Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, Last Archive listeners, It's been here and I
Speaker 1: want to share a story I made with the show
Speaker 1: Revisionist History that I think belongs in the Last Archive
Speaker 1: two because it's about history, democracy, and a question of truth.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty six, the Olympic Games were hosted by
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany. The modern Olympic movement was at a low ebb,
Speaker 1: and without the thirty six Games, there's a good chance
Speaker 1: that we wouldn't have the Olympics we have now. But
Speaker 1: participating in games held in Nazi Germany raised a whole
Speaker 1: lot of ethical and political questions. We tend to think
Speaker 1: of Nazism as a geographically bounded thing, something people in
Speaker 1: Germany in the nineteen thirties dealt with, but even just
Speaker 1: a few years after Hitler's rise, before the start of
Speaker 1: the Second World War, the Nazi Olympics forced countries around
Speaker 1: the world to make a decision about whether or not
Speaker 1: they were going to take a stand against Nazism. In
Speaker 1: the US, there was a boycott movement. It failed, but
Speaker 1: the political tensions around the games were fertile ground for myths.
Speaker 1: Myths that tended to justify the choice to go to
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany. In this episode, we look at probably the
Speaker 1: most influential of those myths, a tale about Jesse Owens.
Speaker 1: This episode and the next are two of a series
Speaker 1: that revisionist history host Malcolm Gladwell and I worked on together.
Speaker 1: It's called Hitler's Olympics, and if you like these episodes,
Speaker 1: I strongly encourage you to check out the whole series. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the episode.
Speaker 2: Collet Street tears around the Gray Serger with a speed
Speaker 2: of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride, also.
Speaker 1: Running about four thousand athletes impeded in the nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six Olympic Games. Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 3: Streak Jesse Owens in the one hundred meters at Bulding
Speaker 3: the outca second on him.
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
Speaker 1: self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
Speaker 1: already set three world records in a single day, all
Speaker 1: in the same hour. With a bad back, the.
Speaker 4: Worlds most runner makes the others look as if they're
Speaker 4: walking as he wins the final and equals the worlds
Speaker 4: record of time.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen thirty six even the Germans were expecting
Speaker 1: something great from him.
Speaker 5: How many board medals do your host to win?
Speaker 2: The two part time, it's to desire very athlete to
Speaker 2: win a first place in the.
Speaker 1: Inn the Olympic Games in nineteen thirty six, he was
Speaker 1: slated to compete in three events.
Speaker 6: And since I'm in.
Speaker 5: Three events, I hope to emerge with three victory.
Speaker 1: I hope one meters, two broad jump, one hundred meters,
Speaker 1: two hundred meters and the broad jump. Later they added
Speaker 1: a fourth event, the four by one hundred meter relay.
Speaker 1: He would win gold in all four, the only person
Speaker 1: to win four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics. And
Speaker 1: that is why you know the name Jesse Owens. But
Speaker 1: it all could have turned out differently because of that
Speaker 1: broad jump. You've seen a broad jump before today, it's
Speaker 1: called the long jump, and it's one of the more
Speaker 1: dramatic Olympic sports. The jumpers sprint down the runway, hit
Speaker 1: a takeoff board and they look like they're flying and
Speaker 1: then they land in a huge spray of sand. So
Speaker 1: the morning of August fourth, nineteen thirty six, ten thirty
Speaker 1: am in the Reichsportfeld. It's the long jump qualifying rounds.
Speaker 1: Best jumpers gone to the final. Owens had just run
Speaker 1: his heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he
Speaker 1: headed over to the pit. It was the third day
Speaker 1: of the games, and by then he already had his
Speaker 1: first gold medal, so it was a surprise when he
Speaker 1: botched his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it
Speaker 1: was a practice run, no sweat, though he had two
Speaker 1: more tries, so he lined himself back up and started
Speaker 1: jogging down the runway. He took off and came up short.
