Sport: Farthest & Fastest

In Ann Arbor, Mich. 10,000 spectators at the 35th annual Western Conference meet last week saw the most amazing individual performance in the history of U.S. track & field sports. Slender, coffee-colored Jesse Owens, 21-year-old Ohio State Sophomore, tied one world’s record, broke three, and emerged from the meet indisputably the ablest all-around track athlete currently functioning in the U.S. His records: 20.3 sec. for the 220-yd. dash (old record: 20.6 sec.); 22.6 sec. for the 220-yd. low hurdles (old record: 23 sec.); 26 ft., 8¼ in. for the broad jump (old record: 26 ft. 2½in., set by Chuhei Nambu of Japan in 1931). His tie: 9.4 sec. for the 100-yd. dash.

Born in Alabama, but not superstitious, Jesse Owens is the son of a onetime cotton picker, now unemployed, who lives in Cleveland with his wife and eight other children. Total income of the Owens family is estimated at $7 a week. When Mrs. Owens applied for relief, she was refused on the ground that the family had enough money to send a son to college. At Ohio State, her son helps earn his way as a State House page. Christened James Cleveland Owens, he became Jesse when a teacher at Cleveland’s Fairmount Junior High School to whom he gave his initials mistook them for his first name. He was too shy to correct her. Before he left high school he had won the U.S. broad-jump title, run 100 yd. in 9.4 sec. The 100-yd. world record, set by Southern California’s Frank Wykoff in 1930, has never been broken but it has been tied so frequently that until this spring it appeared closer than any other to a final definition of the speed of a human runner. The expectation of Ohio State’s Coach Laurence Snyder that his most famed protégé will break it by 3-sec. is based on the fact that, with a running start, Owens has covered the distance in 8.4. Traveling at full speed, he averages 35.71 ft. per sec. His current performances are impaired by slow acceleration which he hopes to correct within the next two years. Coach Snyder also expects him to jump 27 ft. “when he gets his take-off right.” Sure to be a mainstay of next year’s Olympic team, Owens is 21, 5 ft. 10 in., 165 lb. He plans to teach Industrial Art after he graduates.

For the last five years athletes like DeHart Hubbard, Eddie Tolan, Ralph Metcalfe, Ben Johnson, Eulace Peacock have made it apparent that Negroes can jump farther and run short distances faster than whites. Last week onetime Yale field Coach Albert McGall suggested a reason which sounded more likely than those usually proposed by his confreres: in Negroes, os calcis (heel bone) juts out farther at the back of the foot than it does in whites, gives them better leverage.