Boundaries crossed: Making a case for the sporting spirit

A HIGHER PLANE

- Kunal Pradhan

It's a story that's been told a million times as an embodiment of the Sporting Spirit. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, German Luz Long, in full view of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, advised his great American rival Jesse Owens to take off a few centimetres short of the launching pad in the long jump final.

Luz Long was the embodiment of the so-called Aryan race whose fallacious superiority Hitler and his Third Reich sought to celebrate. Jesse Owens was a Black man born in a tenant farm in Alabama whose four gold medals (including the long jump; Luz Long had to settle for silver) punctured that theory on the world's biggest sporting stage.

"You can melt down all the gold medals and cups I have, and they wouldn't be a plating on the 24-carat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment," Owens said later.

Long, who died in 1943 while serving for the Wehrmacht in Sicily in World War 2, wrote this in his final letter to Owens: "...Someday find my [son] Karl, and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we were not separated by war. I am saying - tell him how things can be between men on this earth."