80 years ago, Jesse Owens destroyed the Olympics' racial hierarchy and humiliated Hitler at the Berlin Games

The world in 1936 was nearly as fractured as it would become less than a decade later. Spain was mired in a civil war, fascism had not only invaded Germany, but Italy as well. Policies of official racism amplified and emboldened American racism. Moreover, following the German boxer Max Schmeling’s defeat of black American Joe Lewis, Hitler was given a propaganda item in the lead up to the election: Aryan supremacy is real. As a white sprinter dashed into the stadium and lit the Olympic flame to truly start the games, it must have appeared to all observers of the Berlin Olympics that Hitler might actually be right.

But there was no bigger moment for smashing the assumed racial superiority on display than the pure dominance of Jesse Owens at an Olympic games marketed by Hitler as what would seal the Aryan race atop the racial hierarchy. Owens—the son of a sharecropper and whose grandparents had been slaves—cruised to victory in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay, and long jump, thumbing his nose at the Fuhrer along the way (“Yes-say,” the crowds cheered in their Teutonic accents as Hitler and his entourage left the stadium in a huff), and become the first American to win four gold medals at a single Olympics.

But it was a brutal dictator’s racial theories that Owens really smashed. Hitler had spent considerable German resources to showcase white supremacy. To achieve these goals, the German Olympians had been organized in a military fashion, and trained accordingly. The team was “Aryan’s only,” with its lone Jewish member, Helene Mayer, a fencer who was allowed on the team because only her father was Jewish. In the end, like most host nations, Germany won a lot of medals, but the image of Aryan superiority was punctured for the world to see.

The Germans, and the rest of the field in those four events Owens dominated, would prove no match for the 22-year-old from Cleveland. Owens had operated an elevator while a student at Ohio State—the high school track star who’d set Amateur Athletic Union records had not received a scholarship. In his sophomore year, over the span of 45 minutes, he had broken three world records and tied a fourth. The Olympics would be a breeze in comparison with events staggered over a number of days.

On the first day of competition, following track victories by a white German and some Fins, Hitler set a precedent he would not keep, congratulating the winners personally in his box at the stadium. After two black Americans, Cornelius Johnson and Dave Albritton, won gold and silver in the high jump, Hitler and his aides left the stadium, and the glad-handing ceased for the rest of the games. The games would only go further off of Hitler’s script from there.