J esse Owens arrived in Lincoln, Neb., on a roll. It was July 4, 1935, six weeks after the Ohio State sophomore had burst onto the scene at the Big Te

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2021-07-02 20:00:09

J esse Owens arrived in Lincoln, Neb., on a roll. It was July 4, 1935, six weeks after the Ohio State sophomore had burst onto the scene at the Big Ten championships, where he set three world records and tied another in less than an hour. The 1936 Olympics were 13 months away, but Owens’s stunning performance in Ann Arbor, etched into sports history as “the Day of Days,” made his success in Berlin a foregone conclusion.

It was hot in Lincoln. One hundred degrees, according to some reports. Others said 102. A rare photo shows the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium in an unplanned white-out: 15,000 white faces and white shirts glowing under the midday sun, everyone braving the heat to watch America’s new marvel dominate the AAU championships.

The photo shows only four black faces amid the throng. One belonged to a short man peering from behind a starched shoulder about four rows back, the others to three of the six men racing in the 100-meter final. Arthur Daley, who covered track for The New York Times and would sail to Berlin the following summer as the first Times sportswriter to receive a foreign assignment, called the sprinters who took their marks that day the greatest field ever assembled.

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