Speaker 1: Pushkin the Collock Street tears around the clay circle with
Speaker 1: a spoon of the wind, increasing his lead with every stride.
Speaker 2: Also, about four thousand athletes competed in the nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: six Olympic Games, but Jesse Owens is the one people remember.
Speaker 3: Streak Jesse Owens in one hundred meters.
Speaker 1: The yata go out in front of that cap of
Speaker 1: coming second up on him.
Speaker 2: Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper,
Speaker 2: self effacing, soft spoken, and an unbelievable athlete. In nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty five, as a twenty one year old, he had
Speaker 2: already set three world records in a single day, all
Speaker 2: in the same hour. With a bad back, Where's mister
Speaker 2: runner makes the others look as if they're working?
Speaker 3: He wins the final and equals the worlds record time, and.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty six even the Germans were expecting something
Speaker 2: great from him.
Speaker 4: Now, how many broad medals do you hope to win?
Speaker 4: The two cord metimes?
Speaker 5: It's to desire very athlete to win a first place.
Speaker 4: In the an Olympic Games.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty six, he was slated to compete in
Speaker 2: three events, and since I'm in three events.
Speaker 3: I hope to you emerge with three victories.
Speaker 5: I hope one meets one hundred meters two hundred.
Speaker 2: Meters and rogum one hundred meters two hundred meters and
Speaker 2: the broad jump. Later they added a fourth event, the
Speaker 2: four by one hundred meter relay. He would win gold
Speaker 2: in all four, the only person to win four gold
Speaker 2: medals in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you
Speaker 2: know the name Jesse Owens. But it all could have
Speaker 2: turned out differently because of that broad jump. You've seen
Speaker 2: a broad jump before today it's called the long jump,
Speaker 2: and it's one of the more dramatic Olympic sports. The
Speaker 2: jumpers sprint down the runway, hit a take off board
Speaker 2: and they look like they're flying and then they land
Speaker 2: in a huge spray of sand. So the morning of
Speaker 2: August fourth, nineteen thirty six, ten thirty am in the
Speaker 2: reichs sport Feld, it's the long jump qualifying rounds. Best
Speaker 2: jumpers go on to the final. Owens had just run
Speaker 2: his heat in the two hundred meters immediately after he
Speaker 2: headed over to the pit. It was the third day
Speaker 2: of the Games, and by then he already had his
Speaker 2: first gold medal, so it was a surprise when he
Speaker 2: botched his first jump. By some accounts, he thought it
Speaker 2: was a practice run no sweat, though he had two
Speaker 2: more tries, so he lined himself back up and started
Speaker 2: jogging down the runway. He took off and came up short.
Speaker 2: He had one jump left. If he screwed up that
Speaker 2: last jump, he'd have been out of the contest, and
Speaker 2: he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win
Speaker 2: four gold medals in nineteen thirty six to one of
Speaker 2: three athletes who'd won three golds, right up there with
Speaker 2: Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroke, who actually would have had
Speaker 2: more total medals than him. And I ask you, be honest,
Speaker 2: have you ever heard of Conrad Fray and Hendrika masten Broke. No,
Speaker 2: And probably if he'd missed that final qualifying jump, you
Speaker 2: wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either. So after the
Speaker 2: first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then something miraculous happened,
Speaker 2: something that changed the course of Jesse Owens's life and
Speaker 2: made him a legend.
Speaker 6: I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to revisionist history about things overlooked
Speaker 6: and misunderstood in this episode, Ben and Aph Haffrey and
Speaker 6: I are talking about one of the biggest stories to
Speaker 6: emerge from the Berlin Games. A story about two athletes
Speaker 6: making good on the promise of the Olympics, cross cultural understanding,
Speaker 6: sportsmanship against all odds. A moment that became key to
Speaker 6: the Olympic mythology and to the legend of Jesse Owens.
Speaker 6: A powerful, incredibly important story that's hiding a very big secret.
Speaker 2: It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled
Speaker 2: in over the stadium. Around one hundred thousand people were
Speaker 2: in the stands watching in America's most famous athlete, Jesse Owens,
Speaker 2: was screwing up badly, which makes no sense. All he
Speaker 2: had to do was jump seven point one five meters
Speaker 2: to qualify. He already had a world record for jumping
Speaker 2: a meter farther than that, So what was going wrong?
