking up to him,
literally bowing down this I think because they wouldn't normally
see him. He told us he prefers to run in
(09:41):
the morning, by which he meant three am. Tiff took
us out to the broad jump pit to help us
get inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could
do because he's a master of the approach the part
Jesse Owens was screwing up, but also because so you
(10:02):
actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
Yeah, yeah, you know, I sit and he'd tell the stories.
Yeah and not here all the stories. And you know,
he talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
You know, we asked him to tell us about how
you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
of rockings. You have to have some or jiggle where
you will call it. Yeah, you have to have a
jiggle or a gide up before you even get into
your run.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, that ajustice of your run. Is that why this
is obviously the broad jump, but lose long. I noticed
he does this sort of like hitch in his leg
before he starts running.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, it's like a dance. It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Can you show us what your gidea.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Up was, Well, it's like a one two, three, four five,
then you start your run.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
And I taught it to Willie Banks world record, taught
it to bike Pile world record.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
We gave it a shot on the track where at
the very same time actual Olympic athletes were practicing for
this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did
we set a world record? Not even close. Did we
become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied. But
this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.
(11:21):
What was Did Jesse Owens have a gide yo?
Speaker 4 (11:23):
No, he had a stance start because he was a sprinterer,
you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
all the time. He didn't have a jiggle, Well, he
didn't have a g no. He didn't have a jiggle
or a giddy oh yeah, And it took his competitor
to say, man, come on, you gotta do something first.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit, the export fold
loots Long Lutz Long was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champion,
and he looked the part, a fine ak line nose
framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As
Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning
(12:05):
to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than
to see a black man and lose to an Arian.
The thought was nanging at him, messing up his focus.
And then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler
had been watching the games and saw that when Owens's
turn came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil.
(12:28):
That's why he was fouling out. He was psyched out
by all of it, distracted, and when he saw how
amazing Lutslong was at the broad jump, he began wonder
if there was something true about all this Arian stuff.
He was down to his last jump, and then came
the miracle. In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight,
(12:49):
Owens wrote, Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Lutslong.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What
has taken your goat?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
I had to smile a little in spite of myself
hearing his mixed up American idiom ah nothing. I said,
you know how it is? He was silent for a
few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
But I also know you are a better jumper than this. Now,
what has taken your goat?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
I laughed out loud.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
This time, but I couldn't tell him him above all,
I glanced over at the broad jump pit I was
about to be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if
he wasn't sure which ones to use. Is it what
reichkanze Hitler did? He asked. I was thunderstruck that he'd
say it. I started to answer, but I didn't know
(13:50):
what to say. I see, he said, Look, we talk
about that later. Now you must jump, and you must qualify.
But how I shot back?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I have thought?
Speaker 5 (14:03):
He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
one hundred percent?
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Correct? I not yet?
Speaker 5 (14:10):
You must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
this time in frustration, and as I did, I heard
the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, You take
off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
(14:33):
All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
a cloudburst.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit
that mark on the towel, leapt into the air.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
And when he finally got that, he qualified.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands,
in the metal event itself whol record, he set an
Olympic record. And that's when Lootes along the aryan poster
child who had just lost to Jesse. Owens hugged him
in front of Adolph Hitler, and the Hitler was pist man,
(15:24):
but Long didn't just embrace him. According to Jesse, Owens
later that night they met up in the Olympic village.
The hours ticked on and they stayed up late, talking
about their lives, the state of the world, and the
uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had been formed
(15:44):
between the men that day, because then the next day
they did it again, and after that, again and again
and again. Every single night of the Games they met
up to talk. They became friends. The dream of the
Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable gap
(16:05):
between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
After the Games, when Owens was back in America and
Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany, they wrote letters to
each other, even after long was serving in the Wehrmacht
the Nazi Army, back and forth across the Atlantic for years.
(16:25):
They kept coming until right before Lutzlang was killed in
the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa.
On some lonely desert hour, he sat down to write
one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse. I fear
for my woman who was at home, and my young son, Karl,
who has never really known his father. My heart tells me,
if I be honest with you, that this is the
(17:05):
last letter I shall ever write. If it is so,
I ask you something. It is something so very important
to me. It is you go to Germany when this
war done. Someday find my Carl and tell him about
his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when
(17:27):
we were not separated by war, I am saying, Tell
him how things can be between men on this earth.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone.
This story is a big part of the legend of
Jesse Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, there's the story when they made a star
studied Hollywood film about Jesse Owens's life. Lutslog and that
qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would
(18:04):
help launch the career of the greatest Olympic documentarian of
all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm not an auctioneer, but
I think it is the reason why Lutslog's silver medal
sold for nearly half a million dollars two years ago,
about five times the amount earned for any other silver
medal at auction. It's arguably the most important story in
(18:27):
Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic Dream. It
made the case that it was good that America went
to the Vilin Games because it made possible this improbable
friendship that transcended even the Second World War, a story
that was just too good to be true. This entire series,
(19:03):
we've been telling stories about the way people made sense
of having the Olympics in Nazi Germany, the distortions, And
when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens's friendship with lutzlog,
I thought we got to do an episode on this.
Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all
that moral fog. So I wanted to read more of
what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters.
(19:26):
I wrote to the Jesse Owens Archive at the University
of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't
have any. They suggested I write to the family, but
they didn't have any either. It seems strange to me
that no one had kept them. So then I thought,
maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country.
