A Note From Bob

Sunday morning. On this date in 1936, on the last day of track and field at the Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens ran the opening leg of the 4x100 meter relay and collected his fourth gold medal in seven days. He was twenty-two years old, the son of an Alabama sharecropper and the grandson of people who had been enslaved, and he had just won the 100, the 200, the long jump, and the relay in a stadium built to prove a theory about human beings that he spent a week taking apart in front of a hundred thousand of them.

Today's featured quiz is Owens himself, the whole arc: Oakville, Alabama; the Cleveland junior high coach who trained him before school because the boy worked after it; the forty-five minutes in Ann Arbor in 1935 when he broke three world records and tied a fourth; Berlin; and the long, complicated decades that followed. Fifteen questions. Below it sits a second quiz on the history of the Olympic Games, also fifteen, running from Olympia to the modern era.

Ninety years is a long time. Some races age better than others. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

Fifteen questions on the fastest man of his generation and one of the most consequential athletes this country ever produced. Oakville and Cleveland, the Ohio State years and the Big Ten meet that made his name, four gold medals in seven days in Berlin, and the decades afterward when the nation that cheered him took its time deciding what it owed him. He was celebrated everywhere and welcome in fewer places than you would think. See how much you remember.

The Answer

There was an Olympic flame burning in Amsterdam in 1928, but nobody carried it anywhere. The relay from Olympia to the host stadium was designed for Berlin by Carl Diem, secretary general of the German organizing committee, and run for the first time in the summer of 1936. A flame was kindled in the ruins at Olympia with a mirror and the Greek sun, then handed between more than three thousand runners across seven countries and into the Olympiastadion. The whole ceremony was built to tie the new Germany to the ancient world, and it worked so well that ninety years later most of us assume the Greeks thought of it. They did not. Every part of the torch relay you recognize was invented for the same Games where Jesse Owens won four gold medals.

On This Day

On this day in 1936, the United States won the 4x100 meter relay in Berlin in 39.8 seconds, a world record that stood for twenty years. Jesse Owens ran the first leg and Ralph Metcalfe the second. Neither man was supposed to be in the race. On the morning of the final, American coaches pulled Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, the only two Jewish athletes on the United States track team, and put Owens and Metcalfe in their place. The stated reason was to field the fastest possible team. Glickman believed for the rest of his life that it was done to spare the German hosts one more embarrassment, and he said so plainly in the years after he became one of the most recognized voices in American sports broadcasting. Ninety years on, the Games are still where the world argues with itself in public. Fifteen questions on how they got that way, below.