In addition to taking classes and training, he had to work part-time jobs to pay for school. He also was not allowed to live on campus, so he had to spend a good part of his day going back and forth between his home, work, and campus.
He had to stay in hotels and eat in restaurants which only catered to blacks. After the Olympics, he had to drop his amateur status so he could take advantage of endorsement deals and earn money. Today, an athlete like Usain Bolt can earn money and endorsements from the start of his career, and not have to worry about amateur status. He can be a professional track athlete and focus all of his energy on being the best competitor he can be. Before then, many athletes would only have one good Olympics before they had to quit to get a job, even if they could physically have competed for years more.
Bolt also has professional coaches, using state of the art equipment, to perfect his technique, and to get his body into perfect shape. So before we even begin looking at specifics, we can see that Usain Bolt was able to train at a higher level, and had an entire career where he was able to focus on track, whereas Jesse Owens really had to treat athletics like a part-time job, with a great many other difficulties and social obstacles he had to overcome.
The tracks that Jesse Owens had to run on back in were made out of cinders. Cinders, as in what is leftover after wood is burned. All tracks at the time had a cinder surface, and they were used at every Olympics through There are very few cinder tracks in the world today, and most of them are mostly used for horse racing.
The problem with cinder tracks is that they absorbed a lot of energy, robbing runners of speed. It is no coincidence that the first sub 10 second time in the m came in at the Mexico City Olympics, which was the first Olympics not to use a cinder track. Tracks today are modern synthetic creations designed to let athletes run as fast as possible. It is like running on a rubber surface. Experts have estimated that the difference between running cinders vs a synthetic track is about 1.
Just the track alone would shave about 0. Owens just missed the starting block revolution in sprinting which started in , the year after his gold medal. It was then that starting blocks became mandatory so everyone had an equal start. Owens carried a gardening trowel with him that he used to dig small holes in the cinder track for his feet. In fact, he had a lucky trowel that he brought with him to all his track meets. At 60 meters Metcalfe found the extra gear he was known for and shoved Owens behind him.
A woeful starter, Metcalfe stands with Usain Bolt as perhaps the greatest finisher in sprint history, and he proved it again in Lincoln, finding yet another surge, his long strides eating track in huge chunks. He was the only man who appeared to gain speed throughout the race, like a coin dropped from a skyscraper. The whiteout photo was taken at the finish line. Metcalfe finished second, Owens third.
Owens tried to redeem himself in the long jump, where he twice surpassed the rare foot mark. Then Peacock leapt and won that event, too. The next time a long jumper exceeded 26 feet in a losing cause, the calendar read Neither Daley nor anyone else could have foreseen that Peacock defeating Owens was about to become commonplace. Owens, according to his biographer William Baker, did not dance that night. Much of what we know about Owens today is myth, a tapestry of inaccuracy woven by sportswriters typing unfettered about a man who was both a once-in-five-lifetimes athlete and a people pleaser.
Much like Satchel Paige, Owens generously wanted every scribe to have his scoop, such that he often gave several versions of the same story, each one tailored to whoever was listening. Owens had recently died when Baker, a history professor at the University of Maine with no experience in either journalism or track, began working in the early s on what would become the definitive Owens book, Jesse Owens: An American Life.
Baker also, for the first time, devoted more than a passing mention to Eulace Peacock. Baker, now 74, no longer has the audio cassettes from that interview, only a fraction of which made it into his book. Fortunately, the University of Maine archived them. Along with a filmed interview of Peacock from recently preserved by Washington University in St. They were born a year apart -- Owens in , Peacock in -- in opposite corners of rural Alabama.
By their families had left the sharecropping life and moved north -- the Owenses to Ohio, the Peacocks to New Jersey. In , in the last meet of his high school career, Peacock set the national scholastic record in the long jump.
He went home, clicked on the radio, and learned that a kid in Cleveland had just broken the world record. Name of Owens.
It was the first time anyone had heard of him. Over the next few days Ogden somehow wrested Peacock from Warner, robbing him of a weapon who had scored points, the equivalent of 23 touchdowns as a high school senior.
I want to play football. Owens and Peacock first met at the AAU Indoor championships in , where neither man sprinted but Owens outjumped Peacock by a full foot. There or soon afterward, their laid-back dispositions melted into a friendship that would endure until both men were gray and their records were being tested by hypertrained athletes sprinting across rubberized tracks.
Hundreds of congratulatory telegrams arrived for Peacock in Philadelphia after his victory in Lincoln. Owens, meanwhile, was paying the price for his growing popularity. Responding to a media storm that had erupted a month earlier when he was photographed with a beautiful socialite in Los Angeles, Owens had hopped the first train from Lincoln to Cleveland and married his longtime girlfriend Ruth Solomon, the mother of his two-year-old daughter.
The sporting world lifted its binoculars. Owens and Peacock would race twice more in the next five days. Peacock would have myriad career options, and Metcalfe would go on to serve four terms as a U. Congressman, but Owens knew he was neither a scholar nor a businessman. He and his first coach, Charles Riley, had been plotting victory at the Olympics since Jesse was in middle school.
It was a quirky Coney Island built on a waveless lakeshore, 15 miles from Buffalo, its main attraction a massive roller coaster that kept a nurse on hand to tend to the woozy. The Crystal Beach race took place in a vacuum. Not much was written about it. There are no known photographs. The photos from that evening show a cloudy twilight brooding over the Bronx like a film noir set, complete with rain-flecked trenchcoats and fedoras on all the extras. The track was like damp cake.
Someone shot a film of the race from on high, with the five runners coming toward the camera. Peacock is in Lane 2, Owens in Lane 4. Owens is a picture of calm symmetry. Peacock swerves all over his lane, head wagging, no stride looking the same. The W grows taller and skinnier as Owens and Peacock surge ahead. The news stories describe Owens making a final push, but the film shows their positions staying the same over the last half of the race: Peacock a hair ahead, Owens running more efficiently but gaining no ground.
The flurry of snapshots taken at the finish show Peacock throwing his arms up, wearing an exultant, wide-eyed look. The most telling image recorded by those kamikaze photographers -- the one that flies in the face of everything we would later come to believe about Owens -- is the look on his face. It is the slightly embarrassed expression of a man unaccustomed to finishing second, but being forced to get used to it.
You know, a man has only got so many record jumps and record sprints in his system for one season He resumed his job pumping gas at the Sohio station on the corner of Cedar and 92nd Street. Peacock, meanwhile, departed for Europe with nine of the best track athletes in America.
On Aug. This time there was no wind, and no one called him a colored Thunderbolt, either. On he went to Zurich. Paris again. Victories all. When he boarded the train to Milan, the Berlin Olympics were less than a year away. It was 79 degrees and muggy. The venerable La Stampa newspaper described the sky as disturbato dalla pioggia -- disturbed by rain. Peacock, the youngest man running, could not coast the way he had at his other European stops. The initial pain of tearing a hamstring is not as searing as it is confusing.
The athlete usually hops once -- a weird, involuntary spasm -- the moment the muscle gives way. There is often the sensation of a windowshade rolling up the back of the thigh.
Peacock bounced home on his good leg, in last place. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. And it's impossible to account for technological advances afforded to Bolt, like time-keeping devices, upgraded running clothes and better sneakers. And, he was an American hero for many more reasons than his speed. Usain Bolt vs. Jesse Owens: Here's the tale of the tape.
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