Speaker 1: He had one jump left. If he screwed up that
Speaker 1: last jump, he'd have been out of the contest, and
Speaker 1: he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win
Speaker 1: four gold medals in nineteen thirty six to one of
Speaker 1: three athletes who'd won three goals, right up there with
Speaker 1: Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbrok, who actually would have had
Speaker 1: more total medals than him. And I asked, be honest,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika mastenbrook No,
Speaker 1: And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying drum, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
Speaker 1: first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
Speaker 1: something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
Speaker 1: made him a legend.
Speaker 7: I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about
Speaker 7: things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, Ben and daph
Speaker 7: Haffrey and I are talking about one of the biggest
Speaker 7: stories to emerge from the Berlin Games, A story about
Speaker 7: two athletes making good on the promise of the Olympics,
Speaker 7: cross cultural understanding, sportsmanship against all odds, the moment that
Speaker 7: became key to the Olympic mythology and to the legend
Speaker 7: of Jesse Owens. A powerful, incredibly important story that's hiding
Speaker 7: a very big secret.
Speaker 1: It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled
Speaker 1: in over the stadium. Around one hundred thousand people were
Speaker 1: in the stands watching in America's most famous athlete. Jesse Owens,
Speaker 1: was screwing up badly, which makes no sense. All he
Speaker 1: had to do was jump seven point one five meters
Speaker 1: to qualify. He already had a world record for jumping
Speaker 1: a meter farther than that, So what was going wrong?
Speaker 1: Malcolm and I had decided to ask an expert a legend.
Speaker 4: Actually it was about ten years ago or so. The
Speaker 4: age is sixty five, I think. And I jumped further
Speaker 4: than my high school mark.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And you're the first American who jumped fifty seven feet.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time,
Speaker 1: Milan Tiff.
Speaker 4: I actually jumped sixty feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize
Speaker 4: it because I jumped out of the pit.
Speaker 1: And where should you do that?
Speaker 3: Right here?
Speaker 1: You say, wow, Yeah, I jumped.
Speaker 4: I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on
Speaker 4: the grass. I had grass stands all over the back
Speaker 4: of me.
Speaker 1: Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 7: So when I was in high school, starting at the
Speaker 7: age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
Speaker 7: was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribed to
Speaker 7: Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
Speaker 7: it's called. And Miller Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
Speaker 7: he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
Speaker 7: of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
Speaker 7: he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
Speaker 7: And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
Speaker 7: and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
Speaker 7: But I was I was just obsessed with him as
Speaker 7: this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure, and
Speaker 7: he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
Speaker 7: boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
Speaker 7: a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
Speaker 7: be He's going to be a little bit. He might
Speaker 7: be a little I don't know, but I have a
Speaker 7: sense that he might be. He might be a little
Speaker 7: out there.
Speaker 1: This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting Milan Tiff,
Speaker 1: I felt like I had taken some kind of intense
Speaker 1: psychedelic the effects of which I've yet to wear off.
Speaker 4: The first humans. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: I understood that to walk is just to take a
Speaker 1: number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed by
Speaker 1: an actually gorgeous painting of Milan's portraying a pair of
Speaker 1: empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space called
Speaker 1: Mysterious slee palm springs.
Speaker 4: And the birds and the trees would all fly down.
Speaker 4: They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have
Speaker 4: when I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 1: We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
Speaker 1: he could take us out to the UCLA track, And
Speaker 1: when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above
Speaker 1: us the whole time, which only made everything a little
Speaker 1: more surreal, and Olympic legends just walking up to him,
Speaker 1: literally bowing down this I think because they wouldn't normally
Speaker 1: see him. He told us he prefers to run in
Speaker 1: the morning, by which he meant three am. Tiff took
Speaker 1: us out to the broad jump pit to help us
Speaker 1: get inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could
Speaker 1: do because he's a master of the approach the part
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens was screwing up, but also because so you
Speaker 1: actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you know, I sit and he'd tell the stories.
Speaker 4: Yeah and not here all the stories. And you know,
Speaker 4: he talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 1: You know, we asked him to tell us about how
Speaker 1: you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
Speaker 4: of rockings. You have to have some or jiggle where
Speaker 4: you will call it. Yeah, you have to have a
Speaker 4: jiggle or a gide up before you even get into
Speaker 4: your run.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that ajustice of your run. Is that why this
Speaker 1: is obviously the broad jump, but lose long. I noticed
Speaker 1: he does this sort of like hitch in his leg
Speaker 1: before he starts running.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like a dance. It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 1: Can you show us what your gidea.