Speaker 9 (19:44):
My name is gelindorre I was living in Leipzig and
working in Leipzig for more than thirty years, and the
last twenty five years as the director of the sports
Museum in Leipzig.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right, that's right.
Speaker 9 (20:06):
Lutslan was born in Leipzig nineteen thirty and he lived
there almost till the end.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Roar and her colleague, the sport historian Volka Kluga have
looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens Luteslong story than
anyone else.
Speaker 9 (20:23):
We got a lot of questions from all over the
world about legend.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There
are a few different versions. But Roor dug through the
official reports about the games. They're over a thousand pages long.
Speaker 9 (20:39):
There is a very good documentation about the Olympics called
Official Report of the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and they
describe it very exactly what happens and where.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary
evidence is an article Kluga turned up written by Lutzlong himself.
He was published about a week into the games, and
it's called mine kamfmitt Owens I struggle with Owens, which
I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs, but
homages to Hitler aside. The article was part of the
(21:18):
surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens's win,
including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Luteslong
lying together in the grass of the Reichspoortfeld smiling. The
photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the competition,
when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing a
(21:39):
dark turtleneck sweater and it looks like he's cracking a joke.
Owens is beaming at him and wearing his Team USA
crew neck. In the photo, they're so close it almost
looks like they're touching. They look like real friends. So
Gerlinda Ror and I turned our attention to that.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
So between the first three jumps and the final three jumps,
these photographs were doing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Oh so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens
win the gold. Yes, oh wow, so it's even its prior.
There's a good chance that photo was taken or at
least commissioned by Lenny Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the
Third Reich. The photos float freely around the Internet now
you can find them on Getty images. But at the
(22:26):
time they were part of the Nazi propaganda push, meant
to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed.
So we know that Lutzlang and Jesse Owens met at
least for the time it took to take that photo,
and they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said.
But here's the strange thing. In his article, Lutslog mentions
(22:49):
Jesse Owens's difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three
jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping
him with the approach, which is strange because that's the
most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's
biggest competitor. Owens is what stands between Long and the gold,
and yet Long go out of his way to help
(23:10):
Owens get to the final You would think in an
article about the Olympic Spirit, Long would mention that they
were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in
Nazi Germany, it would have been away for an arian
to take credit for a black man's success, but he
doesn't mention it. Okay, so maybe all the meaningful stuff
happened in those long talks in the Olympic village.
Speaker 9 (23:32):
What about those I didn't think that. It cannot be
because Lutsloan didn't live in the Olympic village. Oh really,
he didn't live here. I know from his family and
from photographs and from a diary of his mother that
(23:55):
after the opening of the Olympic Games he went back
home from Berlin to Leipzig.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump?
He wasn't. He would go home at the end of
each day.
Speaker 9 (24:08):
No, not each day. After his competitions started. He lived
in Berlin in another hotel.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
All right, So the long talks seem less likely, though
there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way. First,
a few days after the broad jump, a newswire service
wrote that quote something like a damon and Pytheis's friendship
has sprung up between Ludslog and Jesse Owens. Though I
think that's just a reference to the hug on the
field that all the reporters would have seen. But then
(24:39):
there's an athlete who, decades after the Games claimed that
she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long,
But Volka Kluga thinks the timing of her story is
implausible given her events schedule. Also, I can't find any
record of it in Owens's Olympic diaries. Owens is on
the record saying quote, I didn't get a chance to
go out of the Olympic village. In fact, I never
(25:01):
did leave the village. The only time that I was
ever out of the village was at the time when
we went to the Olympic stadium to compete. I mean,
they had some intense schedules to keep Actually, even Hitler
couldn't keep up with their schedules. The feuror liked to
sleep late. He famously slipt through a lot of d
Day and probably for the same reason, he wasn't even
(25:23):
in the stands the morning of the broad drum qualifiers,
which is why it's not actually possible that he walked
out on Owens. That leaves us with the letters. So
then the final piece of the legend is these letters,
these sort of beautiful letters that Letslong writes to Jesse
(25:44):
Owens from the front, from the battlefields of the war.
And I've not been able to find any archival record
of those letters.
Speaker 9 (25:53):
Have you I asked his middle when she was living
still in Hamburg, and she said there were letters we
got to our atmus and she never saw a letter
from Jesse Owens. No one in the family knows about
(26:19):
letters from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
To Lutz Owens. At one point cites nineteen thirty nine
as the date of Lutzlang's last letter. He says that
in it Long writes about his wife and son, But
Volkar Kluga points out that Long didn't even marry his
girlfriend until nineteen forty one, and by the way, his
son wasn't born till then either, And okay, well, then
there's that other account featuring a letter from Long on
(26:43):
the front lines of North Africa after he was married
and after his son was born, except he didn't serve
in North Africa. He died in Sicily. Also, you couldn't
even send letters from the Nazi front lines to American citizens.
I mean, they were fighting a war against each other,
(27:04):
so then they really wouldn't have been speaking, really beyond
the competition itself. So probably the most they spoke was
when they were taking those photos.
Speaker 9 (27:12):
The only time they met each other was during the
long jump competition in this stadium the only time, never before,
and never often.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I looked through Jesse Owens's diary from the nineteen thirty
six Games. In the back he keeps a list of addresses,
presumably of people he wants to write to, and there's
no address for Lutslan in there. It was starting to
look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true. But
then I was left with a new question. If it's
(27:50):
not true, how did it catch on? We'll be right back.
