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Examples of Sports - Jesse Owens

Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust - Jesse Owens -

Index

Jesse Owens's background

What makes Jesse Owens such a great example?

Jesse Owens's background

Jesse Owens was an African-American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics [100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay], in front of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi regime that had staged the Games to showcase claims of Aryan racial superiority. His victories, and his genuinely warm reception from the German crowd, are widely seen as a direct rebuttal of that propaganda, even though back home in the United States he still faced the segregation of the Jim Crow South, unable even to ride in the front of the bus taking him home from his own reception.

What makes Jesse Owens such a great example?

Jesse Owens makes a good example of a chart that has to hold triumph and injustice at the very same moment: the greatest athletic performance of his life, delivered specifically to disprove a racist ideology, while his own country still denied him basic equality.

The chart shown is the birth of Jesse Owens, set at midday, with the time his career ended as transits, set at 6:31am.