There’s only so much sporting desperation a man can take before he needs to hide away in a dark place for a couple of hours, mainlining nostalgia and slowing coming up on the sweet high that is the story of Jesse Owens. Even after 80 years it hits all the right nerves and shoots through all fear.
Power, greed, corruption, bribery, political unrest, economic uncertainty, silly propaganda and that constantly nagging feeling that some countries just don’t belong in the Olympics: it’s all there, every bit as disturbingly relevant then as it is now, only on top of that all the overtly cruel racism that surrounded his participation in Berlin in 1936. And still Owens races high above it all.
Which is why the latest presentation of the Owens story is suitably entitled Race – the first full-length feature film treatment of his four gold medal haul at those 1936 Olympics, and how he went about it. It’s actually the story of two races, told concurrently: the obstacles that race presented in his rise from impoverishment to sporting greatness, and his own race to become the fastest man on earth in time for Berlin.
Clocking in at two hours and 14 minutes, Race is more a marathon than a sprint, although that doesn’t mean the action doesn’t delicately propel forward at considerable speed, a bit like that low running action of Owens. Those of us treated to an advance screening at the Irish Film Institute last Thursday had the rest of the day to absorb it all, which is a good thing, because this is not some quick fix, a little nibble of history.
Crosshead
Naturally, there is no talk or even mention of drugs, which adds further context, forcing Race to ask a more profound question: would our current sporting desperation allow for an athlete like Jesse Owens anymore? Would he even find his place in history in 2016?
“You’re a natural, and I don’t trust naturals,” says his coach, Larry Snyder, not long after Owens arrives at Ohio State University, in 1933, aged 19. “What I want to know is can you win?”
Snyder soon gets his answer, as Owens – played with perfect pace and rhythm by Canadian actor Stephan James – combined his natural talent and will to win with devastating effect. In the spring of 1935, his second year at Ohio, and in a span of 45 minutes, Owens set three world records and tied a fourth, including an 8.13metre long jump record that lasted 25 years.
With that Owens is immediately established as the gold medal favourite for Berlin, although to get there he faces some dark resistance – including from the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which insists he boycott Berlin as a symbol of protest against the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s even more despicable views on the human race and Aryan supremacy.
There is no guarantee the Americans will be in Berlin anyway, until calls for an all-out boycott are eventually suppressed by Avery Brundage, the US Olympic Committee chairman, and no prizes for guessing why. Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl make bold appearances and to a lesser extent Hitler himself, and set inside the original and still spectacular Olympiastadion, it’s clear Owens isn’t just under sporting pressure, but something far greater.
That it all unfolds so triumphantly is giving nothing away – although that doesn’t mean Race finishes on a lasting high. Owens is snubbed not only by Hitler but later his own president, when invitations to the White House were common for Olympic champions, and later still finds himself stupidly banned from athletics, ending up as a janitor back at Ohio State. He died in 1980, aged 66, from lung cancer, having spent the last 35 years of his life smoking a packet of cigarettes a day.
My own sweet high didn’t last long either when, within an hour of walking out of Race, I found myself sitting in front of former Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, in Trinity College, as he told a small audience that if he was back at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, that yes, he’d take drugs all over again, to win the 100 metres – even if it meant disqualification, and whatever else came with it. “I’m still alive, aren’t I?” said Johnson, with zero remorse and even less responsibility.
Tested positive
He then told us he shouldn’t have even been in Seoul, as he’d tested positive for drugs two years before, only for that to be somehow covered up.
That sweet high from Race now in full-on comedown, I called into my dad on the way home, knowing he’d met Owens once. It wasn’t a chance encounter: it was 1959, at the old Drake relays, and his coach at Idaho State University, Dubby Holt, was a former rival of Owens on the track, who had actually pushed him to one of those world records in the spring of 1935.
Like many athletes who met Owens there was a sort of kinship, passed on however briefly to my dad and still lasting to this day: “He was a spectacular man, smart, articulate, and pure class,” he told me. “One of the most impressive men I’ve ever met. We’ll never see his like again, and that’s for sure.” Race goes on selected release in Ireland next Friday.
