James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens (September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980) was an American track and field athlete and four-time Olympic gold medalist. Owens specialized in the sprints and the long jump and was recognized in his lifetime as "perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history". His achievement of setting three world records and tying another in less than an hour at the 1935 Big Ten track meet has been called "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport" and has never been equaled. At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, Owens won international fame with four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4x100 meter relay. He was the most successful athlete at the games and as such has been credited with "single-handedly crush[ing] Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy." The Jesse Owens Award, USA Track and Field's highest accolade for the year's best track and field athlete, is named after him, and he was ranked by ESPN as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the twentieth century and the highest-ranked in his sport. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it.
If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard.
It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.
Life doesn't give you all the practice races you need.
One chance is all you need.
The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself- the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.
The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
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(September 12 is also the birthday of H.L. Mencken, Stanislaw Lem, and Louis C.K..)
Categories: Jesse Owens, Quotes of the day
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