Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics
by Jeremy Schaap
Book Summary Information
Author: Jeremy SchaapEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-02-05
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics
Book Review: An Entertaining and Skillful History
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a very entertaining and well-written account of Jesse Owens' track career culminating in his 4 gold medals at the notorious 1936 Olympics hosted in Berlin by the Nazi regime. Given Owens' iconic and historic importance, Schaap needs to exercise the skills of an historian in parsing through the evidence and sifting fact from legend. In this regard, Schaap does an excellent job.
In particular, Schaap dispels the myth of Hitler's supposed "snub" of Owens. What really happened is that on Day 1, Hitler congratulated only a select few Nordic athletes. The Olympic officials told Hitler that he had to congratulate everyone or no one at all. Hitler complied with this directive, so he had a good excuse for not meeting with Owens after his first victory on Day 2. Indeed, the evidence is that Hitler waved congratulations to Owens. Years later, Owens retracted this version to tell a more marketable "snub" story on the lecture circuit.
Schaap is also excellent at recounting the controversy regarding Marty Glickman and one other fellow American Jew left off the 4x100 relay team at the last minute. Legend has it that this was a craven effort by the Avery Brundage crew to appease Hitler. But Schaap tells the facts and it seems that, while this angle may have helped the strategy go through, the real reasons were twofold. First, Owens' celebrity was such that there was a desire to accommodate his expressed desire for a fourth medal. At the time, American runners were so dominant that the U.S. usually fielded a relay team that did not include the best four runners, but instead used the relay as a device for spreading medals around. But as the star of the Games, how could Owens be left off this event? And second, the Olympic track coach was head coach at U.S.C. and wanted to finagle a way to get his 2 U.S.C. runners on the relay team. Interestingly enough, the team used the old method to pick its 4x400 team and did not field the best 4 runners -- which resulted in Great Britain taking the Gold.
Also fascinating are Schaap's recounting of how Hitler warmed to the idea of the games, the difficuties experienced by Leni Riefenstahl in filming the games in what became "Olympia", and the ways in which the Nazis toned down the less savory aspects of their regime so as to score propaganda points.
Schaap is excellent in recounting the failed, but important, attempts made to boycott the 1936 games. The effort was defeated by an odd alliance among the far-right, fascist sympathizing Brundage crew; blacks and liberals who were offended by the hypocrisy of protesting the Nazi regime while tolerating Jim Crow at home; and the athletes themselves, whose ambition compelled them to take advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to compete at the games.
Schaap admires Owens, whose dignity, work ethic, grace, and fundamental decency all come through in this book. But he also gives a portrayal of Owens' flaws. This includes his rather tepid pro forma protest of taking the place of another runner on the relay team, his rejection of the boycott efforts, his brief flings when he first achieved celebrity, and the bitterness of his later years when he was unable to cash in on his celebrity.
I would have liked to have seen more about Owens' later years, his fellow black rival (Metcalfe), and the great Euless Peacock who beat Owens four times in a row before he pulled a hamstring that caused him to sit out the Olympics. Why is it, for instance, that Metcalfe was able to parlay his silver medal and track notoriety into a career in law and politics?
Schaap's analysis of the Germans' approach to the games is excellent, but deficient in one important respect. He points out that the Games were obtained by the Weimar regime and that the Germans had a long history of poor Olympic performance. The pomp of the games, which included Hitler's innovations of the torch relay and heavy State subsidies into what has previously been just a another glorified track meet, caused the regime considerable reflected glory. But Schaap falls into the trap of the myth of Owens as defeating Hitler's racial theories. Yes, Owens' success was embarrassing, but what Schaap fails to point out is that the Germans absolutely killed the U.S. and the rest of the world in the overall medal count. There is no question that Germany won the 1936 Games, and the Olympics on the whole seemed to confirm rather than undercut Hitler's claims to having created a system that was superior to the rest of the world.
Schaap points out that Owens ran a world record 10.3 on the inside (muddiest) lane of an old fashioned cinder track. I'm old enough to have run on cinder tracks and to have experienced the thrill of shifting to a bouncy synthetic turf and seeing my times plummet. Owens' time under these conditions was amazing. Indeed, I looked up some Olympic records and found that with this time Owens would have won the Gold in 1956 and the Bronze in 1972 and 1980.
This is a very good book, though not sufficiently ambitious and broad in scope to merit 5 stars.
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