Speaker 4: Up was, Well, it's like a one two, three, four five,
Speaker 4: then you start your run.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I taught it to Willie Banks world record, taught
Speaker 4: it to bike Pile world record.
Speaker 1: We gave it a shot on the track where at
Speaker 1: the very same time actual Olympic athletes were practicing for
Speaker 1: this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying. Did
Speaker 1: we set a world record? Not even close. Did we
Speaker 1: become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied. But
Speaker 1: this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.
Speaker 1: What was Did Jesse Owens have a gide yo?
Speaker 4: No, he had a stance start because he was a sprinterer,
Speaker 4: you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
Speaker 4: all the time. He didn't have a jiggle, Well, he
Speaker 4: didn't have a g no. He didn't have a jiggle
Speaker 4: or a giddy oh yeah, And it took his competitor
Speaker 4: to say, man, come on, you gotta do something first.
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit, the export fold
Speaker 1: loots Long Lutz Long was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champion,
Speaker 1: and he looked the part, a fine ak line nose
Speaker 1: framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As
Speaker 1: Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning
Speaker 1: to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than
Speaker 1: to see a black man and lose to an Arian.
Speaker 1: The thought was nanging at him, messing up his focus.
Speaker 1: And then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler
Speaker 1: had been watching the games and saw that when Owens's
Speaker 1: turn came, Hitler had just left. It made his blood boil.
Speaker 1: That's why he was fouling out. He was psyched out
Speaker 1: by all of it, distracted, and when he saw how
Speaker 1: amazing Lutslong was at the broad jump, he began wonder
Speaker 1: if there was something true about all this Arian stuff.
Speaker 1: He was down to his last jump, and then came
Speaker 1: the miracle. In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: Owens wrote, Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.
Speaker 1: It was Lutslong.
Speaker 5: Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What
Speaker 5: has taken your goat?
Speaker 1: Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 5: I had to smile a little in spite of myself
Speaker 5: hearing his mixed up American idiom ah nothing. I said,
Speaker 5: you know how it is? He was silent for a
Speaker 5: few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
Speaker 5: But I also know you are a better jumper than this. Now,
Speaker 5: what has taken your goat?
Speaker 1: I laughed out loud.
Speaker 5: This time, but I couldn't tell him him above all,
Speaker 5: I glanced over at the broad jump pit I was
Speaker 5: about to be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if
Speaker 5: he wasn't sure which ones to use. Is it what
Speaker 5: reichkanze Hitler did? He asked. I was thunderstruck that he'd
Speaker 5: say it. I started to answer, but I didn't know
Speaker 5: what to say. I see, he said, Look, we talk
Speaker 5: about that later. Now you must jump, and you must qualify.
Speaker 5: But how I shot back?
Speaker 1: I have thought?
Speaker 5: He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
Speaker 5: one hundred percent?
Speaker 1: Correct? I not yet?
Speaker 5: You must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
Speaker 5: this time in frustration, and as I did, I heard
Speaker 5: the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
Speaker 5: do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, You take
Speaker 5: off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
Speaker 5: hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
Speaker 5: All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
Speaker 5: a cloudburst.
Speaker 1: Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
Speaker 1: to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
Speaker 1: lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
Speaker 1: his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
Speaker 1: closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit
Speaker 1: that mark on the towel, leapt into the air.
Speaker 4: And when he finally got that, he qualified.
Speaker 1: And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands,
Speaker 1: in the metal event itself whol record, he set an
Speaker 1: Olympic record. And that's when Lootes along the aryan poster
Speaker 1: child who had just lost to Jesse. Owens hugged him
Speaker 1: in front of Adolph Hitler, and the Hitler was pist man,
Speaker 1: but Long didn't just embrace him. According to Jesse, Owens
Speaker 1: later that night they met up in the Olympic village.