Speaker 2: Malcolm and I had decided to ask an expert a legend.
Speaker 3: Actually it was about ten years ago, so the age
Speaker 3: is sixty five, I think, and I jumped further than
Speaker 3: my high school mark is sun right, yeah, and.
Speaker 6: You're the first American who jump fifty seven feet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the greatest American triple jumpers of all
Speaker 2: time Milan Tiff.
Speaker 3: I actually jumped sixty feet but they didn't wouldn't recognize
Speaker 3: it because I jumped out of the pit And.
Speaker 6: Where did you do that?
Speaker 7: Right here?
Speaker 3: You say wow, and I jump. I completely jumped over
Speaker 3: the sand pit and landed on the grass. I had
Speaker 3: grass stands all over the back of me.
Speaker 2: Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.
Speaker 6: So when I was in high school, starting at the
Speaker 6: age of twelve, I became a competitive runner, and I
Speaker 6: was obsessed with track and field, and I subscribe to
Speaker 6: Track and Field News, the Bible of the sport, as
Speaker 6: it's called. And Miller Tiff was this extraordinary. First of all,
Speaker 6: he was astonishing looking. He looked there was something kind
Speaker 6: of ethereal about him, and he had as a kid,
Speaker 6: he couldn't walk because he had I think polio or something.
Speaker 6: And he was also an artist, really really bright colors
Speaker 6: and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.
Speaker 6: But I was I was just obsessed with him as
Speaker 6: this kind of like this this strange, otherworldly figure. And
Speaker 6: he was a favorite in nineteen eighty. Had we not
Speaker 6: boycotted the nineteen eighty Games, he might well have won
Speaker 6: a gold medal. Anyway, I cannot wait. He's going to
Speaker 6: be He's going to be a little bit. He might
Speaker 6: be a little I don't know, but I have a
Speaker 6: sense that he might be. He might be a little
Speaker 6: out there.
Speaker 2: This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting the
Speaker 2: lawn Tiff, I felt like I had take in some
Speaker 2: kind of intense psychedelic the effects of which I've yet
Speaker 2: to wear off.
Speaker 3: The first humans. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: I understood that to walk is just to take a
Speaker 2: number of tiny, long jumps. I found myself transfixed by
Speaker 2: an actually gorgeous painting of Milans portraying a pair of
Speaker 2: empty tidy whities suspended in a blue abstract space called
Speaker 2: mysteriously palm springs, and.
Speaker 3: The birds and the trees would all fly down. They're
Speaker 3: just tapped into the same frequency as I have when
Speaker 3: I'm running and jumping.
Speaker 2: We flew out to Los Angeles, where he lives, so
Speaker 2: he could take us out to the UCLA track, And
Speaker 2: when we got there there were several helicopters hovering above
Speaker 2: us the whole time, which only made everything a little
Speaker 2: more surreal. And Olympic legends just walking up to him
Speaker 2: literally bowing down. This I think because they wouldn't normally
Speaker 2: see him. He told us he prefers to run in
Speaker 2: the morning, by which he meant three am. Tif us
Speaker 2: out to the broad jump pit to help us get
Speaker 2: inside Jesse Owens's mind, which we thought he could do
Speaker 2: because he's a master of the approach the part Jesse
Speaker 2: Owens was screwing up, but also because so you actually
Speaker 2: knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know that sit and he tell the stories, yeah,
Speaker 3: and not hear all the stories. And you know, he
Speaker 3: talked about his experience in Berlin.
Speaker 2: You know, we asked him to tell us about how
Speaker 2: you're supposed to approach a jump.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you gotta have a gidea up first, that kind
Speaker 3: of rockings. You have to have some or a jiggle
Speaker 3: where you will call it. Yeah, you have to have
Speaker 3: a jiggle or a gide up before you even get
Speaker 3: into your run.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that adjustice your run. Is that why this is
Speaker 2: obviously the broad jump but lose long. I noticed he
Speaker 2: does this sort of like hitch in his leg before
Speaker 2: he starts running.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a dance. It's like it's like a preparation.
Speaker 2: Can you show us what your gidea up.
Speaker 3: Was, Well, it's like a one, two, three, four five,
Speaker 3: then you start your run.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I told it to Willie Banks world record, taught
Speaker 3: it to.
