A few weeks before the Paris Olympic Games, the Guadeloupean writer and philosopher Alain Foix writes the fantastic story of the life of Jesse Owens, who undermined the Nazi theory of the superiority of the Aryan race.
The story of Jesse Owens is a bit like the story, in this first part of the twentieth century, of the upheaval of the world. In August 1936, the African-American athlete not only won four gold medals (100m, 200m, long jump and 4X100m) during the Berlin Games. With his toes on his toes, he above all undermines the theory of the superiority of the Aryan race, the triumph of which the Führer awaited in the Olympiastadion, the Olympic stadium. “where the new man was to hatch”.
If Jesse Owens has a happy break with this Olympics, he will be disillusioned back home in the United States where racism and segregation are rampant. Even Harlem received him coldly: Jesse Owens appeared alongside heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, a notorious racist, who had refused to fight against black people. And his community remembers it.
By telling us the life of the fastest athlete of the interwar period, the author Alain Foix above all restores to us an era with a charged ideological context. A Nazi Germany and an America where blacks have not yet won the civil rights struggle. Which, of course, does not prevent the miracle of simple human encounters. Thus, in Berlin, in the long jump final, while the American athlete had already missed his first two attempts to qualify, it was the German Luz Long, Hitler’s favorite, who gave him the right advice. so that he qualifies and wins the competition. The two athletes would later become friends.
But what about the behavior of staff of the American team. At the very last moment, the coaches change the composition of the 4X100m relay. They removed the two Jewish torchbearers and replaced them with Jesse Owens and another sprinter. The athletes have understood that this is a low maneuver to please Nazi ideology.
Long before the raised fist of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico ’68 Games, and then the attack on the Israeli team at the Munich ’72 Games, this gripping biography of the hero of the 1936 Berlin Games (Jesse Owens will almost end up an ambassador) timely reminds us that the sporting gesture is often a political gesture.
Jesse Owens (folio biographies), by Alain Foix.
