\n<\/p>\n
Hitler was present at Berlin\u2019s Olympic Stadium as Owens and Long contested one of the Games’ greatest long jump finals.<\/p>\n
After a see-sawing battle, Long matched Owens’ leading distance of 7.87m with his penultimate attempt, to the delight of the home fans.<\/p>\n
But Owens dug out his best when he needed it most, responding with 7.94m, to move clear of Long once again.<\/p>\n
Long produced a foul on his final attempt, but his performance was good enough for silver and a first Olympic long jump medal for Germany.<\/p>\n
Owens, with his title already assured, created further history with a final leap of 8.06m – setting an Olympic record that would stand for 24 years.<\/p>\n
Long, putting aside his own disappointment, instinctively leapt into the sandpit to congratulate him. <\/p>\n
Locked in that moment, alone in their embrace as an appreciative capacity crowd of more than 100,000 people watched on, Owens confided to his rival: “You forced me to give my best.”<\/p>\n
Between them, Owens and Long had surpassed the previous Olympic record five times.<\/p>\n
“It’s almost like a fairytale – to jump so long in this weather,” said Long in an interview with his hometown newspaper, Neue Leipziger Zeitung.<\/p>\n
“I can’t help it. I run to him. I’m the first to congratulate him, to hug him.”<\/p>\n
Long’s impulsive reaction caught the attention of the German authorities.<\/p>\n
Soon after the Olympic Games, his mother, Johanna, made a note in her diary about a warning from Rudolf Hess, then deputy Fuhrer of the Nazi Party.<\/p>\n
Long, she wrote, had “received an order from the highest authority” that he should never again embrace a black person.<\/p>\n
He had been noted as “not racially conscious” by the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n
The embrace clearly angered the Nazis, who often used powerful imagery to further its own ideology and feared how Owens and Long’s friendship might undermine its propaganda. <\/p>\n
In that respect, they were right.<\/p>\n
Almost 90 years later, Owens and Long’s friendship is one of the most enduring Olympic stories.<\/p>\n
“The gesture of kindness and fairness touched the hearts of many people,” says Kellner-Long.<\/p>\n
“Together, Luz and Jesse enjoyed a special friendship that day, demonstrating to the world that in sports and in life, friendship and respect are the most important things, regardless of background or skin colour.”<\/p>\n
Stuart Rankin, Owens’ only grandson, is equally struck by its significance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI often say that of all my grandfather’s accomplishments at the 1936 Olympics, the unlikely friendship that he struck with Luz Long is the thing of which I am most proud and most impressed by,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
“For them to have forged that friendship, under those conditions, in those circumstances, in that stadium, in the face of Hitler, was just phenomenal.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n