Speaker 1: The hours ticked on and they stayed up late, talking
Speaker 1: about their lives, the state of the world, and the
Speaker 1: uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had been formed
Speaker 1: between the men that day, because then the next day
Speaker 1: they did it again, and after that, again and again
Speaker 1: and again. Every single night of the Games they met
Speaker 1: up to talk. They became friends. The dream of the
Speaker 1: Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable gap
Speaker 1: between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
Speaker 1: After the Games, when Owens was back in America and
Speaker 1: Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany, they wrote letters to
Speaker 1: each other, even after long was serving in the Wehrmacht
Speaker 1: the Nazi Army, back and forth across the Atlantic for years.
Speaker 1: They kept coming until right before Lutzlang was killed in
Speaker 1: the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa.
Speaker 1: On some lonely desert hour, he sat down to write
Speaker 1: one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 5: I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
Speaker 5: the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
Speaker 5: fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse. I fear
Speaker 5: for my woman who was at home, and my young son, Karl,
Speaker 5: who has never really known his father. My heart tells me,
Speaker 5: if I be honest with you, that this is the
Speaker 5: last letter I shall ever write. If it is so,
Speaker 5: I ask you something. It is something so very important
Speaker 5: to me. It is you go to Germany when this
Speaker 5: war done. Someday find my Carl and tell him about
Speaker 5: his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when
Speaker 5: we were not separated by war, I am saying, Tell
Speaker 5: him how things can be between men on this earth.
Speaker 1: There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone.
Speaker 1: This story is a big part of the legend of
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia Britannica, there's the story when they made a star
Speaker 1: studied Hollywood film about Jesse Owens's life. Lutslog and that
Speaker 1: qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would
Speaker 1: help launch the career of the greatest Olympic documentarian of
Speaker 1: all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm not an auctioneer, but
Speaker 1: I think it is the reason why Lutslog's silver medal
Speaker 1: sold for nearly half a million dollars two years ago,
Speaker 1: about five times the amount earned for any other silver
Speaker 1: medal at auction. It's arguably the most important story in
Speaker 1: Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic Dream. It
Speaker 1: made the case that it was good that America went
Speaker 1: to the Vilin Games because it made possible this improbable
Speaker 1: friendship that transcended even the Second World War, a story
Speaker 1: that was just too good to be true. This entire series,
Speaker 1: we've been telling stories about the way people made sense
Speaker 1: of having the Olympics in Nazi Germany, the distortions, And
Speaker 1: when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens's friendship with lutzlog,
Speaker 1: I thought we got to do an episode on this.
Speaker 1: Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all
Speaker 1: that moral fog. So I wanted to read more of
Speaker 1: what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters.
Speaker 1: I wrote to the Jesse Owens Archive at the University
Speaker 1: of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't
Speaker 1: have any. They suggested I write to the family, but
Speaker 1: they didn't have any either. It seems strange to me
Speaker 1: that no one had kept them. So then I thought,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country.
Speaker 9: My name is gelindorre I was living in Leipzig and
Speaker 9: working in Leipzig for more than thirty years, and the
Speaker 9: last twenty five years as the director of the sports
Speaker 9: Museum in Leipzig.
Speaker 1: And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right, that's right.
Speaker 9: Lutslan was born in Leipzig nineteen thirty and he lived
Speaker 9: there almost till the end.
Speaker 1: Roar and her colleague, the sport historian Volka Kluga have
Speaker 1: looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens Luteslong story than
Speaker 1: anyone else.
Speaker 9: We got a lot of questions from all over the
Speaker 9: world about legend.
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There
Speaker 1: are a few different versions. But Roor dug through the
Speaker 1: official reports about the games. They're over a thousand pages long.
Speaker 9: There is a very good documentation about the Olympics called
Speaker 9: Official Report of the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and they
Speaker 9: describe it very exactly what happens and where.
Speaker 1: Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary
Speaker 1: evidence is an article Kluga turned up written by Lutzlong himself.
Speaker 1: He was published about a week into the games, and
Speaker 1: it's called mine kamfmitt Owens I struggle with Owens, which
Speaker 1: I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs, but
Speaker 1: homages to Hitler aside. The article was part of the
Speaker 1: surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens's win,
Speaker 1: including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Luteslong
Speaker 1: lying together in the grass of the Reichspoortfeld smiling. The
Speaker 1: photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the competition,
Speaker 1: when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing a
Speaker 1: dark turtleneck sweater and it looks like he's cracking a joke.
