1913–1980 
ATHLETE UNITED STATES
The minute you think you’ve got it beaten, you’re beaten. No matter what you did yesterday, each sunrise wipes the slate clean.
—JESSE OWENS
Twelve-year-old Jesse Owens ran every race full out, as if he were running the 100-yard dash. That day in 1926, he was running the 220-yard dash against some of the best junior high runners in Cleveland. As usual, Jesse had pulled ahead of his competition at the start of the race. But, as was happening more and more often, runners inched by him on the track. When he finally reached the finish line, the tape was already fluttering in the breeze, broken by someone else. Today he came in third place. What was he doing wrong?
Jesse was so mad, he continued running at full speed until he plowed into the brick wall surrounding the track. Bouncing off, dazed and hurt, he looked up and saw Coach Riley looking down at him.
“Congratulations, Jesse! You won today. Even when the race was over, you didn’t stop.” Jesse thought his coach was making fun of him for running into the wall, but he was serious. Even though Jesse was still making the same mistakes he’d made the last year, his coach knew Jesse could be a champion. In that single display of fierceness, Coach Riley saw in Jesse the character and determination of an Olympian.
Jesse’s honesty and fairness were legendary. In one track meet, his archrival stumbled off a rickety starting block. Jesse easily won the race, but insisted it be re-run so his opponent would have a fair chance. Jesse lost the second race, but he showed everyone the real meaning of being a good sport.
Back in 1926, this was a radical idea. Jesse was black and poor, and the Olympics were not exactly friendly to black athletes. Jesse’s own dad, beaten down after a life of hard labor and discrimination, didn’t want his son to get his hopes up for the Olympics. He told Jesse, “It don’t do a colored man no good to get himself too high. ’Cause it’s a [long] drop back to the bottom.” But Coach Riley was right to dream big for Jesse, because ten years later, Jesse Owens stood in front of the world and accepted four Olympic gold medals in track.
Jesse Owens was born James Cleveland Owens in 1913 in Alabama to sharecropping parents. The life of a sharecropper was miserable—not much better than a slave’s life. So, when the big cities of the North, like Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland, began making cars and machines and hiring tons of workers, millions of blacks left the farms of the South, hoping to find a better life. Jesse’s parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when Jesse (or J. C., as he was known then) was eight.
When he got to Cleveland, right from the start Jesse was at a disadvantage. Schools for blacks in the South were so bad that, by age nine, Jesse could barely read or write. He was put in the first grade, where he couldn’t even fit into the tiny school desk. On his first day of school, when the teacher asked his name, he replied, “J. C., ma’am.” Misunderstanding his Southern drawl, the teacher wrote down Jesse, and he was too intimidated to correct her.
His poor beginnings in school meant that he would struggle with his studies all the way through college. But there was one place where he excelled: on the track. “I always loved running,” Jesse said. “It was something you could do . . . under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow . . . fighting the wind . . . seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”
In middle school, Jesse met the man who would change his life: Coach Riley. Because Jesse had to work after school to help support his family, he couldn’t make it to regular track practices, so Coach Riley worked with Jesse early in the mornings before school started. He became Jesse’s mentor, on and off the track.
For a while, Jesse lost most races, even though he was faster than anyone else. Before each race, he was doing the 1920s equivalent of trash-talking: staring his opponents down, trying to intimidate them before the race. Coach Riley watched in silence. It was only when Jesse asked, “Why can’t I win?” that day he crashed into the wall, that his coach did a peculiar thing. Instead of answering, he drove Jesse to a racetrack to watch horses run.
Today’s tracks, with their bouncy surface, give runners a lift and are made to drain water away so it doesn’t form puddles. But in 1936 tracks were made from crushed cinders (pieces of partly burned coal). When it rained, the runners’ heavy leather shoes soaked up the muck from the soggy track, slowing them down.
“What do you see on their faces?” Coach asked.
“Nothing,” Jesse answered.
“That’s right,” Coach Riley noted. “Horses are honest. No animal has ever tried to stare another down . . . horses make it look easy because the determination is all on the inside where no one can see it.”
From that day on, Jesse put his emotions aside when he ran, concentrated on his body—not his opponents—and tried to run like a horse, with an easy, fluid, and graceful power. He started winning!