What are the ingredients of a good Olympic story?
Speaker 7 (28:08):
Well, I mean I would start with the mathematics of
the games, which are tremendously appealing from a storyteller's perspective,
which is that you have whatever I forgot, how many
sports fifty going on simultaneously with athletes from all over
the world, So you have an infinite number of stories
to choose from.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Like a farm system.
Speaker 7 (28:29):
It's a farm storytelling, so every year a different one
bubbles up. You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist whins seven golds.
Now do you come in each? A kind of beautiful
waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful natural experiment
in myth making. It just has it has an enormous
strategic advantage with the other big sports spectacles World Cup,
(28:52):
super Bowl, those are monocultures.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, I think that's totally true. And like in the
myth making thing, you have this ancient aura to it. Yes.
Speaker 7 (29:01):
The other thing is it's this playground for healthy prejudice.
So the the flying fin, the kind of mysterious Pabunermi
who comes from like the woods of and like you know,
a baby Bekuila running barefoot through the streets of Rome
and to in the marathon in nineteen sixty. Of course
(29:21):
he's berefit, right, he's e Theiopia right on and on
your your you, you take on the characteristics of your
of your country, and that's like it's this kind of
really fun exercise in multicultural ethnocentrism.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
It's like, what's what's in the water over there? Yes,
that's right. Did you ever cross paths with Bud Greenspan? No,
Bud green Span, the most legendary Olympic storyteller of all time.
Speaker 8 (29:53):
There are those who believe in the core values of
the Olympics, no one more so than filmmaker Bud Greenspan.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
At some point in this project, I got a little
distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan.
He looked like the Buddha, if the Buddha had been
born far sighted on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
He was bald and typically wore his black, thick framed
glasses on top of his head, like his brain was stargazing.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
Do you ever look at that unappealing negative side of
the Olympics in your films?
Speaker 8 (30:24):
I've been asked that many times, Jane.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
I think I'd rather spend one hundred percent of my
time and a ninety percent that's good, and a lot
of my colleagues who spent one.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Hundred percent of the time in the ten percent that's
not so good. Here, I should just acknowledge that he's
talking about us in our nine part series on Hitler's Olympics,
which that is fair. I defer to him because Bud
green Span basically invented modern uplifting Olympic storytelling. When Bob
cost Us, the Voice of the Olympics on NBC first
got the big job, you watched like sixteen hours of
(30:53):
Bud Greenspan documentaries just to get the feeling right.
Speaker 8 (30:58):
Though criticized at times for looking at the games like
a young boy through rose colored glasses. He has been
making films on the Olympics for over fifty years.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to
Bud Greenspan, which is why there was all those angelic
voices in the background. Green Span started reporting on the
Olympics in the late nineteen forties. He was at every
single Olympic Games from nineteen eighty four until he died
in twenty ten. He won eight Emmys, a Lifetime Achievement
(31:29):
Award from the Director's Guild. Everyone knew Bud green Span,
and even if you don't know his name, you know
his style.
Speaker 6 (31:35):
Here's one story.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Okay, we're at the Metropolitan Opera, which he adored, and
intermission and having a glasses champagne and managing editor of
Time magazine you know, comes up to us and goes Bud,
and he goes, what are you doing here? As if
you know, oh, you should be at Yankee Stadium or something.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Oh, there is something so operatic about Olympic stories. So well, yeah,
so why am I telling you about Bud green Span
because his love for sport and his love for operatic
storytelling came together in the holy grail of all Olympic stories,
the nineteen thirty six Games. In Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into
New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment, they'd certainly
see each other. I remember by telling these stories about
how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe
it was like a tennis at racket club in New
York City and they were still segregated, but he talked
(32:44):
his way into the dining room, and I remember the
matre g called but just as long as Jesse sits
with his back to the door, the front door.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
In the nineteen sixties, during the Civil rights movement, Greenspan
got the idea for a film that fit the era.
He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot
an hour long TV documentary to narrate it too. A
lot of the film is made up of archival footage
that Lenny Reef shot of the games, but it's framed
with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a
(33:14):
suit walking around the reich Sport Feld and for one
of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutsloan's son
Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track, and that's
when this happened. Ki.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
You probably don't know it, but your father was greatly
responsible for my winning the broad jump in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Well, Jesse, you have been a very important part in
my life and I'm very often seen pictures from you
and the photographs of my father. Please tell me about
this competition here in the stadium, because I have my
father only scene for three times. I was born nineteen
forty one and my father has died in ninety forty three.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Well, it all happened on the other side of the
field here where we had the premonaries for the running
broad jump, and on the first two jumps, I fouled
on one and then go far enough on the other.
And your father came to my assistance and he helped
me measure a footback of the takeoff board, and he
helped the tape until I measured a back as far
as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came down
(34:13):
and I hit between these two marks, and therefore I qualified,
and that led to the victory in the running broad ject.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
The film was a huge hit, and it was written, directed,
and produced by Bud Greenspan. So I figured case closed.
Greenspan took that hug on the field and he just
made up the rest of the myth about Loose Long.
But Nancy Befer said, not so fast. Bud Greenspan believed
that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6 (34:43):
But going back, why did he make it up? I
don't know. I can't really speculate on that particular thing.
But obviously you need a storyteller and then a recipient.
So people must have wanted to hear that story, you know,
and the notion I mean, So I don't know, And Bud,
(35:04):
I mean, most important thing was until he died, didn't
know Jesse made up that story.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The story came from Jesse Owens, and he first told
it long before he made that film in the nineteen sixties.
