Olympic Games (Cont'd)

At the first modern revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, a little crew of casually assembled athletes foundered through a helter-skelter track meet at Athens. In the four decades since, the modern Olympic Games have become what their founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, hoped that they might one day be and what the ancient Olympic Games actually were: World's No. i sports event.

Last week in Berlin, daily crowds of 110,000 packed the gigantic new Olympic Stadium. Below them cavorted the finest athletes in the world. In the press stand sat 1,500 reporters, hundreds more than customarily report League of Nations doings at Geneva. Whether or not the Olympic Games actually serve their purpose of promoting international understanding remains dubious. That they afford harmless amusement to participants & spectators, a valuable chance for ballyhoo to the nation which holds them, no one is better aware than Realmleader Adolf Hitler, who attended every session except one last week, inspired his loyal Nazi followers to win the unheard of total of five track & field events.

Officially, no country wins the Olympic Games. Patterned on their Greek models, each event is an individual contest of which the winner is an individual or a specialized team. Any effort to rate Olympic performances in national units raises questions of procedure such as whether the sport of Running, backbone of the Olympics, with 14 major subdivisions, should be given the same importance as the sport of Canoeing.

Actually, the U. S. always wins the Olympic Games because its entrants are not only ablest, but most numerous. To arrive at some sort of basis for comparison, sports writers long ago invented a system for tabulating all events on the basis of ten points for first place, five for second, four for third and so on down to one for sixth. Graded by this system, the first six countries in men's track & field events, after eight days of competition, were last week as follows: U. S. 203 points Finland 80 1/2 points Germany 69 3/4 points Japan 51 13/22 points Great Britain 43 1/11 points Canada 22 1/11 points By last week, the track & field events were finished. No. 1 hero of the world's No. 1 sports event was a Cleveland Negro named Jesse Owens. No. 1 heroine, with the possible exception of Mrs. Eleanor Holm Jarrett, because she was not allowed to compete, was a Fulton, Mo., filly named Helen Stephens. The Olympic Games had produced eight deaths, innumerable misunderstandings, enough revenue to repay all running expenses and part of what it would otherwise have cost Germany for barracks for 4,000 soldiers, the best sports arena in the world. Events:

Hero Owens. In 1924 Finn Paavo Nurmi won three Olympic races. Last week at Berlin, Cleveland's coffee-colored Jesse Owens bettered this achievement. On the first day of competition he broke the world's record for 100 metres in a trial heat (10.2 sec.). On the second day, he won the final in world-record time (10.3). On the third, he won the broad jump with a new Olympic record (26 ft., 5 21/64 in.). On the fourth, he won the 200-metre dash with a new world's record (20.7 sec.) for a track with a turn. Finally, selected for the U. S. 400-metre relay team, he helped it equal the world's record in a trial heat, break it winning the final in 39.8 sec.

In 1933 Owens won both sprints and the broad jump in record time in the U. S. interscholastic championships. In 1935, as an Ohio State sophomore, he broke three world's records and equalled a fourth in a single afternoon. Last week, when his deeds made it apparent that he could continue this routine at least until Olympic competition becomes extraterrestrial, Negro Owens became the most celebrated single contestant the Olympic Games have had since famed U. S. Indian Jim Thorpe, who was disqualified for professionalism after winning the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912.

At the Owens cabana in the Olympic Village, awed rivals crowded to feel the Owens muscles, get the Owens autograph. In Cleveland Governor Martin L. Davey decreed a Jesse Owens Day. Over the radio, Mrs. Henry Cleveland Owens described her son: "Jesse was always a face boy. . . . When a problem came up, he always faced it." Said Face Boy Owens, before his fourth trip to the Victory Stand to have a laurel wreath stuck on his kinky head, be awarded a minute potted oak tree and the Olympic first prize of a diploma and a silver-gilt medal: "That's a grand feeling standing up there. ... I never felt like that before. . . ."

