Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: broad jumper, Jesse Owens, United States, Third Reich (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Written as though the film treatment were already completed, Schaap's chronicle of Jesse Owens's journey to and glorious triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is snappy and dramatic, with an eye for the rousing climax, through curiously slight on follow-through. Starting with Owens as the well-feted ex-athlete in the 1950s, Schaap (an ESPN anchor and author of Cinderella Man) flashes back to Owens's childhood in 1920s Cleveland, where junior high coach Charles Riley spotted his astounding physique and near limitless potential for track and field. Owens seems so perfectly made for running and jumping that the following years of ever-increasing athletic and popular success are less exciting than preordained. By the time the "Ebony Antelope" (as one of many adoring newspapermen had anointed him) was ready for Berlin, his success was practically guaranteed. The real drama of Schaap's book, which surprisingly skimps on Owens the person, comes in the politically fractious runup to Berlin (for the ceremony-obsessed Hitler, "a fascist fantasy come true"). While the story has been told many times, Schaap makes good use of his prodigious research and access to the Owens family, even digging up the fact that Owens's oft-repeated claim he was snubbed by Hitler and the Berlin crowd was very likely untrue. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Matt Schudel

Jesse Owens captured the nation's attention in a single afternoon. On May 25, 1935, at a track meet in Ann Arbor, Mich., he set or tied four world records in less than an hour and instantly became one of the two greatest African American sports heroes of the time, along with boxer Joe Louis. Both were born in Alabama, within eight months of each other, and moved as children to the industrial North -- Louis to Detroit, Owens to Cleveland.

In June 1936, a year before Louis won the world heavyweight title, he was temporarily derailed in his championship march by German fighter Max Schmeling. It then fell to Owens to redeem American athletic pride in the upcoming Olympic Games in Berlin.

As Jeremy Schaap points out in his evocative new study of Owens and the Berlin Olympics, writers and human rights advocates debated whether the United States should even participate in the games, which were a calculated showcase for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Owens himself tepidly endorsed an Olympic boycott, but as "the greatest running and jumping talent the world had ever seen," he also knew the Olympics would be his ultimate international stage.

When the games began in August 1936, the 22-year-old Owens was seen as the living repudiation of Hitler's credo of Aryan supremacy. He was, Schaap writes, "a true revolutionary, fighting against the ugliest regime on the planet, embarrassing Hitler . . . simply by being at his best."

If that seemed a heavy responsibility for a 160-pound sprinter, Owens proved equal to the task. Like the sportswriters who covered the games, Schaap, an ESPN reporter, keeps one eye on the track and another on Hitler's official box, gauging the effect of Owens's triumphs and those of America's other black athletes on the Nazi brass. After congratulating several German and European victors on the first day of competition, Hitler decided to head for home rather than greet the two African American high jumpers who won gold and silver medals.

Owens never met Hitler, but his victories were recorded by the Fuhrer's favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, in her remarkable documentary about the games, "Olympia." (While cajoling Nazi leaders, Riefenstahl carried on an affair with the American athlete Glenn Morris, who later played Tarzan in the movies. After winning the gold medal in the decathlon, Morris ripped open Riefenstahl's blouse and kissed her breasts in full view of 100,000 spectators.) Day by day, as Owens's achievements mounted, the cheers grew louder. Running on a muddy track, he equaled the world record of 10.3 seconds in the 100-meter dash. He dramatically bested a German competitor, Luz Long, in the broad jump, setting an Olympic record that stood for 24 years. Afterward, Long saluted Owens by holding his hand aloft for all the crowd to see.

The next day, against a headwind, Owens set a world record in the 200-meter dash. He was not expected to run any more races, but -- in the "untold story" part of the book -- Schaap reveals that Owens quietly campaigned for a spot on the 400-meter relay team. He was able to win his fourth gold medal only by replacing a Jewish sprinter, who was left on the sidelines of the Hitler games.

For the next 45 years until his death in 1980, Owens relived the glory of his Olympic victories on the banquet circuit and in three unreliable autobiographies. Schaap, the author of Cinderella Man, about boxer James J. Braddock, brings fresh luster to Owens's fading legend, but his narrowly focused book is neither a full biography nor a comprehensive history of the 1936 Olympics. And for all his diligence in the archives, Schaap has resorted to the dubious ploy of inventing long conversations and interior monologues, which undercut his book's authority and give it the foul odor of docudrama.

He also leaves unexamined the pathos of Owens's later years, as the world's most celebrated athlete -- "the man who was standing in for all minorities everywhere" -- returned to a segregated America. When the civil rights movement finally gained momentum a generation later, Owens was all but forgotten. The man who outran Hitler, you might say, was just too fast for his time.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First edition (February 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618688226
• ISBN-13: 978-0618688227
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #548,441 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN HISTORIC SPORTS ICON, SPORT'S GREATEST HOUR , AND HITLER'S OLYMPICS, February 17, 2007

By	RBSProds "rbsprods" (Deep in the heart of Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Sports writer and ESPN "Sports Center" anchor Jeremy Schaap reveals Jesse Owens as not just a beloved American 'sports icon', but also a towering figure on both the international sports and world history stages. The only athlete to be singled out in the world history books for his very notable international athletic achievements during the Olympic Games just prior to Hitler's scourging of Europe in the runup to World War II. Mr Schaap reveals new insights about Jesse Owens in Berlin. And the Jesse Owens/Lutz Long friendship and it's aftermath are truly moving. He is also the central figure in the greatest one-hour period of individual sports achievements, ever.

This book also the details who 'discovered' Jesse Owens, who helped him hone his God-given talents, a day-by-day detailing of the Berlin political and sports environment and Owens' 1936 Olympic triumphs, the AAU incident, what happened to Jesse Owens when he triumphantly returned from the 'Hitler Olympic Games' and how differently he was treated as opposed to today's self-possessed, rich athletes; what he did to earn money after track & field; and what he ultimately died from. Along the way, the author debunks one of the greatest myths in Olympic history and Owen's role in it. And, truth be told, the book details the racism of that period. This is a marvelous, well-written book by Jeremy Schaap that spotlights a singular athlete and human being: a man who 'wrote' a chapter of sports history that every true sports fan should know. Jesse Owens was the quintessential "amateur athlete" of the 20th Century. My Highest Recommendation!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Entertaining and Skillful History, December 2, 2008

By	CJA "CJA" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A real close to Triumph, May 22, 2008

By	William F. Mckee (Savannah, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics (Paperback)

This is really a fine histury of the 1936 Olympics in addition to a review of Jesse Owens career leading to the Olympics. This should be required reading for all of the current sports writers and editors. it should be read especially by those that thought that Clay was even close to being the outstanding athlete of the century. It would be a five star book if the author hadn't inserted some of his personal biasis.