Ki Long at first heard it from Jesse Owens too,
a decade earlier.
Speaker 9 (35:24):
Oh, when I first talked to Ky Long, he said,
for him, it was a completely unexpected situation.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Again, sport historian Gerlinda Rhorr.
Speaker 9 (35:40):
He was ten years at the time when Jesse Owens
came to Germany and suddenly ky Long was in a
lot of journalists and photographs, and he didn't know what
happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only
(36:02):
two and a half year old when Lutzlong had to
leave the family for the war, and so it was
a completely a new situation for this young boy. Of course,
he believed it because he didn't know what really happened.
(36:24):
He couldn't ask his father. Never.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Grilinda told me that as Kai Long grew older and
reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father,
Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had
begun to involve Kai too. In a TV interview, Owen
said that Kai had his letters' salutes in his scrap book.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
In nineteen fifty one, I had the privilege of meeting
his son, and after showing the pictures and letters that
he had, described book that I.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Had written his father.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
Well.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
As a result of that, today I.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Know there is no evidence that that's true. Kai published
a book in twenty fifteen about his father, full of
family photos and documents. It's in German and impossible to find,
but the publisher sent me a copy and there are
just no letters from Omens to Long in it. Surely,
if Kai had those letters in that scrap book, he'd
(37:19):
have included them in this book.
Speaker 9 (37:23):
And so he started to think about what's the truth
and what really happened when he was an adult, and
he was asked all the time from journalists and when
he told them, oh, maybe it couldn't be or their
(37:49):
aren't letters to me, he said, I can tell what
I want. They want to hear the legends. And so
he said once to me, Oh, missus, Raw, isn't it
(38:10):
nice for people to live with this story? Do you
want to destroy this story?
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story. And let
me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true.
Lutslang and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good
to each other on the field. But this whole series
we're doing is about what happens when we failed to
see the truth of what is right before our eyes.
And this legend of the Owens Long friendship has started
(38:43):
to seem to me like one of the biggest examples
of failing to see what's right before you first, because
in so many ways it doesn't add up. And second
because it doesn't just involve one or two daffy members
of the IOC, but so many of us for a
long time now. But why would Jesse Owens make this up?
(39:04):
The truth at last? Next week? Revisionist History is produced
by me Ben Thattdiphaffrey, Dalli Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence.
(39:24):
Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking on this episode
by J. L. Goldfein, Original scoring by Luis Garratt, mastering
by Sarah Briguier and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen
Schakerji rufus Wright who read the excerpts of Jesse owens
(39:46):
autobiography and J. D. Landis. I'm bennatiph Haffrey. That was
part one of a two part story on Jesse Owens
from Revisionist Histories nine part series on the Games. Part
two is in your feeds now
Pushkin, Hey, Last Archive listeners, It's been here and I
want to share a story I made with the show
Revisionist History that I think belongs in the Last Archive
(00:36):
two because it's about history, democracy, and a question of truth.
In nineteen thirty six, the Olympic Games were hosted by
Nazi Germany. The modern Olympic movement was at a low ebb,
and without the thirty six Games, there's a good chance
that we wouldn't have the Olympics we have now. But
participating in games held in Nazi Germany raised a whole
(00:58):
lot of ethical and political questions. We tend to think
of Nazism as a geographically bounded thing, something people in
Germany in the nineteen thirties dealt with, but even just
a few years after Hitler's rise, before the start of
the Second World War, the Nazi Olympics forced countries around
the world to make a decision about whether or not
they were going to take a stand against Nazism. In
(01:21):
the US, there was a boycott movement. It failed, but
the political tensions around the games were fertile ground for myths.
Myths that tended to justify the choice to go to
Nazi Germany. In this episode, we look at probably the
most influential of those myths, a tale about Jesse Owens.
(01:42):
This episode and the next are two of a series
that revisionist history host Malcolm Gladwell and I worked on together.
It's called Hitler's Olympics, and if you like these episodes,
I strongly encourage you to check out the whole series. Okay,
here's the episode.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Collet Street tears around the Gray Serger with a speed
of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride, also.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Running about four thousand athletes impeded in the nineteen thirty
six Olympic Games. Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Streak Jesse Owens in the one hundred meters at Bulding
the outca second on him.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
already set three world records in a single day, all
in the same hour. With a bad back, the.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Worlds most runner makes the others look as if they're
walking as he wins the final and equals the worlds
record of time.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And in nineteen thirty six even the Germans were expecting
something great from him.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
How many board medals do your host to win?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
The two part time, it's to desire very athlete to
win a first place in the.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Inn the Olympic Games in nineteen thirty six, he was
slated to compete in three events.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
And since I'm in.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Three events, I hope to emerge with three victory.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I hope one meters, two broad jump, one hundred meters,
two hundred meters and the broad jump. Later they added
a fourth event, the four by one hundred meter relay.
He would win gold in all four, the only person
to win four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics. And
(03:40):
that is why you know the name Jesse Owens. But
it all could have turned out differently because of that
broad jump. You've seen a broad jump before today, it's
called the long jump, and it's one of the more
dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers sprint down the runway, hit
a takeoff board and they look like they're flying and
(04:03):
then they land in a huge spray of sand. So
the morning of August fourth, nineteen thirty six, ten thirty
am in the Reichsportfeld. It's the long jump qualifying rounds.