Speaker 2: Bike Pile world record. We gave it a shot on
Speaker 2: the track where at the very same time actual Olympic
Speaker 2: athletes were practicing for this year's games. Was it embarrassing?
Speaker 2: It was mortifying. Did we set a world record? Not
Speaker 2: even close. Did we become friends with any Olympians they
Speaker 2: were otherwise occupied. But this is the kind of dedication
Speaker 2: that deep historical investigations demand. What was Did Jesse Owens
Speaker 2: have a gidayup?
Speaker 3: No, he had a stand start because he was a sprinter,
Speaker 3: you see. Yeah, that's why he was losing the steps
Speaker 3: all the time. He didn't have a jiggle, well, he
Speaker 3: didn't have a che No, he didn't have a jiggle
Speaker 3: or a get.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it took his competitor to say, man, come on,
Speaker 3: you gotta do something first.
Speaker 2: Jesse Owens's competitor, facing down the pit through export fold
Speaker 2: Long Lutzlong was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champion, and
Speaker 2: he looked the part a fine ak line nose framed
Speaker 2: by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes. As Owens
Speaker 2: wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning to watch.
Speaker 2: Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than to see
Speaker 2: a black man lose to an Arian. The thought was
Speaker 2: nanging at him, messing up his focus. And then he'd
Speaker 2: looked up at the box where Hitler had been watching
Speaker 2: the games and saw that when Owens's turn came, Hitler
Speaker 2: had just left. It made his blood boil. That's why
Speaker 2: he was fouling out. He was psyched out by all
Speaker 2: of it, distracted, and when he saw how amazing Lutslong
Speaker 2: was at the broad jump, he began wonder if there
Speaker 2: was something true about all this Arian stuff. He was
Speaker 2: down to his last jump, and then came the miracle.
Speaker 2: In an autobiography he published in nineteen seventy eight, Owens wrote,
Speaker 2: suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was
Speaker 2: Lut's Long. Look.
Speaker 4: There is no time to waste with manners. What has
Speaker 4: taken your goat.
Speaker 2: Obviously we had to reenact this.
Speaker 4: I had to smile a little in spite of myself
Speaker 4: hearing his mixed up American idiom ah. Nothing I said,
Speaker 4: you know how it is. He was silent for a
Speaker 4: few seconds. Yes, he said, finally, I know how it is.
Speaker 4: But I also know you are a better jumper than this.
Speaker 4: Now what has taken your goat? I laughed out loud
Speaker 4: this time, but I couldn't tell him him Above all,
Speaker 4: I glanced over at the broad jump pit I was
Speaker 4: about to be called. Lutz didn't waste words, even if
Speaker 4: he wasn't sure of which ones to use. Is it
Speaker 4: what reichkanze Hitler did? He asked. I was thunderstruck that
Speaker 4: he'd say it. I start to answer, but I didn't
Speaker 4: know what to say. I see, he said, Look, we
Speaker 4: talk about that later. Now you must jump and you
Speaker 4: must qualify. But how I shot back?
Speaker 2: I have thought?
Speaker 4: He said, you are like Aya. You must do it
Speaker 4: one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 2: I nodded.
Speaker 4: Yet you must be sure not to foul. I nodded again,
Speaker 4: this time in frustration, And as I did, I heard
Speaker 4: the loudspeaker call my name. Lutz talked quickly. Then you
Speaker 4: do both things, Jesse. You remeasure your steps, you take
Speaker 4: off six inches behind the foul board. You jump as
Speaker 4: hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.
Speaker 4: All at once, the panic emptied out of me like
Speaker 4: a cloudburst.
Speaker 2: Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel
Speaker 2: to mark where Long had told him to jump. He
Speaker 2: lined up on the runway, maybe wiped his hands on
Speaker 2: his jersey, and then he ran one step, two steps,
Speaker 2: closer and closer to the pit, and then he hit
Speaker 2: that mark on the towel, leapt into the air.
Speaker 3: And when he finally got that, he qualified.
Speaker 2: And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands,
Speaker 2: in the metal event itself well record, he set an
Speaker 2: Olympic record. And that's when Lootes along the aryan poster
Speaker 2: child who had just lost to Jesse Owens, hugged him
Speaker 2: in front of Adolph.
Speaker 3: Hitler, and the Hitler was pissed man.
Speaker 2: But Long didn't just embrace him. According to Jesse Owens,
Speaker 2: later that night they met up in the Olympic village.