Speaker 1: Owens is beaming at him and wearing his Team USA
Speaker 1: crew neck. In the photo, they're so close it almost
Speaker 1: looks like they're touching. They look like real friends. So
Speaker 1: Gerlinda Ror and I turned our attention to that.
Speaker 9: So between the first three jumps and the final three jumps,
Speaker 9: these photographs were doing.
Speaker 1: Oh so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens
Speaker 1: win the gold. Yes, oh wow, so it's even its prior.
Speaker 1: There's a good chance that photo was taken or at
Speaker 1: least commissioned by Lenny Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the
Speaker 1: Third Reich. The photos float freely around the Internet now
Speaker 1: you can find them on Getty images. But at the
Speaker 1: time they were part of the Nazi propaganda push, meant
Speaker 1: to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed.
Speaker 1: So we know that Lutzlang and Jesse Owens met at
Speaker 1: least for the time it took to take that photo,
Speaker 1: and they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said.
Speaker 1: But here's the strange thing. In his article, Lutslog mentions
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens's difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three
Speaker 1: jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping
Speaker 1: him with the approach, which is strange because that's the
Speaker 1: most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's
Speaker 1: biggest competitor. Owens is what stands between Long and the gold,
Speaker 1: and yet Long go out of his way to help
Speaker 1: Owens get to the final You would think in an
Speaker 1: article about the Olympic Spirit, Long would mention that they
Speaker 1: were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany, it would have been away for an arian
Speaker 1: to take credit for a black man's success, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't mention it. Okay, so maybe all the meaningful stuff
Speaker 1: happened in those long talks in the Olympic village.
Speaker 9: What about those I didn't think that. It cannot be
Speaker 9: because Lutsloan didn't live in the Olympic village. Oh really,
Speaker 9: he didn't live here. I know from his family and
Speaker 9: from photographs and from a diary of his mother that
Speaker 9: after the opening of the Olympic Games he went back
Speaker 9: home from Berlin to Leipzig.
Speaker 1: And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump?
Speaker 1: He wasn't. He would go home at the end of
Speaker 1: each day.
Speaker 9: No, not each day. After his competitions started. He lived
Speaker 9: in Berlin in another hotel.
Speaker 1: All right, So the long talks seem less likely, though
Speaker 1: there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way. First,
Speaker 1: a few days after the broad jump, a newswire service
Speaker 1: wrote that quote something like a damon and Pytheis's friendship
Speaker 1: has sprung up between Ludslog and Jesse Owens. Though I
Speaker 1: think that's just a reference to the hug on the
Speaker 1: field that all the reporters would have seen. But then
Speaker 1: there's an athlete who, decades after the Games claimed that
Speaker 1: she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long,
Speaker 1: But Volka Kluga thinks the timing of her story is
Speaker 1: implausible given her events schedule. Also, I can't find any
Speaker 1: record of it in Owens's Olympic diaries. Owens is on
Speaker 1: the record saying quote, I didn't get a chance to
Speaker 1: go out of the Olympic village. In fact, I never
Speaker 1: did leave the village. The only time that I was
Speaker 1: ever out of the village was at the time when
Speaker 1: we went to the Olympic stadium to compete. I mean,
Speaker 1: they had some intense schedules to keep Actually, even Hitler
Speaker 1: couldn't keep up with their schedules. The feuror liked to
Speaker 1: sleep late. He famously slipt through a lot of d
Speaker 1: Day and probably for the same reason, he wasn't even
Speaker 1: in the stands the morning of the broad drum qualifiers,
Speaker 1: which is why it's not actually possible that he walked
Speaker 1: out on Owens. That leaves us with the letters. So
Speaker 1: then the final piece of the legend is these letters,
Speaker 1: these sort of beautiful letters that Letslong writes to Jesse
Speaker 1: Owens from the front, from the battlefields of the war.
Speaker 1: And I've not been able to find any archival record
Speaker 1: of those letters.
