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