Who Actually Snubbed Jesse Owens?

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — the 100m, 200m, long jump and 4×100m relay — in a stadium built to advertise the regime's theories about racial superiority. It is one of the great sporting achievements, and it is usually told with one fact wrong.

The standard version: Adolf Hitler personally refused to shake Owens' hand. What actually happened is more mundane and more revealing. Hitler had congratulated German athletes on the first day of competition. Olympic officials then told him he must either congratulate everyone or no one. He chose no one, and stopped appearing at medal ceremonies altogether.

Owens' own account of who snubbed him is the part that gets left out. He said it plainly: "Hitler didn't snub me — it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."

Franklin Roosevelt never publicly acknowledged his four gold medals or invited him to the White House. Owens came home to a country where he was still required to use segregated entrances and back doors, and where his own celebration in New York was held at a hotel he could only enter through the service lift.

There is a second story from those games that deserves more space than it gets. In the long jump, struggling with his run-up, Owens was advised by the German competitor Luz Long — who told him to adjust his mark. Owens qualified, then won. Long finished second. The two men walked a lap together, arm in arm, in front of Hitler. Long was killed in the Second World War in 1943.

Owens' four medals are the headline. The accurate version of the snub is the one that still stings.