The Olympics in Paris just concluded and I was reading an article about memorable Olympics. It was interesting — a lot of the Olympics mentioned, I remember. In 1972 I was in Jakarta, Indonesia during the Olympics and was in the communications center at the American Embassy when a flash message came in about the Israeli hostages being killed.
But the Olympics mentioned in the article that caught my eye was the 1936 Olympics in Berlin…..
In 1931, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to the city of Berlin. This was meant to mark Germany’s unofficial welcoming into the international arena after her discipline following World War I. But — the IOC didn’t foresee the rising tide of Nazism and the coming to power, in 1933, of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who saw the games as a showcase of Aryan supremacy.
He considered the games to be an opportunity to show a skeptical world how he’d lifted his nation from the depths of despair and transformed it into a well-oiled machine that allowed the natural Germanic superiority to flourish. The games would be perfect, just like Germany.
His first step was to clean up Berlin. The streets were cleared of the homeless, and anti-Jewish signs were removed. Hitler’s architects deigned four massive stadiums and a splendid Olympic village. German spent $25 million getting ready — an enormous sum of money in those days. And of course, the amateur German athletes were supported while they trained full time in the years leading up to the games.
Between 1931 and 1936, there was a growing movement around the world to boycott the games because of the German government’s anti-Semitic policies.There was a proposal for an alternative event, dubbed “The People’s Games,” to be held in Barcelona. But the Spanish Civil War squashed that movement. In the end, the 1936 Olympic Games would see more participant countries (49) and more competitors (4,066) than any previous Olympics.
When the medals were tallied in the end, Germany easily won with 101 medals overall, including 41 golds. It’s nearest rival, was the United States (a country with three times the population) with 66 medals, 25 of which were gold. But all of Germany’s achievements were cast into the shadows by the unbelievable performance of an American — his name, of course, was Jesse Owens.
They called Owens the “Tan Cyclone” and he brilliantly lived up to that name by bagging four gold medals — in the 100 meter dash, the 200 meter sprint (in world record time,) the 400 meter relay, and the long jump.
Jesse started badly in the long jump, fouling on his first two jumps by overstepping the mark. He only had one more chance to get it right. As he psyched himself for his final jump, he was approached by his major rival, a stocky blond German who was a prototype of Hitler’s ideal. The man’s name was Luz Long and in one of the great acts of sporting comradeship he offered Owens some advice — he suggested that Owens draw a line a few inches in front of the take-off board and use that as his mark. It worked.
I’ve heard that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens because he was a black man, but it seems that’s not technically true. On the first day of the games, Hitler formally shook hands with the medal winners from German and Finland. But that night, Hitler received a polite message from the President of the international Olympic Committee, Count Baillet-Latour, that informed him that it wasn’t proper protocol for a national leader to congratulate the athletes — he was there merely as a spectator. Hitler took the advice and from then on, didn’t congratulate the individual athletes. So Jesse Owens was not personally congratulated by Hitler, but neither were any of the other competitors. When Owens was interviewed about the matter a few years later, he said, “When I passed the Chancellor, he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him.”
Unfortunately, the real snub came when Jesse returned to the United States. His own president, Franklin Roosevelt, refused a face-to-face meeting with him and did not congratulate him in any way, by letter or phone call, on his outstanding accomplishment. (It’s also interesting that back in Hitler’s Germany, Jesse could sit wherever he wanted to on a bus.)
Sports announcer Marty Glickman was at the games that year —as a participant. He was generally considered to be the fastest man on the U.S. relay team. The day before the big event, 18-year old Marty and the other runners were called in for a team meeting. Their coach, Dean Cromwell, had an announcement: Marty wouldn’t be running — his replacement was wonder boy Jesse Owens. Glickman’s fellow athlete Sam Stoller was also bumped, in favor of Ralph Metcalfe. No reason was given for the substitutions. But — everyone understood. Glickman and Stoller were Jewish. The U.S. Olympic Committee was afraid a loss to a couple of Jewish guys would compound the damage that Jesse and the other black athletes had already caused to Germany’s Aryan image of itself.
Jesse Owens protested…. “I’ve won the three gold medals I set out to win. I’ve had it. I’m tired. Let Marty and Sam run. They deserve it.” Owens was informed that he would do as he was told. And so the relay event was run without Glickman and Stoller. The U.S. team won by nearly 14 meters.
In the history of the modern Olympic Games no other fit American athlete has been pulled from an event. And until the day he died, Marty Glickman had a bitter taste in his mouth — a bitterness caused, not by Adolph Hitler or Germany, but by his own American Olympic Committee.
It’d be nice to think that the Olympics have finally become non-political…. of course, that’s not the case. And it’d be nice to think something like what happened at the 1936 Olympics couldn’t happen again…. that’s not the case, either.
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