On this day 74 years ago, James Cleland Owens was “in the zone”. Two weeks previously, he had fallen on his tailbone, and when he awoke on the morning of 25 May he could not bend over without pain. However, by the afternoon the pain had miraculously disappeared, as he lined up to represent Ohio State University at the Big Ten Championships. At 3.15pm he equalled the world record of 9.4 seconds in the 100-yard dash.
Some ten minutes later, at 3.25pm, he jumped 26 feet 8 1/4 inches in the long jump to set a new world record which would last for 25 years. Nine minutes after that, at 3.34pm, he won the 220-yard dash in a world record time of 20.3 seconds, and then at 4.00pm he won the 220-yard low hurdles in the world record time of 22.6 seconds. In the space of just 45 minutes he had set three new world records and equalled another, one of the most remarkable sporting achievements of all time.
In August the following year, Jesse Owens represented the United States of America at the Berlin Olympics. Germany was in the grip of Nazism, which would lead up to the second world war. On 3rd August, Owens won the 100 metres; on 4th August he won the long jump, on 5th August he won the 200 metres, and on 9th August he was a member of the winning 4 x 100 metre relay. Owens’s success was a great embarrassment to Adolf Hitler’s claims of Aryan supremacy.