At the first modern revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, a little crew of casually assembled athletes foundered through a helter-skelter track meet at Athens. In the four decades since, the modern Olympic Games have become what their founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, hoped that they might one day be and what the ancient Olympic Games actually were: World's No. i sports event.
Last week in Berlin, daily crowds of 110,000 packed the gigantic new Olympic Stadium. Below them cavorted the finest athletes in the world. In the press stand sat 1,500 reporters, hundreds more than customarily report League of Nations doings at Geneva. Whether or not the Olympic Games actually serve their purpose of promoting international understanding remains dubious. That they afford harmless amusement to participants & spectators, a valuable chance for ballyhoo to the nation which holds them, no one is better aware than Realmleader Adolf Hitler, who attended every session except one last week, inspired his loyal Nazi followers to win the unheard of total of five track & field events.
Officially, no country wins the Olympic Games. Patterned on their Greek models, each event is an individual contest of which the winner is an individual or a specialized team. Any effort to rate Olympic performances in national units raises questions of procedure such as whether the sport of Running, backbone of the Olympics, with 14 major subdivisions, should be given the same importance as the sport of Canoeing.
Actually, the U. S. always wins the Olympic Games because its entrants are not only ablest, but most numerous. To arrive at some sort of basis for comparison, sports writers long ago invented a system for tabulating all events on the basis of ten points for first place, five for second, four for third and so on down to one for sixth. Graded by this system, the first six countries in men's track & field events, after eight days of competition, were last week as follows: U. S. 203 points Finland 80½ points Germany 69¾ points Japan 51 13/22 points Great Britain 43 1/11 points Canada 22 1/11 points By last week, the track & field events were finished. No. 1 hero of the world's No. 1 sports event was a Cleveland Negro named Jesse Owens. No. 1 heroine, with the possible exception of Mrs. Eleanor Holm Jarrett, because she was not allowed to compete, was a Fulton, Mo., filly named Helen Stephens. The Olympic Games had produced eight deaths, innumerable misunderstandings, enough revenue to repay all running expenses and part of what it would otherwise have cost Germany for barracks for 4,000 soldiers, the best sports arena in the world. Events:
Hero Owens. In 1924 Finn Paavo Nurmi won three Olympic races. Last week at Berlin, Cleveland's coffee-colored Jesse Owens bettered this achievement. On the first day of competition he broke the world's record for 100 metres in a trial heat (10.2 sec.). On the second day, he won the final in world-record time (10.3). On the third, he won the broad jump with a new Olympic record (26 ft., 5 21/64 in.). On the fourth, he won the 200-metre dash with a new world's record (20.7 sec.) for a track with a turn. Finally, selected for the U. S. 400-metre relay team, he helped it equal the world's record in a trial heat, break it winning the final in 39.8 sec.