Best jumpers gone to the final. Owens had just run
his heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he
headed over to the pit. It was the third day
(04:25):
of the games, and by then he already had his
first gold medal, so it was a surprise when he
botched his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it
was a practice run, no sweat, though he had two
more tries, so he lined himself back up and started
jogging down the runway. He took off and came up short.
(04:48):
He had one jump left. If he screwed up that
last jump, he'd have been out of the contest, and
he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win
four gold medals in nineteen thirty six to one of
three athletes who'd won three goals, right up there with
Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbrok, who actually would have had
more total medals than him. And I asked, be honest,
(05:11):
have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika mastenbrook No,
And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying drum, you
wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
(05:34):
something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
made him a legend.
Speaker 7 (05:45):
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, Ben and daph
Haffrey and I are talking about one of the biggest
stories to emerge from the Berlin Games, A story about
two athletes making good on the promise of the Olympics,
cross cultural understanding, sportsmanship against all odds, the moment that
(06:10):
became key to the Olympic mythology and to the legend
of Jesse Owens. A powerful, incredibly important story that's hiding
a very big secret.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled
in over the stadium. Around one hundred thousand people were
in the stands watching in America's most famous athlete. Jesse Owens,
was screwing up badly, which makes no sense. All he
had to do was jump seven point one five meters
to qualify. He already had a world record for jumping
(06:50):
a meter farther than that, So what was going wrong?
Malcolm and I had decided to ask an expert a legend.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
Actually it was about ten years ago or so. The
age is sixty five, I think. And I jumped further
than my high school mark.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Is that right?
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And you're the first American who jumped fifty seven feet.
Speaker 8 (07:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time,
Milan Tiff.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
I actually jumped sixty feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize
it because I jumped out of the pit.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
And where should you do that?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Right here?
Speaker 1 (07:26):
You say, wow, Yeah, I jumped.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on
the grass. I had grass stands all over the back
of me.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 7 (07:40):
So when I was in high school, starting at the
age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribed to
Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
it's called. And Miller Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
(08:02):
of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
But I was I was just obsessed with him as
this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure, and
(08:26):
he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
be He's going to be a little bit. He might
be a little I don't know, but I have a
sense that he might be. He might be a little
out there.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff,
I felt like I had taken some kind of intense
psychedelic the effects of which I've yet to wear off.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
The first humans. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I understood that to walk is just to take a
number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed by
an actually gorgeous painting of Milan's portraying a pair of
empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space called
Mysterious slee palm springs.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And the birds and the trees would all fly down.
They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have
when I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
he could take us out to the UCLA track, And
when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above
us the whole time, which only made everything a little
more surreal, and Olympic legends just walking up to him,
literally bowing down this I think because they wouldn't normally
see him. He told us he prefers to run in
(09:41):
the morning, by which he meant three am. Tiff took
us out to the broad jump pit to help us
get inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could
do because he's a master of the approach the part
Jesse Owens was screwing up, but also because so you
(10:02):
actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
Yeah, yeah, you know, I sit and he'd tell the stories.
Yeah and not here all the stories. And you know,
he talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
You know, we asked him to tell us about how
you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
of rockings. You have to have some or jiggle where
you will call it. Yeah, you have to have a
jiggle or a gide up before you even get into
your run.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, that ajustice of your run. Is that why this
is obviously the broad jump, but lose long. I noticed
he does this sort of like hitch in his leg
before he starts running.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, it's like a dance. It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Can you show us what your gidea.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Up was, Well, it's like a one two, three, four five,
then you start your run.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
And I taught it to Willie Banks world record, taught
it to bike Pile world record.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
We gave it a shot on the track where at
the very same time actual Olympic athletes were practicing for
this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did
we set a world record? Not even close. Did we
become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied. But
this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.
(11:21):
What was Did Jesse Owens have a gide yo?
Speaker 4 (11:23):
No, he had a stance start because he was a sprinterer,
you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
all the time. He didn't have a jiggle, Well, he
didn't have a g no. He didn't have a jiggle
or a giddy oh yeah, And it took his competitor
to say, man, come on, you gotta do something first.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit, the export fold
loots Long Lutz Long was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champion,
and he looked the part, a fine ak line nose
framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As
Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning
(12:05):
to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than
to see a black man and lose to an Arian.
The thought was nanging at him, messing up his focus.
And then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler
had been watching the games and saw that when Owens's
turn came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil.
(12:28):
That's why he was fouling out. He was psyched out
by all of it, distracted, and when he saw how
amazing Lutslong was at the broad jump, he began wonder
if there was something true about all this Arian stuff.
He was down to his last jump, and then came
the miracle. In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight,
(12:49):
Owens wrote, Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Lutslong.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What
has taken your goat?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
I had to smile a little in spite of myself
hearing his mixed up American idiom ah nothing. I said,
you know how it is? He was silent for a
few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
But I also know you are a better jumper than this. Now,
what has taken your goat?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
I laughed out loud.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
This time, but I couldn't tell him him above all,
I glanced over at the broad jump pit I was
about to be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if
he wasn't sure which ones to use. Is it what
reichkanze Hitler did? He asked. I was thunderstruck that he'd
say it. I started to answer, but I didn't know
(13:50):
what to say. I see, he said, Look, we talk
about that later. Now you must jump, and you must qualify.
But how I shot back?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I have thought?
Speaker 5 (14:03):
He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
one hundred percent?
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Correct? I not yet?