At fifteen, he began setting world records for his age. He ran the 100-yard dash in eleven seconds. At eighteen, he became the high school world champion in the long jump; and at nineteen, he broke the world record for the 220-yard dash, at 20.7 seconds. Jesse, along with his teammate David Albritton, another future Olympian, helped their school earn first place in the most prestigious high school track meet in the Midwest. They came back to Cleveland as heroes. They were even welcomed by a parade. Jesse, now a nationally ranked athlete, was recruited by Ohio State University to run on its track team. Unlike today, when some college athletes are treated like campus royalty, attending school for free and living in luxury, in the 1930s, poor athletes had to work full-time to pay for their education. Jesse worked three jobs while going to class and competing.
Despite being one of Ohio State’s biggest stars, Jesse was still discriminated against. Because he was black, he couldn’t live on campus or eat in the restaurants near the school. When he and his teammates traveled to competitions, the whites rode in separate cars from the black athletes. In many gyms, the blacks weren’t even allowed to take a shower. Jesse was frustrated that even though his white teammates were friendly, they did nothing to protest this racist treatment. As Jesse said, “Their niceness didn’t include making sure you got to take your shower too.” But those hard times helped strengthen Jesse’s character and prepared him for the difficult challenges to come.
Jesse was finally honored by the United States president for his accomplishments at the 1936 Olympics—in 1976! President Gerald Ford awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor our country can pay to a civilian in peacetime.
After an incredible season in 1935 where, in one day, Jesse smashed three world records and tied a fourth, he began thinking he might actually make it to the 1936 Olympics. Sure enough, a few months later he was chosen for the US Olympic track team and hopped a ship to Europe for the Olympics. That year, they were being held in Nazi-controlled Berlin. The Nazis hated Jews, blacks, and other groups that they called nonhumans. The pressure was on the German athletes to show that Hitler was right when he claimed that the Aryans (white, blue-eyed, blond-haired people) were the “master race.” And just as much pressure was on the United States, with its ten black athletes, to show how wrong Hitler was.
Jesse felt the pressures of competition, race, and his incredible fame at the Olympics. He awoke one morning to a hoard of autograph seekers thrusting their arms through his open hotel window. But he remembered Coach Riley’s lesson. He kept his emotions in control, and he won four gold medals for the United States in the 100-meter dash, the long jump, the 200-meter run, and the 400-meter relay. He also won the hearts of the German fans with his grace, sportsmanship, and awesome speed. And, just as he’d learned to do at home, he ignored Hitler’s racism. He even became friends, much to Hitler’s anger, with Germany’s top track star, Luz Long. The world loved Jesse, not just for his running, but for his ability to keep his cool under tough circumstances.
In Berlin, the street outside the Olympic Stadium has been renamed Jesse Owens Strasse (street).
Despite his star status, life wasn’t easy when Jesse got home. As a black man in America, most doors were closed to him. When he couldn’t find a job to support his wife and family, he was forced to humiliate himself by racing against horses for pay. His first real job was as a playground instructor earning thirty dollars a week—not a lot of money even then. But over the years, as America’s racism eased and Jesse’s achievements were recognized, life got better. He counseled young people, taught sports clinics for the government during World War II, and started his own public relations agency. In the 1970s he became an activist for racial equality, fighting for equal housing laws for blacks, and as an adviser to baseball’s American League, pushing team owners to hire black managers.
Despite Jesse’s struggles against racism, he lived his life with dignity, never returning hatred with hatred, and always trying to change people’s minds by his own fairness and honesty. He said:
No matter how much bad there is, the best way to get rid of it is by exposing the good. Don’t just hack away at the roots of evil. They go all the way to China. Plant next to prejudice another tree that grows so big and high that discrimination has to wither and die.6
I am going to rock the world by becoming a famous athlete. To be precise, an NHL hockey star. I started skating lessons and hockey initiation when I was five and started real lessons when I was eight. I am now eleven and in the squirt level in hockey. I’ve got a long way to go to get to the NHL. I’m going to try hard to accomplish my dream to rock this world.
MYLES SCHMERTZLER 
AGE 11