The Daily History Chronicle

Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics on August 9, a triumph that demolished Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy in front of the world. But the day before that race, American coaches quietly pulled the only two Jewish sprinters on the U.S. team from the lineup, and no one ever gave them a straight answer why. This episode holds both truths at once: a hero's defiance of Nazi ideology, and a quieter act of exclusion inside his own team that history rarely tells alongside it.