Jesse Owens

James Cleveland Owens was the seventh child of an Alabama sharecropper. He picked cotton as a small boy and became "Jesse" when a teacher in Ohio misheard his initials, J.C. He was a sickly child with chronic bronchitis, and a school coach let him train before classes because he worked after them.

At a college athletics meeting in Michigan in May 1935 he set three world records and equalled a fourth in the space of 45 minutes, while competing with a back injury from a fall down the stairs a few days earlier. It is still regarded as the greatest single afternoon in the history of the sport.

The next year the Olympic Games were held in Berlin, and the Nazi government intended them as a showcase for its ideas about race. Owens won the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the long jump and the sprint relay, four gold medals, a record that stood for 48 years. In the long jump, the German competitor Luz Long publicly befriended him, and the German crowd cheered him.

He came home to a country where he still could not sit at the front of the bus. No president invited him to the White House. He was banned from amateur athletics for declining a promotional tour, and for years earned money racing against horses. Only late in life did recognition come: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, and the Congressional Gold Medal awarded after his death.