Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens was an American Hall of Fame former Olympic sprinter and long-jumper whose 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics performance — across August 3–9, 1936 — produced his four Olympic gold medals (100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4x100m relay) — shaping 20th-century international sports history through his African-American athletic excellence in the 1936 Berlin Olympics held under the Nazi-German Adolf Hitler regime. He was born James Cleveland Owens on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, into an African-American sharecropping family. His father Henry Cleveland Owens was an Alabama tenant farmer and his mother Mary Emma Fitzgerald was a homemaker. The 1922 Owens family Great Migration relocation to Cleveland, Ohio (when Jesse was nine) launched his early-career path. He acquired the nickname "Jesse" from a Cleveland elementary-school teacher who misheard his Alabama accent's pronunciation of his initials "J.C." as "Jesse."

His 1933 high-school career at Cleveland's East Technical High School produced three world-record-tying performances at the 1933 National Interscholastic Track and Field Championships in Chicago. His 1933 enrollment at the Ohio State University under coach Larry Snyder launched his college-track public profile.

His May 25, 1935 Big Ten Conference Championships at the University of Michigan's Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan — across which he set three world records and tied a fourth across a 45-minute period (long jump 26 feet 8 1/4 inches, 220-yard sprint 20.3 seconds, 220-yard low hurdles 22.6 seconds, and tied the 100-yard dash record at 9.4 seconds) — has been continuously identified by track-and-field historians as one of the foundational athletic performances of 20th-century international track-and-field.

His August 3–9, 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics four-gold-medal performance — across his 100-meter (10.3 seconds, world-record-tying), long-jump (8.06 meters, Olympic record), 200-meter (20.7 seconds, world record), and 4x100m relay (39.8 seconds, world record) victories — shaped 20th-century international track-and-field public profile. The Berlin Olympic broad-jump victory produced his Olympic friendship with German broad-jumper Luz Long (who provided Owens with technical advice during the 1936 broad-jump qualifying round, and was subsequently killed in a 1943 World War II battle in Italy). He died on March 31, 1980, at age 66, in Tucson, Arizona, of lung cancer.

His name Jesse derives from the Hebrew Yishai meaning "gift" — the Old Testament name of the father of King David. Jesse was the most-popular American unisex name through the late 19th century.