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In 1933 Owens won both sprints and the broad jump in record time in the U. S. interscholastic championships. In 1935, as an Ohio State sophomore, he broke three world's records and equalled a fourth in a single afternoon. Last week, when his deeds made it apparent that he could continue this routine at least until Olympic competition becomes extraterrestrial, Negro Owens became the most celebrated single contestant the Olympic Games have had since famed U. S. Indian Jim Thorpe, who was disqualified for professionalism after winning the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912.
At the Owens cabana in the Olympic Village, awed rivals crowded to feel the Owens muscles, get the Owens autograph. In Cleveland Governor Martin L. Davey decreed a Jesse Owens Day. Over the radio, Mrs. Henry Cleveland Owens described her son: "Jesse was always a face boy. . . . When a problem came up, he always faced it." Said Face Boy Owens, before his fourth trip to the Victory Stand to have a laurel wreath stuck on his kinky head, be awarded a minute potted oak tree and the Olympic first prize of a diploma and a silver-gilt medal: "That's a grand feeling standing up there. ... I never felt like that before. . . ."
U. S. Negroes. Before the Games started, U. S. track & field entrants appeared to have a good chance in eleven of the 23 men's events, but no one actually expected them to win that many. Last week, when the track & field events ended, the U. S. had actually won twelve firsts, bettering the record of eleven made by their team in 1932. The individual winners, other than Owens: Archie Williams (400-metre run); John Woodruff (800-metre run); Forrest Towns (100-metre hurdles); Glenn Hardin (400-metre hurdles) ; Kenneth Carpenter (discus throw) ; Cornelius Johnson (high jump); Earle Meadows (pole vault); Glenn Morris (decathlon). Owens, Williams, Woodruff and Johnson are Negroes. So are Ralph Metcalfe, Mack Robinson and David Albritton, who finished second in the 100-metre, 200-metre and high jump, respectively.
Original German theory to explain Negro sport supremacy, prematurely evolved before the Schmeling-Louis prizefight, was that Negroes are not really people. Last week, Realmleader Adolf Hitler conspicuously neglected to invite Negro winners up to shake hands with him in his box, and Nazi newspapers invented an even more facile excuse for Germany's feeble showing of only three winners—Hans Woellke (shot put), Gerhard Stoeck (javelin throw), Karl Hein (hammer throw)—in the men's track & field events by describing the Negroes who between them won half the U. S. total as "a black auxiliary force." Said Der Angriff, run by Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels: "Actually, the Yankees, heretofore invincible, have been the great disappointment of the games. . . . Without these members of the black race—these auxiliary helpers—a German would have won the broad jump. . . . The fighting power of European athletes, especially the Germans, has increased beyond all comparison. . . ."