Speaker 2: The hours ticked on and they stayed up late, talking
Speaker 2: about their lives, the state of the world, and the
Speaker 2: uncertain future. Some kind of strange bond had been formed
Speaker 2: between the men that day, because then the next day
Speaker 2: they did it again, and after that, again and again
Speaker 2: and again. Every single night of the games, they met
Speaker 2: up to talk. They became friends. The dream of the
Speaker 2: Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgable gap
Speaker 2: between two cultures, two races. Something unbreakable had bound them.
Speaker 2: After the Games, when Owens was back in America and
Speaker 2: Lutzlang was still in Nazi Germany, they wrote letters to
Speaker 2: each other, even after long was serving in the Wehrmacht
Speaker 2: the Nazi army, back and forth across the Atlantic for years.
Speaker 2: They kept coming until right before Lutzlang was killed in
Speaker 2: the war. He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa.
Speaker 2: On some lonely desert hour, he sat down to write
Speaker 2: one last letter to his friend.
Speaker 4: I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only
Speaker 4: the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not
Speaker 4: fear so much for myself, my friend, Jesse. I fear
Speaker 4: for my woman, who was at home, and my young son, Karl,
Speaker 4: who has never really known his father. My heart tells me,
Speaker 4: if I be honest with you, that this is the
Speaker 4: last letter I shall ever write. If it is so,
Speaker 4: I ask you something. It is something so very important
Speaker 4: to me. It is you go to Germany when this
Speaker 4: war done. Someday find my Carl. And tell him about
Speaker 4: his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when
Speaker 4: we were not separated by war, I am saying, tell
Speaker 4: him how things can be between men on this earth.
Speaker 2: There are tears in your eyes. You would not be alone.
Speaker 2: This story is a big part of the legend of
Speaker 2: Jesse Owens. If you look up Jesse Owens in the
Speaker 2: Encyclopedia Britannica, there's the story when they made a star
Speaker 2: studded Hollywood film about Jesse Owens's life. Lutslog and that
Speaker 2: qualifying jump are the pivotal moment. Retelling this story would
Speaker 2: help launch the career of the greatest Olympic documentarian of
Speaker 2: all time, Bud Greenspan. And I'm not an auctioneer, but
Speaker 2: I think it is the reason why Lutslog's silver medal
Speaker 2: sold for nearly half a million dollars two years ago,
Speaker 2: about five times the amount earned for any other silver
Speaker 2: medal at auction. It's arguably the most important story in
Speaker 2: Olympic history. It is proof of the Olympic Dream. It
Speaker 2: made the case that it was good that America went
Speaker 2: to the vilin Games because it made possible this improbable
Speaker 2: friendship that transcended even the Second World war a story
Speaker 2: that was just too good to be true. This entire series,
Speaker 2: we've been telling stories about the way people made sense
Speaker 2: of having the Olympics in Nazi Germany, the distortions, the myths.
Speaker 2: And when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens's friendship with Lutzlong,
Speaker 2: I thought, we got to do an episode on this.
Speaker 2: Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all
Speaker 2: that moral fog. So I wanted to read more of
Speaker 2: what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters.
Speaker 2: I wrote to the Jesse Owens Archive at the University
Speaker 2: of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't
Speaker 2: have any. They suggested I write to the family, but
Speaker 2: they didn't have any either. It seems strange to me
Speaker 2: that no one had kept them. So then I thought,
Speaker 2: maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country.
Speaker 8: My name is Gelindre. I was living in Leipzig, working
Speaker 8: in Leipzig for more than thirty years, and the last
Speaker 8: twenty five years as the director of the Sports Museum
Speaker 8: in Leipzig.
Speaker 2: And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right, that's right.
Speaker 8: Lutslan was born in Leipzig nineteen thirteen and he lived
Speaker 8: there almost till the end.
Speaker 2: Rhor and her colleague, the sport historian Volker Kluge, have
Speaker 2: looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens luteslong story than
Speaker 2: anyone else.
Speaker 8: We got a lot of questions from all over the
Speaker 8: world about the legend.
Speaker 2: Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There
Speaker 2: are a few different versions, but Roor dug through the
Speaker 2: official reports about the games. They're over a thousand pages long.
