Jesse Owens set five world records in 45 minutes with a sore back
On a May afternoon in 1935, between 3:15 and 4 p.m., an injured college sprinter in Michigan equalled one world record and broke five more. That burst, still unmatched, came a year before Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Berlin. Even his name was an accident, born of a teacher mishearing a Southern accent.
He was born J. C. Owens in Oakville, Alabama, in 1913, the youngest of ten children of a sharecropper and the grandson of an enslaved man. When he was nine the family joined the Great Migration north to Cleveland. On his first day, a teacher asked his name, heard Jesse instead of J. C., and it stuck. He delivered groceries, loaded freight cars and fixed shoes after school, so his junior high coach Charles Riley let him train in the mornings instead, help Owens credited for the rest of his life.
By high school he had equalled the world mark of 9.4 seconds for 100 yards. At Ohio State, nicknamed the Buckeye Bullet, he won eight individual NCAA titles in two seasons, still a record, and all 42 events he entered in 1936. Success did not buy equality: he had no scholarship, lived off campus with other Black athletes, and on road trips was limited to segregated restaurants and hotels.
The Big Ten meet at Ann Arbor on May 25, 1935 made him famous. Despite a lower back injury, he tied the 100-yard record and set new ones in the long jump, at 8.13 metres, the 220-yard sprint and the 220-yard low hurdles; the two 220 races also beat the 200-metre standards. That long jump mark held for 25 years.
Before Berlin, a boycott movement urged Americans to stay home, and Owens at first said the United States should withdraw if minorities faced discrimination in Germany. He competed anyway and took gold in the 100 and 200 metres, the long jump and the sprint relay, the most successful athlete at those Games. ESPN later credited him with demolishing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy, and USA Track and Field's award for the year's best athlete bears his name.
Source: Jesse Owens