Speaker 9: Have you I asked his middle when she was living
Speaker 9: still in Hamburg, and she said there were letters we
Speaker 9: got to our atmus and she never saw a letter
Speaker 9: from Jesse Owens. No one in the family knows about
Speaker 9: letters from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 1: To Lutz Owens. At one point cites nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: as the date of Lutzlang's last letter. He says that
Speaker 1: in it Long writes about his wife and son, But
Speaker 1: Volkar Kluga points out that Long didn't even marry his
Speaker 1: girlfriend until nineteen forty one, and by the way, his
Speaker 1: son wasn't born till then either, And okay, well, then
Speaker 1: there's that other account featuring a letter from Long on
Speaker 1: the front lines of North Africa after he was married
Speaker 1: and after his son was born, except he didn't serve
Speaker 1: in North Africa. He died in Sicily. Also, you couldn't
Speaker 1: even send letters from the Nazi front lines to American citizens.
Speaker 1: I mean, they were fighting a war against each other,
Speaker 1: so then they really wouldn't have been speaking, really beyond
Speaker 1: the competition itself. So probably the most they spoke was
Speaker 1: when they were taking those photos.
Speaker 9: The only time they met each other was during the
Speaker 9: long jump competition in this stadium the only time, never before,
Speaker 9: and never often.
Speaker 1: I looked through Jesse Owens's diary from the nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six Games. In the back he keeps a list of addresses,
Speaker 1: presumably of people he wants to write to, and there's
Speaker 1: no address for Lutslan in there. It was starting to
Speaker 1: look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true. But
Speaker 1: then I was left with a new question. If it's
Speaker 1: not true, how did it catch on? We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: What are the ingredients of a good Olympic story?
Speaker 7: Well, I mean I would start with the mathematics of
Speaker 7: the games, which are tremendously appealing from a storyteller's perspective,
Speaker 7: which is that you have whatever I forgot, how many
Speaker 7: sports fifty going on simultaneously with athletes from all over
Speaker 7: the world, So you have an infinite number of stories
Speaker 7: to choose from.
Speaker 1: Like a farm system.
Speaker 7: It's a farm storytelling, so every year a different one
Speaker 7: bubbles up. You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist whins seven golds.
Speaker 7: Now do you come in each? A kind of beautiful
Speaker 7: waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful natural experiment
Speaker 7: in myth making. It just has it has an enormous
Speaker 7: strategic advantage with the other big sports spectacles World Cup,
Speaker 7: super Bowl, those are monocultures.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's totally true. And like in the
Speaker 1: myth making thing, you have this ancient aura to it. Yes.
Speaker 7: The other thing is it's this playground for healthy prejudice.
Speaker 7: So the the flying fin, the kind of mysterious Pabunermi
Speaker 7: who comes from like the woods of and like you know,
Speaker 7: a baby Bekuila running barefoot through the streets of Rome
Speaker 7: and to in the marathon in nineteen sixty. Of course
Speaker 7: he's berefit, right, he's e Theiopia right on and on
Speaker 7: your your you, you take on the characteristics of your
Speaker 7: of your country, and that's like it's this kind of
Speaker 7: really fun exercise in multicultural ethnocentrism.
Speaker 1: It's like, what's what's in the water over there? Yes,
Speaker 1: that's right. Did you ever cross paths with Bud Greenspan? No,
Speaker 1: Bud green Span, the most legendary Olympic storyteller of all time.
Speaker 8: There are those who believe in the core values of
Speaker 8: the Olympics, no one more so than filmmaker Bud Greenspan.
Speaker 1: At some point in this project, I got a little
Speaker 1: distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan.
Speaker 1: He looked like the Buddha, if the Buddha had been
Speaker 1: born far sighted on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Speaker 1: He was bald and typically wore his black, thick framed
Speaker 1: glasses on top of his head, like his brain was stargazing.
Speaker 7: Do you ever look at that unappealing negative side of
Speaker 7: the Olympics in your films?
Speaker 8: I've been asked that many times, Jane.
Speaker 2: I think I'd rather spend one hundred percent of my
Speaker 2: time and a ninety percent that's good, and a lot
Speaker 2: of my colleagues who spent one.