Speaker 5 (14:10):
You must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
this time in frustration, and as I did, I heard
the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, You take
off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
(14:33):
All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
a cloudburst.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit
that mark on the towel, leapt into the air.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
And when he finally got that, he qualified.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands,
in the metal event itself whol record, he set an
Olympic record. And that's when Lootes along the aryan poster
child who had just lost to Jesse. Owens hugged him
in front of Adolph Hitler, and the Hitler was pist man,
(15:24):
but Long didn't just embrace him. According to Jesse, Owens
later that night they met up in the Olympic village.
The hours ticked on and they stayed up late, talking
about their lives, the state of the world, and the
uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had been formed
(15:44):
between the men that day, because then the next day
they did it again, and after that, again and again
and again. Every single night of the Games they met
up to talk. They became friends. The dream of the
Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable gap
(16:05):
between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
After the Games, when Owens was back in America and
Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany, they wrote letters to
each other, even after long was serving in the Wehrmacht
the Nazi Army, back and forth across the Atlantic for years.
(16:25):
They kept coming until right before Lutzlang was killed in
the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa.
On some lonely desert hour, he sat down to write
one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse. I fear
for my woman who was at home, and my young son, Karl,
who has never really known his father. My heart tells me,
if I be honest with you, that this is the
(17:05):
last letter I shall ever write. If it is so,
I ask you something. It is something so very important
to me. It is you go to Germany when this
war done. Someday find my Carl and tell him about
his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when
(17:27):
we were not separated by war, I am saying, Tell
him how things can be between men on this earth.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone.
This story is a big part of the legend of
Jesse Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, there's the story when they made a star
studied Hollywood film about Jesse Owens's life. Lutslog and that
qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would
(18:04):
help launch the career of the greatest Olympic documentarian of
all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm not an auctioneer, but
I think it is the reason why Lutslog's silver medal
sold for nearly half a million dollars two years ago,
about five times the amount earned for any other silver
medal at auction. It's arguably the most important story in
(18:27):
Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic Dream. It
made the case that it was good that America went
to the Vilin Games because it made possible this improbable
friendship that transcended even the Second World War, a story
that was just too good to be true. This entire series,
(19:03):
we've been telling stories about the way people made sense
of having the Olympics in Nazi Germany, the distortions, And
when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens's friendship with lutzlog,
I thought we got to do an episode on this.
Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all
that moral fog. So I wanted to read more of
what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters.
(19:26):
I wrote to the Jesse Owens Archive at the University
of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't
have any. They suggested I write to the family, but
they didn't have any either. It seems strange to me
that no one had kept them. So then I thought,
maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country.
Speaker 9 (19:44):
My name is gelindorre I was living in Leipzig and
working in Leipzig for more than thirty years, and the
last twenty five years as the director of the sports
Museum in Leipzig.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right, that's right.
Speaker 9 (20:06):
Lutslan was born in Leipzig nineteen thirty and he lived
there almost till the end.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Roar and her colleague, the sport historian Volka Kluga have
looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens Luteslong story than
anyone else.
Speaker 9 (20:23):
We got a lot of questions from all over the
world about legend.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There
are a few different versions. But Roor dug through the
official reports about the games. They're over a thousand pages long.
Speaker 9 (20:39):
There is a very good documentation about the Olympics called
Official Report of the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and they
describe it very exactly what happens and where.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary
evidence is an article Kluga turned up written by Lutzlong himself.
He was published about a week into the games, and
it's called mine kamfmitt Owens I struggle with Owens, which
I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs, but
homages to Hitler aside. The article was part of the
(21:18):
surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens's win,
including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Luteslong
lying together in the grass of the Reichspoortfeld smiling. The
photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the competition,
when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing a
(21:39):
dark turtleneck sweater and it looks like he's cracking a joke.
Owens is beaming at him and wearing his Team USA
crew neck. In the photo, they're so close it almost
looks like they're touching. They look like real friends. So
Gerlinda Ror and I turned our attention to that.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
So between the first three jumps and the final three jumps,
these photographs were doing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Oh so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens
win the gold. Yes, oh wow, so it's even its prior.
There's a good chance that photo was taken or at
least commissioned by Lenny Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the
Third Reich. The photos float freely around the Internet now
you can find them on Getty images. But at the
(22:26):
time they were part of the Nazi propaganda push, meant
to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed.
So we know that Lutzlang and Jesse Owens met at
least for the time it took to take that photo,
and they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said.
But here's the strange thing. In his article, Lutslog mentions
(22:49):
Jesse Owens's difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three
jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping
him with the approach, which is strange because that's the
most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's
biggest competitor. Owens is what stands between Long and the gold,
and yet Long go out of his way to help
(23:10):
Owens get to the final You would think in an
article about the Olympic Spirit, Long would mention that they
were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in
Nazi Germany, it would have been away for an arian
to take credit for a black man's success, but he
doesn't mention it. Okay, so maybe all the meaningful stuff
happened in those long talks in the Olympic village.
Speaker 9 (23:32):
What about those I didn't think that. It cannot be
because Lutsloan didn't live in the Olympic village. Oh really,
he didn't live here. I know from his family and
from photographs and from a diary of his mother that
(23:55):
after the opening of the Olympic Games he went back
home from Berlin to Leipzig.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump?
He wasn't. He would go home at the end of
each day.
