When Jessie Owens beat a horse — by a nose
WHEN Jesse Owens won four gold medals in track and field at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, with swastikas fluttering all around, he crushed Adolf Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.
On his return to New York, he was given a ticker-tape parade but because of the racial segregation which still then existed he could not ride in the front of the buses.
Despite his golds in the 100m, 200m, long jump and 4x100m relay, there were no lucrative advertising endorsements for athletes in those days either.
So it was that he had to make money was by running against horses in exhibition races.
‘People said it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do?’ said Owens, who eventually achieved financial security in the Fifties after becoming a public speaker for corporations, and opening a public-relations firm. ‘I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.’
Owens regularly won against horses, thanks to employing a tactic of racing highly- strung thoroughbreds who tended to be frightened by the starter’s pistol, allowing him to sprint ahead.
He would also start 40 yards ahead of his equine competitors before sprinting for 100 yards — but even then would often only win by a nose.
Over longer distances, however, Owens, despite his then worldrecord- equalling 10.3 seconds in the 100 m in the Olympic final, would not have stood a chance against a horse’s far superior speed and stamina.
Horses gallop on average at around 25 to 30 mph. The highest race speed recorded by a horse over two furlongs (or a quarter of a mile) is 43.97 mph, achieved by Winning Brew, a two-year-old, at Penn National Race Course, Grantville, Pennsylvania in 2008. The record for the longer distance of 1½ miles is 37.82 mph, by threeyear-old Hawkster at Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, California, in 1989.
Even Usain Bolt, the current world’s fastest man, would trail them.
His 2009 record-breaking 100 m dash in 9.58 seconds saw him reach an estimated top speed of only 27.45 mph.
RESULT: Man won (albeit with a head start).