French pole vault star Renaud Lavillenie made a bizarre and remarkably inapt, to say the least, comparison of his getting booed on Monday night at the Olympics to Jesse Owens’ competing at the 1936 Olympic Games, as he was beaten to gold by home favourite Thiago Braz:
Via AFP:
In the pole vault, Lavillenie was the hot favourite but he was undone by Braz’s Olympic record of 6.03m and had to settle for silver in front of the partisan crowd.
“In 1936 the crowd was against Jesse Owens. We’ve not seen this since. We have to deal with it,” said the Frenchman in response to the jeers he received in a comparison sure to be judged as being in extremely poor taste.
Owens, an African American sporting legend, very famously won four golds at the Berlin Games, a defiant performance in front of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi regime that propagated a white supremacist, Aryan “master race” ideology.
Lavillenie’s implication is obviously ridiculous, that being booed by a partisan Brazilian crowd could somehow equate with the adversity Owens faced in the form of racism.
It's doubly bizarre in that it's not historically clear Owens was actually booed in Berlin, or faced much crowd hostility at all. Marty Glickman, one of the Jewish sprinters who went to the Games as part of the US team, has said:
“All that stuff about the hostility toward Jesse in Berlin — and for that matter, towards me and Sam Stoller, we were the only Jews on the US track team — was invention by the American press.
“The German people were wonderful to us. They were grand hosts and cheered us on tremendously.
“They wanted their own athletes to win, of course, but they didn’t resent any of the Americans, and especially not Jesse.
“In fact, they treated him like he was a movie star. When he first arrived at the stadium there were hundreds of young girls screaming ‘Wo ist Jesse?’ — Where is Jesse? Some of them had scissors — they wanted to cut off pieces of his suit for souvenirs. The police had to form a barrier around him to get into the facilities.
“Jesse was surprised — he didn’t get that kind of reception at track meets in America.”
That last point is important to remember when recalling Owens' legacy. Whatever animosity he may have seen in the two weeks in Nazi Germany probably did not compare to the daily reality of rampant, structural racism he would face back in the United States.
As the director Deborah Riley Draper told NPR in the link above:
“They were Olympic athletes when they were on the medal stand. When they came back home to a segregated America, they came back to being Negroes.”
UPDATE
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