Speaker 8: There is a very good documentation about the Olympics called
Speaker 8: Official Report of the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and they
Speaker 8: describe it very exactly what happens and where.
Speaker 2: Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary
Speaker 2: evidence is an article Kuga turned up written by Lutzlong himself.
Speaker 2: He was published about a week into the Games, and
Speaker 2: it's called Mine kamfmit Owens, My Struggle with Owens, which
Speaker 2: I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs, but
Speaker 2: homages to Hitler aside. The article was part of the
Speaker 2: surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens's win,
Speaker 2: including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Lutzlog
Speaker 2: lying together in the grass of the Reichspoortfeld smiling. The
Speaker 2: photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the
Speaker 2: competition when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing
Speaker 2: a dark turtle neck sweater and it looks like he's
Speaker 2: cracking a joke. Owens is beaming at him and wearing
Speaker 2: his Team USA crew neck. In the photo, they're so
Speaker 2: close it almost looks like they're touching. They look like
Speaker 2: real friends. So Gerlinda Ror and I turned our attention
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 8: So between the first three jumps and the final three jumps,
Speaker 8: these photographs were doing.
Speaker 2: Oh so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens
Speaker 2: wins the gold Yes, oh wow, so it's even its prior.
Speaker 2: There's a good chance that photo was taken or at
Speaker 2: least commissioned by Lenny Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the
Speaker 2: Third Reich. The photos float freely around the Internet now
Speaker 2: you can find them on Getty Images. But at the
Speaker 2: time they were part of the Nazi propaganda push, meant
Speaker 2: to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed.
Speaker 2: So we know that Lutes Along and Jesse Owens met
Speaker 2: at least for the time it took to take that photo,
Speaker 2: and they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said.
Speaker 2: But here's the strange thing. In his articles, Long mentions
Speaker 2: Jesse Owens's difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three
Speaker 2: jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping
Speaker 2: him with the approach, which is strange because that's the
Speaker 2: most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's
Speaker 2: biggest competitor. Owens is what stands between Long and the gold,
Speaker 2: and yet Long goes out of his way to help
Speaker 2: Owens get to the final You would think in an
Speaker 2: article about the Olympic Spirit, Long would mention that they
Speaker 2: were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in
Speaker 2: Nazi Germany, it would have been a way for an
Speaker 2: arian to take credit for a black man's success. But
Speaker 2: he doesn't mention it. Okay, So maybe all the meaningful
Speaker 2: stuff happened in those Long talks in the Olympic village.
Speaker 8: What about those I didn't think that. It cannot be
Speaker 8: because Lukslong didn't live in the Olympic village. Oh really,
Speaker 8: he didn't live here. I know from his family and
Speaker 8: from photographs and from a diary of his mother that
Speaker 8: after the opening of the Olympic Games he went back
Speaker 8: home from Berlin to Leipzig.
Speaker 2: And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump?
Speaker 2: He wasn't. He would go home at the end of
Speaker 2: each day.
Speaker 8: No, not each day. After his competitions started. He lived
Speaker 8: in Berlin in another hotel.
Speaker 2: All right, So the Long talks seem less likely, though
Speaker 2: there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way. First,
Speaker 2: a few days after the broad jump, a newswire service
Speaker 2: wrote that quote something like a damon and pytheis friendship
Speaker 2: has sprung up between Ludslog and Jesse Owens. Though I
Speaker 2: think that's just a reference to the hug on the
Speaker 2: field that all the reporters would have seen. But then
Speaker 2: there's an athlete who, decades after the Games claimed that
Speaker 2: she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long.
Speaker 2: But Volker Kluga thinks the timing of her story is
Speaker 2: implausible given her events schedule. Also, I can't find any
Speaker 2: record of it in Owens's Olympic diaries. Owens is on
Speaker 2: the record saying quote, I didn't get a chance to
Speaker 2: go out of the Olympic village. In fact, I never
Speaker 2: did leave the village. The only time that I was
Speaker 2: ever out of the village was at the time when
Speaker 2: we went to the Olympic Stadium to compete. I mean,
Speaker 2: they had some intense schedules to keep. Actually, even Hitler
Speaker 2: couldn't keep up with their schedules. The fearor liked to
Speaker 2: sleep late. He famously slipt through a lot of d
Speaker 2: day and probably for the same reason, he wasn't even
Speaker 2: in the stands the morning of the broad drum qualifiers,
Speaker 2: which is why it's not actually possible that he walked
Speaker 2: out on Owens. That leaves us with the letters. So
Speaker 2: then the final piece of the legend is these letters,
Speaker 2: these sort of beautiful letters that Letslong writes to Jesse
Speaker 2: Owens from the front, from the battle fields of the war.