Speaker 1: Hundred percent of the time in the ten percent that's
Speaker 1: not so good. Here, I should just acknowledge that he's
Speaker 1: talking about us in our nine part series on Hitler's Olympics,
Speaker 1: which that is fair. I defer to him because Bud
Speaker 1: green Span basically invented modern uplifting Olympic storytelling. When Bob
Speaker 1: cost Us, the Voice of the Olympics on NBC first
Speaker 1: got the big job, you watched like sixteen hours of
Speaker 1: Bud Greenspan documentaries just to get the feeling right.
Speaker 8: Though criticized at times for looking at the games like
Speaker 8: a young boy through rose colored glasses. He has been
Speaker 8: making films on the Olympics for over fifty years.
Speaker 1: That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to
Speaker 1: Bud Greenspan, which is why there was all those angelic
Speaker 1: voices in the background. Green Span started reporting on the
Speaker 1: Olympics in the late nineteen forties. He was at every
Speaker 1: single Olympic Games from nineteen eighty four until he died
Speaker 1: in twenty ten. He won eight Emmys, a Lifetime Achievement
Speaker 1: Award from the Director's Guild. Everyone knew Bud green Span,
Speaker 1: and even if you don't know his name, you know
Speaker 1: his style.
Speaker 6: Here's one story.
Speaker 1: Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.
Speaker 6: Okay, we're at the Metropolitan Opera, which he adored, and
Speaker 6: intermission and having a glasses champagne and managing editor of
Speaker 6: Time magazine you know, comes up to us and goes Bud,
Speaker 6: and he goes, what are you doing here? As if
Speaker 6: you know, oh, you should be at Yankee Stadium or something.
Speaker 1: Oh, there is something so operatic about Olympic stories. So well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so why am I telling you about Bud green Span
Speaker 1: because his love for sport and his love for operatic
Speaker 1: storytelling came together in the holy grail of all Olympic stories,
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirty six Games. In Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6: They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into
Speaker 6: New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment, they'd certainly
Speaker 6: see each other. I remember by telling these stories about
Speaker 6: how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe
Speaker 6: it was like a tennis at racket club in New
Speaker 6: York City and they were still segregated, but he talked
Speaker 6: his way into the dining room, and I remember the
Speaker 6: matre g called but just as long as Jesse sits
Speaker 6: with his back to the door, the front door.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties, during the Civil rights movement, Greenspan
Speaker 1: got the idea for a film that fit the era.
Speaker 1: He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot
Speaker 1: an hour long TV documentary to narrate it too. A
Speaker 1: lot of the film is made up of archival footage
Speaker 1: that Lenny Reef shot of the games, but it's framed
Speaker 1: with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a
Speaker 1: suit walking around the reich Sport Feld and for one
Speaker 1: of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutsloan's son
Speaker 1: Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track, and that's
Speaker 1: when this happened. Ki.
Speaker 2: You probably don't know it, but your father was greatly
Speaker 2: responsible for my winning the broad jump in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 3: Well, Jesse, you have been a very important part in
Speaker 3: my life and I'm very often seen pictures from you
Speaker 3: and the photographs of my father. Please tell me about
Speaker 3: this competition here in the stadium, because I have my
Speaker 3: father only scene for three times. I was born nineteen
Speaker 3: forty one and my father has died in ninety forty three.
Speaker 2: Well, it all happened on the other side of the
Speaker 2: field here where we had the premonaries for the running
Speaker 2: broad jump, and on the first two jumps, I fouled
Speaker 2: on one and then go far enough on the other.
Speaker 2: And your father came to my assistance and he helped
Speaker 2: me measure a footback of the takeoff board, and he
Speaker 2: helped the tape until I measured a back as far
Speaker 2: as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came down
Speaker 2: and I hit between these two marks, and therefore I qualified,
Speaker 2: and that led to the victory in the running broad ject.
Speaker 1: The film was a huge hit, and it was written, directed,
Speaker 1: and produced by Bud Greenspan. So I figured case closed.
Speaker 1: Greenspan took that hug on the field and he just
Speaker 1: made up the rest of the myth about Loose Long.