Speaker 9 (24:08):
No, not each day. After his competitions started. He lived
in Berlin in another hotel.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
All right, So the long talks seem less likely, though
there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way. First,
a few days after the broad jump, a newswire service
wrote that quote something like a damon and Pytheis's friendship
has sprung up between Ludslog and Jesse Owens. Though I
think that's just a reference to the hug on the
field that all the reporters would have seen. But then
(24:39):
there's an athlete who, decades after the Games claimed that
she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long,
But Volka Kluga thinks the timing of her story is
implausible given her events schedule. Also, I can't find any
record of it in Owens's Olympic diaries. Owens is on
the record saying quote, I didn't get a chance to
go out of the Olympic village. In fact, I never
(25:01):
did leave the village. The only time that I was
ever out of the village was at the time when
we went to the Olympic stadium to compete. I mean,
they had some intense schedules to keep Actually, even Hitler
couldn't keep up with their schedules. The feuror liked to
sleep late. He famously slipt through a lot of d
Day and probably for the same reason, he wasn't even
(25:23):
in the stands the morning of the broad drum qualifiers,
which is why it's not actually possible that he walked
out on Owens. That leaves us with the letters. So
then the final piece of the legend is these letters,
these sort of beautiful letters that Letslong writes to Jesse
(25:44):
Owens from the front, from the battlefields of the war.
And I've not been able to find any archival record
of those letters.
Speaker 9 (25:53):
Have you I asked his middle when she was living
still in Hamburg, and she said there were letters we
got to our atmus and she never saw a letter
from Jesse Owens. No one in the family knows about
(26:19):
letters from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
To Lutz Owens. At one point cites nineteen thirty nine
as the date of Lutzlang's last letter. He says that
in it Long writes about his wife and son, But
Volkar Kluga points out that Long didn't even marry his
girlfriend until nineteen forty one, and by the way, his
son wasn't born till then either, And okay, well, then
there's that other account featuring a letter from Long on
(26:43):
the front lines of North Africa after he was married
and after his son was born, except he didn't serve
in North Africa. He died in Sicily. Also, you couldn't
even send letters from the Nazi front lines to American citizens.
I mean, they were fighting a war against each other,
(27:04):
so then they really wouldn't have been speaking, really beyond
the competition itself. So probably the most they spoke was
when they were taking those photos.
Speaker 9 (27:12):
The only time they met each other was during the
long jump competition in this stadium the only time, never before,
and never often.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I looked through Jesse Owens's diary from the nineteen thirty
six Games. In the back he keeps a list of addresses,
presumably of people he wants to write to, and there's
no address for Lutslan in there. It was starting to
look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true. But
then I was left with a new question. If it's
(27:50):
not true, how did it catch on? We'll be right back.
What are the ingredients of a good Olympic story?
Speaker 7 (28:08):
Well, I mean I would start with the mathematics of
the games, which are tremendously appealing from a storyteller's perspective,
which is that you have whatever I forgot, how many
sports fifty going on simultaneously with athletes from all over
the world, So you have an infinite number of stories
to choose from.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Like a farm system.
Speaker 7 (28:29):
It's a farm storytelling, so every year a different one
bubbles up. You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist whins seven golds.
Now do you come in each? A kind of beautiful
waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful natural experiment
in myth making. It just has it has an enormous
strategic advantage with the other big sports spectacles World Cup,
(28:52):
super Bowl, those are monocultures.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, I think that's totally true. And like in the
myth making thing, you have this ancient aura to it. Yes.
Speaker 7 (29:01):
The other thing is it's this playground for healthy prejudice.
So the the flying fin, the kind of mysterious Pabunermi
who comes from like the woods of and like you know,
a baby Bekuila running barefoot through the streets of Rome
and to in the marathon in nineteen sixty. Of course
(29:21):
he's berefit, right, he's e Theiopia right on and on
your your you, you take on the characteristics of your
of your country, and that's like it's this kind of
really fun exercise in multicultural ethnocentrism.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
It's like, what's what's in the water over there? Yes,
that's right. Did you ever cross paths with Bud Greenspan? No,
Bud green Span, the most legendary Olympic storyteller of all time.
Speaker 8 (29:53):
There are those who believe in the core values of
the Olympics, no one more so than filmmaker Bud Greenspan.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
At some point in this project, I got a little
distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan.
He looked like the Buddha, if the Buddha had been
born far sighted on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
He was bald and typically wore his black, thick framed
glasses on top of his head, like his brain was stargazing.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
Do you ever look at that unappealing negative side of
the Olympics in your films?
Speaker 8 (30:24):
I've been asked that many times, Jane.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
I think I'd rather spend one hundred percent of my
time and a ninety percent that's good, and a lot
of my colleagues who spent one.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Hundred percent of the time in the ten percent that's
not so good. Here, I should just acknowledge that he's
talking about us in our nine part series on Hitler's Olympics,
which that is fair. I defer to him because Bud
green Span basically invented modern uplifting Olympic storytelling. When Bob
cost Us, the Voice of the Olympics on NBC first
got the big job, you watched like sixteen hours of
(30:53):
Bud Greenspan documentaries just to get the feeling right.
Speaker 8 (30:58):
Though criticized at times for looking at the games like
a young boy through rose colored glasses. He has been
making films on the Olympics for over fifty years.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to
Bud Greenspan, which is why there was all those angelic
voices in the background. Green Span started reporting on the
Olympics in the late nineteen forties. He was at every
single Olympic Games from nineteen eighty four until he died
in twenty ten. He won eight Emmys, a Lifetime Achievement
(31:29):
Award from the Director's Guild. Everyone knew Bud green Span,
and even if you don't know his name, you know
his style.