Speaker 2: And I've not been able to find any archival record
Speaker 2: of those letters, have you.
Speaker 8: I asked his middle when she was living still in Hamburg,
Speaker 8: and she said there were letters. We got to our atlas,
Speaker 8: and she never saw a letter from Jesse Owens. No
Speaker 8: one in the family knows about letters from Jesse Owens
Speaker 8: to Lutz.
Speaker 2: Owens at one point cites nineteen thirty nine as the
Speaker 2: date of Lutslang's last letter. He says that in it
Speaker 2: Long writes about his wife and son, but Volkar Kluga
Speaker 2: points out that Long didn't even marry his girlfriend until
Speaker 2: nineteen forty one, and by the way, his son wasn't
Speaker 2: born till then either, And okay, well, then there's that
Speaker 2: other account featuring a letter from Long on the front
Speaker 2: lines of North Africa after he was married and after
Speaker 2: his son was born, except he didn't serve in North Africa.
Speaker 2: He died in Sicily. Also, you couldn't even send letters
Speaker 2: from the Nazi front lines to American citizens. I mean,
Speaker 2: they were fighting a war against each other, so then
Speaker 2: they really wouldn't have been speaking really beyond the competition itself.
Speaker 2: So probably the moment they spoke was when they were
Speaker 2: taking those photos.
Speaker 8: The only time they met each other was during the
Speaker 8: long jump competition in this stadium, the only time, never before,
Speaker 8: and never often.
Speaker 2: I looked through Jesse Owens's diary from the nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: six Games. In the back he keeps a list of addresses,
Speaker 2: presumably of people he wants to write to, and there's
Speaker 2: no address for Lutslang in there. It was starting to
Speaker 2: look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true. But
Speaker 2: then I was left for the new question. If it's
Speaker 2: not true, how did it catch on? We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: What are the ingredients of a good Olympic story?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean I would start with the mathematics of
Speaker 6: the games, which are tremendously appealing from a storyteller's perspective,
Speaker 6: which is that you have whatever I forgot, how many
Speaker 6: sports fifty going on simultaneously with athletes from all over
Speaker 6: the world, So you have an infinite number of stories
Speaker 6: to choose from.
Speaker 2: Like a farm system.
Speaker 6: It's a farm storytelling, so every year a different one
Speaker 6: bubbles up. You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist whins seven golds?
Speaker 6: Now do you come in each a kind of beautiful
Speaker 6: waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful natural experiment
Speaker 6: in myth making. It just has it. It has a
Speaker 6: an almost strategic advantage with the other big sports spectacles
Speaker 6: World Cup, super Bowl, those are monocultures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's totally true, and like in the
Speaker 2: myth making thing, you have this ancient aura to it.
Speaker 6: Yes. The other thing is it's this playground for uh,
Speaker 6: for healthy prejudice. So the the flying fin, the kind
Speaker 6: of mysterious Pavunermi who comes from like the woods of
Speaker 6: and like you know, a baby Beequila running barefoot through
Speaker 6: the streets of Rome and to in the marathon in
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty. Of course he's barefit. Right, it's Ethiopia right
Speaker 6: on and on your your you, you take on the
Speaker 6: characteristics of your of your country, and that's like, it's
Speaker 6: this kind of really fun exercise in multicultural ethnocentrism.
Speaker 2: It's like, what's what's in the water over there? Yes,
Speaker 2: that's right. Did you ever cross paths with Bud Greenspan? No,
Speaker 2: but green Span the most legendary Olympic storyteller of all time.
Speaker 9: There are those who believe in the core values of
Speaker 9: the Olympics, no one more so than filmmaker Bud green Span.
Speaker 2: At some point in this project, I got a little
Speaker 2: distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan.
Speaker 2: He looked like the Buddha, if the Buddha had been
Speaker 2: born far sighted on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Speaker 2: He was bald and typically wore his black, thick framed
Speaker 2: glasses on top of his head like his brain was stargazing.