Speaker 1: But Nancy Befer said, not so fast. Bud Greenspan believed
Speaker 1: that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6: But going back, why did he make it up? I
Speaker 6: don't know. I can't really speculate on that particular thing.
Speaker 6: But obviously you need a storyteller and then a recipient.
Speaker 6: So people must have wanted to hear that story, you know,
Speaker 6: and the notion I mean, So I don't know, And Bud,
Speaker 6: I mean, most important thing was until he died, didn't
Speaker 6: know Jesse made up that story.
Speaker 1: The story came from Jesse Owens, and he first told
Speaker 1: it long before he made that film in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Ki Long at first heard it from Jesse Owens too,
Speaker 1: a decade earlier.
Speaker 9: Oh, when I first talked to Ky Long, he said,
Speaker 9: for him, it was a completely unexpected situation.
Speaker 1: Again, sport historian Gerlinda Rhorr.
Speaker 9: He was ten years at the time when Jesse Owens
Speaker 9: came to Germany and suddenly ky Long was in a
Speaker 9: lot of journalists and photographs, and he didn't know what
Speaker 9: happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only
Speaker 9: two and a half year old when Lutzlong had to
Speaker 9: leave the family for the war, and so it was
Speaker 9: a completely a new situation for this young boy. Of course,
Speaker 9: he believed it because he didn't know what really happened.
Speaker 9: He couldn't ask his father. Never.
Speaker 1: Grilinda told me that as Kai Long grew older and
Speaker 1: reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father,
Speaker 1: Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had
Speaker 1: begun to involve Kai too. In a TV interview, Owen
Speaker 1: said that Kai had his letters' salutes in his scrap book.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty one, I had the privilege of meeting
Speaker 2: his son, and after showing the pictures and letters that
Speaker 2: he had, described book that I.
Speaker 1: Had written his father.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 2: As a result of that, today I.
Speaker 1: Know there is no evidence that that's true. Kai published
Speaker 1: a book in twenty fifteen about his father, full of
Speaker 1: family photos and documents. It's in German and impossible to find,
Speaker 1: but the publisher sent me a copy and there are
Speaker 1: just no letters from Omens to Long in it. Surely,
Speaker 1: if Kai had those letters in that scrap book, he'd
Speaker 1: have included them in this book.
Speaker 9: And so he started to think about what's the truth
Speaker 9: and what really happened when he was an adult, and
Speaker 9: he was asked all the time from journalists and when
Speaker 9: he told them, oh, maybe it couldn't be or their
Speaker 9: aren't letters to me, he said, I can tell what
Speaker 9: I want. They want to hear the legends. And so
Speaker 9: he said once to me, Oh, missus, Raw, isn't it
Speaker 9: nice for people to live with this story? Do you
Speaker 9: want to destroy this story?
Speaker 1: Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story. And let
Speaker 1: me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true.
Speaker 1: Lutslang and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good
Speaker 1: to each other on the field. But this whole series
Speaker 1: we're doing is about what happens when we failed to
Speaker 1: see the truth of what is right before our eyes.
Speaker 1: And this legend of the Owens Long friendship has started
Speaker 1: to seem to me like one of the biggest examples
Speaker 1: of failing to see what's right before you first, because
Speaker 1: in so many ways it doesn't add up. And second
Speaker 1: because it doesn't just involve one or two daffy members
Speaker 1: of the IOC, but so many of us for a
Speaker 1: long time now. But why would Jesse Owens make this up?
Speaker 1: The truth at last? Next week? Revisionist History is produced
Speaker 1: by me Ben Thattdiphaffrey, Dalli Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking on this episode
Speaker 1: by J. L. Goldfein, Original scoring by Luis Garratt, mastering
Speaker 1: by Sarah Briguier and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen
Speaker 1: Schakerji rufus Wright who read the excerpts of Jesse owens
Speaker 1: autobiography and J. D. Landis. I'm bennatiph Haffrey. That was
Speaker 1: part one of a two part story on Jesse Owens
Speaker 1: from Revisionist Histories nine part series on the Games. Part
Speaker 1: two is in your feeds now