Speaker 6 (31:35):
Here's one story.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Okay, we're at the Metropolitan Opera, which he adored, and
intermission and having a glasses champagne and managing editor of
Time magazine you know, comes up to us and goes Bud,
and he goes, what are you doing here? As if
you know, oh, you should be at Yankee Stadium or something.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Oh, there is something so operatic about Olympic stories. So well, yeah,
so why am I telling you about Bud green Span
because his love for sport and his love for operatic
storytelling came together in the holy grail of all Olympic stories,
the nineteen thirty six Games. In Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into
New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment, they'd certainly
see each other. I remember by telling these stories about
how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe
it was like a tennis at racket club in New
York City and they were still segregated, but he talked
(32:44):
his way into the dining room, and I remember the
matre g called but just as long as Jesse sits
with his back to the door, the front door.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
In the nineteen sixties, during the Civil rights movement, Greenspan
got the idea for a film that fit the era.
He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot
an hour long TV documentary to narrate it too. A
lot of the film is made up of archival footage
that Lenny Reef shot of the games, but it's framed
with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a
(33:14):
suit walking around the reich Sport Feld and for one
of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutsloan's son
Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track, and that's
when this happened. Ki.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
You probably don't know it, but your father was greatly
responsible for my winning the broad jump in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Well, Jesse, you have been a very important part in
my life and I'm very often seen pictures from you
and the photographs of my father. Please tell me about
this competition here in the stadium, because I have my
father only scene for three times. I was born nineteen
forty one and my father has died in ninety forty three.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Well, it all happened on the other side of the
field here where we had the premonaries for the running
broad jump, and on the first two jumps, I fouled
on one and then go far enough on the other.
And your father came to my assistance and he helped
me measure a footback of the takeoff board, and he
helped the tape until I measured a back as far
as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came down
(34:13):
and I hit between these two marks, and therefore I qualified,
and that led to the victory in the running broad ject.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
The film was a huge hit, and it was written, directed,
and produced by Bud Greenspan. So I figured case closed.
Greenspan took that hug on the field and he just
made up the rest of the myth about Loose Long.
But Nancy Befer said, not so fast. Bud Greenspan believed
that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6 (34:43):
But going back, why did he make it up? I
don't know. I can't really speculate on that particular thing.
But obviously you need a storyteller and then a recipient.
So people must have wanted to hear that story, you know,
and the notion I mean, So I don't know, And Bud,
(35:04):
I mean, most important thing was until he died, didn't
know Jesse made up that story.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The story came from Jesse Owens, and he first told
it long before he made that film in the nineteen sixties.
Ki Long at first heard it from Jesse Owens too,
a decade earlier.
Speaker 9 (35:24):
Oh, when I first talked to Ky Long, he said,
for him, it was a completely unexpected situation.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Again, sport historian Gerlinda Rhorr.
Speaker 9 (35:40):
He was ten years at the time when Jesse Owens
came to Germany and suddenly ky Long was in a
lot of journalists and photographs, and he didn't know what
happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only
(36:02):
two and a half year old when Lutzlong had to
leave the family for the war, and so it was
a completely a new situation for this young boy. Of course,
he believed it because he didn't know what really happened.
(36:24):
He couldn't ask his father. Never.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Grilinda told me that as Kai Long grew older and
reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father,
Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had
begun to involve Kai too. In a TV interview, Owen
said that Kai had his letters' salutes in his scrap book.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
In nineteen fifty one, I had the privilege of meeting
his son, and after showing the pictures and letters that
he had, described book that I.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Had written his father.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
Well.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
As a result of that, today I.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Know there is no evidence that that's true. Kai published
a book in twenty fifteen about his father, full of
family photos and documents. It's in German and impossible to find,
but the publisher sent me a copy and there are
just no letters from Omens to Long in it. Surely,
if Kai had those letters in that scrap book, he'd
(37:19):
have included them in this book.
Speaker 9 (37:23):
And so he started to think about what's the truth
and what really happened when he was an adult, and
he was asked all the time from journalists and when
he told them, oh, maybe it couldn't be or their
(37:49):
aren't letters to me, he said, I can tell what
I want. They want to hear the legends. And so
he said once to me, Oh, missus, Raw, isn't it
(38:10):
nice for people to live with this story? Do you
want to destroy this story?
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story. And let
me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true.
Lutslang and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good
to each other on the field. But this whole series
we're doing is about what happens when we failed to
see the truth of what is right before our eyes.
And this legend of the Owens Long friendship has started
(38:43):
to seem to me like one of the biggest examples
of failing to see what's right before you first, because
in so many ways it doesn't add up. And second
because it doesn't just involve one or two daffy members
of the IOC, but so many of us for a
long time now. But why would Jesse Owens make this up?
(39:04):
The truth at last? Next week? Revisionist History is produced
by me Ben Thattdiphaffrey, Dalli Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence.
(39:24):
Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking on this episode
by J. L. Goldfein, Original scoring by Luis Garratt, mastering
by Sarah Briguier and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen
Schakerji rufus Wright who read the excerpts of Jesse owens
(39:46):
autobiography and J. D. Landis. I'm bennatiph Haffrey. That was
part one of a two part story on Jesse Owens
from Revisionist Histories nine part series on the Games. Part
two is in your feeds now
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