Speaker 6: Do you ever look at that unappealing negative side of
Speaker 6: the Olympics in your films.
Speaker 9: I've been asked that many times, Jane.
Speaker 5: I think I'd rather spend one hundred percent of my
Speaker 5: time and a ninety percent that's good, and a lot
Speaker 5: of my colleagues who spent one hundred percent of the
Speaker 5: time in the ten percent that's not so good.
Speaker 2: Here, I should just acknowledge that he's talking about us
Speaker 2: in our nine part series on Hitler's Olympics, which that
Speaker 2: is fair. I defer to him because Bud Greenspan basically
Speaker 2: invented modern uplifting Olympic storytelling. When Bob he cost us
Speaker 2: the voice of the Olympics on NBC first got the
Speaker 2: big job, you watched like sixteen hours of Bud Greenspan
Speaker 2: documentaries just to get the feeling right.
Speaker 9: Though criticized at times for looking at the games like
Speaker 9: a young boy through rose colored glasses, he has been
Speaker 9: making films on the Olympics for over fifty years.
Speaker 2: That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to
Speaker 2: Bud Greenspan, which is why there was all those angelic
Speaker 2: voices in the background. Green Span started reporting on the
Speaker 2: Olympics in the late nineteen forties. He was at every
Speaker 2: single Olympic Games from nineteen eighty four until he died
Speaker 2: in twenty ten. He won eight Emmys a Lifetime Achievement
Speaker 2: Award from the Director's Guild. Everyone knew Bud Greenspan, and
Speaker 2: even if you don't know his name, you know his style.
Speaker 10: Here's one story.
Speaker 2: Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.
Speaker 10: Okay, we're at the metropol and Opera, which he adored,
Speaker 10: and intermission and having a glassish campaign and managing editor
Speaker 10: of Time magazine, you know, comes up to us, and
Speaker 10: it does Bud, and he goes, what are you doing here?
Speaker 10: As if you know, oh, you should be at Yankee
Speaker 10: Stadium or something.
Speaker 2: Oh, there is something so operatic about Olympic stories. So
Speaker 2: well yeah, so why am I telling you about Bud
Speaker 2: Greenspan Because his love for sport and his love for
Speaker 2: operatic storytelling came together in the holy grail of all
Speaker 2: Olympic stories, the nineteen thirty six Games and Jesse Owens.
Speaker 10: They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into
Speaker 10: New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment, they'd certainly
Speaker 10: see each other. I remember Bud telling these stories about
Speaker 10: how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe
Speaker 10: it was like a tennis or racket club in New
Speaker 10: York City and they were still segregated, but he talked
Speaker 10: his way into the dining room, and I remember the
Speaker 10: matre g called but just as long as Jesse sits
Speaker 10: with his back to the door, the front door.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties, during the Civil Rights movement, Greenspan
Speaker 2: got the idea for a film that fit the era.
Speaker 2: He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot
Speaker 2: an hour long TV documentary to narrate it too. A
Speaker 2: lot of the film is made up of archival footage
Speaker 2: that Lenny reefinstall shot of the games, but it's framed
Speaker 2: with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a
Speaker 2: suit walking around the reich sport Feld. And for one
Speaker 2: of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutsloan's Sun
Speaker 2: Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track and that's
Speaker 2: when this happened.
Speaker 5: Kyle, you probably don't know it, but your father was
Speaker 5: greatly responsible for my winning the broad Jump in nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty six.
Speaker 7: Well, Jesse has been a very important part in my life,
Speaker 7: and I'm very often seen pictures from you and the
Speaker 7: photographs of my father. Please tell me about this competition
Speaker 7: here in the stadium, because I have my father only
Speaker 7: seen for three times. I was found nineteen forty one
Speaker 7: and my father has died to ninety forty three.
Speaker 5: Well, it all happened on the other side of the
Speaker 5: field here, but we had the premonaries for the running
Speaker 5: broad jump, and on the first two gymps, I followed
Speaker 5: on one and didn't go far enough on the other.
Speaker 5: And your father came to my assistance and he helped
Speaker 5: me measure a footback of the takeoff board, and he
Speaker 5: helped the tape until I measured a foot back as
Speaker 5: far as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came
Speaker 5: down and I hit between these two marks, and therefore
Speaker 5: I qualified, and that led to the victory in the
Speaker 5: running broad jump.
