Jesse Owens and Hitler

Others care about Olympic track too.

The popular wisdom is that human biodiversity is scientifically impossible, and that is a good thing, because it would be the end of human civilization if it turned out to be true.

As you may have noticed once or twice over last three decades, in response I sometimes point to Olympic track results as evidence that not only does human biodiversity exist, but that its existence is something that we seem to tolerate without it driving us crazy.

The most common retort I get from upholders of the conventional wisdom is: “Nobody cares about sports!”

Yet that doesn’t seem to be true when it comes to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, which academics seem to care about very much.

From The Guardian opinion section:

Trump is terrified of Black culture. But not for the reasons you think

Saida Grundy

A look back at 1960s Black arts movement explains why Trump is obsessed with eliminating Black artistry and the museums and institutions that support it

Sun 22 Jun 2025 09.00 EDT

Paywall here.

By the time Jesse Owens bowed his head from the highest podium tier to be crowned with his fourth Olympic wreath in the 1936 Berlin Olympics,

It looks instead like Jesse is saluting the American flag.

Europe’s premiers knew they had a problem. In front of a record-setting crowd at games that should have been a lavish display of Aryan propaganda, Owens’s unmatched athleticism on the track humiliated the host Nazi regime

Actually, the 1936 Olympics were a big success for the Nazis because they did a good job of hosting them.

and smashed one of the vital ideological pillars upon which European empires annexed the world into their racial order. Since the inception of race-based slavery and settler-colonialism in the 15th century, the novel idea that human beings could be stratified into distinct “races,” with superiority defaulting to white Europeans, was bolstered by the claim that white racial supremacy was the rational outcome of the “natural” biophysical, intellectual and aesthetic ascendancy of white people, and thus of whiteness itself.

Adolf Hitler watched Owens, the five-time world record holder and grandson of enslaved people, triumph in his first event from a lavishly decorated imperial box, and abruptly exited the arena thereafter rather than witness Aryan athletes stumble to place second. In his conspicuous departure, a reluctant admission heard around the world had been made. A pillar was smashed. European physical superiority had been proven an undeniable fallacy and, more insultingly, Black dominance on the track was now a quantifiable fact. The ideological stakes of white supremacy – that whites were the smarter race, the sole ones capable of higher thought, that white people were the most physically beautiful, and also that the cultural products of whiteness were the most artistically valuable to advanced civilization – had suffered a powerful blow and shifted on its heels.

The notion that “Nobody cares about sports!” was less untrue in 1936 than since then. Still …

Popular as that theory is, that’s actually not true.

In reality, Hitler had stopped shaking hands of gold medalists after the first day of the 1936 Olympics due to an intra-European dispute with the International Olympic Committee. On the first day, Hitler had shaken hands with all the German gold medalists but not the other European gold medalists. So the IOC said: Who do you think you are, Hitler, Hitler? Either you shake all the gold medalists’ hands or you shake none of them.

So Hitler submitted and stopped shaking anybody’s hands.

In reality, nobody cared all that much about blacks in Europe in the 1930s. That Jesse Owens or Joe Louis were a crushing blow to Nazi ideology was mostly an invention of Jewish-American sportswriters.

African Americans had won in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics all the individual events — 100m, 200m and long jump — that Jesse Owens won in the 1936 Olympics. Owens had set five world records at the 1935 Big Ten championships. So nobody was terribly surprised when he won three individual golds and one relay gold in the 1936 Olympics.

Owens liked to point out that he didn’t care that he didn’t get to shake Hitler’s hand, who was the leader of a foreign country. But he was disappointed that he didn’t get to shake FDR’s hand, who was his own leader.

Seems reasonable.