Speaker 2: The film was a huge hit, and it was written,
Speaker 2: directed and produced by Bud Greenspan, So I figured case closed.
Speaker 2: Greenspan took that hug on the field and he just
Speaker 2: made up the rest of the myth about LuSE loan.
Speaker 2: But Nancy Befer said, not so fast. Bud Greenspan believed
Speaker 2: that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens.
Speaker 10: But going back, why didn't he make it up? I
Speaker 10: don't know. I can't really speculate on that particular thing.
Speaker 10: But obviously you need a storyteller and then a recipient.
Speaker 10: So people must have wanted to hear that story, you know,
Speaker 10: and the note I mean, so I don't know, and
Speaker 10: but I mean the most important thing was until he died,
Speaker 10: didn't know that Jesse made up that story.
Speaker 2: The story came from Jesse Owens, and he first told
Speaker 2: it long before he made that film in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Ki Long at first heard it from Jesse Owens too,
Speaker 2: a decade earlier.
Speaker 8: Oh, when I first talked to ky Long, he said,
Speaker 8: for him, it was a completely unexpected situation.
Speaker 2: Again, sport historian Gerlinda Rhorr.
Speaker 8: He was ten years at the time when Jesse Owens
Speaker 8: came to Germany, and suddenly ky Long was in a
Speaker 8: lot of journalists and photographs, and he didn't know what
Speaker 8: happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only
Speaker 8: two and a half year old when Lutzlan had to
Speaker 8: leave the family for the war, and so it was
Speaker 8: a completely new situation for this young boy. Of course
Speaker 8: he believed it because he didn't know what really happened.
Speaker 8: He couldn't ask his father.
Speaker 2: Never Griwinda told me that as Kai Long grew older
Speaker 2: and reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father,
Speaker 2: Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had
Speaker 2: begun to involve Kai too. In a TV interview, Owen
Speaker 2: said that Kai had his letters' salutes in his scrap
Speaker 2: book fifty one.
Speaker 5: I had the privilege of meeting his son and after
Speaker 5: showing the.
Speaker 9: Pictures and letters that he had the scrap book that I.
Speaker 1: Had written as father.
Speaker 3: Well as a result of that, today.
Speaker 2: I know there is no evidence that that's true. Kai
Speaker 2: published a book in twenty fifteen about his father, full
Speaker 2: of family photos and documents. It's in German and impossible
Speaker 2: to find, but the publisher sent me a copy and
Speaker 2: there are just no letters from Omens to Long in it. Surely,
Speaker 2: if Kai had those letters in that scrap book, he'd
Speaker 2: have included them in this book.
Speaker 8: And so he started to think about what's the truth
Speaker 8: and what really happened. When he was an adult and
Speaker 8: he was asked all the time from journalists, and when
Speaker 8: he told them, oh, maybe it couldn't be or their
Speaker 8: aren't letters to me, he said, I can tell what
Speaker 8: I want. They want to hear the legends. And so
Speaker 8: he said once to me, Oh, missus, Raw, isn't it
Speaker 8: nice for people to live with this story? Do you
Speaker 8: want to destroy this story?
Speaker 2: Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story. And let
Speaker 2: me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true.
Speaker 2: Lutslang and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good
Speaker 2: to each other on the field. But this whole series
Speaker 2: we're doing is about what happens when we failed to
Speaker 2: see the truth of what is right before our eyes.
Speaker 2: And this legend of the Owens long friendship has started
Speaker 2: to seem to me like one of the biggest examples
Speaker 2: of failing to see what's right before you. First, because
Speaker 2: in so many ways it doesn't add up. And second,
Speaker 2: because it doesn't just involve one or two daffy members
Speaker 2: of the IOC, but so many of us for a
Speaker 2: long time now. But why would Jesse Owens make this up?
Speaker 2: The truth at last? Next Week Revisionist History is produced
Speaker 2: by me Ben Mattahaffrey, dalli Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence.
Speaker 2: Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking on this episode
Speaker 2: by J. L. Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Garratt, mastering
Speaker 2: by Sarah Briguer and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Speaker 2: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen
Speaker 2: Schakerji rufus Wright, who read the excerpts of Jesse Owens
Speaker 2: autobiography and J. D.
Speaker 1: Land.
Speaker 2: I'm then out of Haffery.