U. S. Negroes. Before the Games started, U. S. track & field entrants appeared to have a good chance in eleven of the 23 men's events, but no one actually expected them to win that many. Last week, when the track & field events ended, the U. S. had actually won twelve firsts, bettering the record of eleven made by their team in 1932. The individual winners, other than Owens: Archie Williams (400-metre run); John Woodruff (800-metre run); Forrest Towns (100-metre hurdles); Glenn Hardin (400-metre hurdles) ; Kenneth Carpenter (discus throw) ; Cornelius Johnson (high jump); Earle Meadows (pole vault); Glenn Morris (decathlon). Owens, Williams, Woodruff and Johnson are Negroes. So are Ralph Metcalfe, Mack Robinson and David Albritton, who finished second in the 100-metre, 200-metre and high jump, respectively.

Original German theory to explain Negro sport supremacy, prematurely evolved before the Schmeling-Louis prizefight, was that Negroes are not really people. Last week, Realmleader Adolf Hitler conspicuously neglected to invite Negro winners up to shake hands with him in his box, and Nazi newspapers invented an even more facile excuse for Germany's feeble showing of only three winners--Hans Woellke (shot put), Gerhard Stoeck (javelin throw), Karl Hein (hammer throw)--in the men's track & field events by describing the Negroes who between them won half the U. S. total as "a black auxiliary force." Said Der Angriff, run by Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels: "Actually, the Yankees, heretofore invincible, have been the great disappointment of the games. . . . Without these members of the black race--these auxiliary helpers--a German would have won the broad jump. . . . The fighting power of European athletes, especially the Germans, has increased beyond all comparison. . . ."

"Greatest Race." Finns regularly win Olympic races at 3,000 metres or more. Last week three solemn Finns named Vol-mari Iso-Hollo, Gunnar Hoeckert and IImari Salminen won their specialties, the 3,000-metre steeplechase, the 5,000 and the 10,000-metre runs. With U. S. victories in the sprints and intermediate runs, outside competition centred, as usual, on the 1,500-metre race. Among 39 entrants, eight were outstanding. New Zealand had Jack Lovelock, onetime world-record miler. England had Stanley Wooderson, who had beaten Lovelock three consecutive times this year. Italy had Luigi Beccali, winner at Los Angeles in 1932. The U. S. had Gene Venzke, Archie San Romani and Glenn Cunningham, all three good enough to beat Bill Bonthron, who held the world's record for 1,500 metres, in the Olympic tryouts last month. Sweden had dependable Eric Ny and Canada had Negro Phil Edwards.

Every installment of the Olympic games produces at least one historic race. With considerable justice, track experts called last week's 1,500-metre final the greatest ever run. The field lined up without Wooderson, who had been put out in a preliminary heat. Hitler reached his box just before the gun sounded for the start. While the murmur of the crowd gathered into a huge expectant roar, the field of twelve runners finished the first three laps with Ny leading, Cunningham second, Lovelock third. Then, still a good 300 metres from the finish, Lovelock began his amazing sprint. It carried him, a tiny light-footed figure in loose, black shirt and shorts, past the leaders and down the stretch in such a burst of speed that Cunningham, famed for his own finishing kick, was actually losing ground until Lovelock turned to glance casually at the field strung out behind him and then coasted through the tape, first by six full yards.

Lovelock's time was 3:47.8, a new world's record by a round second. The next four finishers--Cunningham, Beccali, San Romani, Edwards--broke the Olympic record of 3:51.2. In his dressing room, Lovelock coolly admitted he had known that incorrect placing of the starting line had cheated him of three yards, had not considered it worth calling to the attention of officials. Asked why he had looked back and slowed down at the finish, he said: "I didn't hear anyone so I thought I had better have a peek. . .. They thought I could sprint only about the last 70 metres and weren't prepared when I started my run. I think I could have sustained it for another 100 metres if necessary. ... I was a bit wound up, wasn't I? ..."

Marathon. Japan's first big moment in the track & field events came when, Naoto Tajima won a Japanese specialty, which many athletes from other countries fail to take seriously, the hop, step & jump. Japan's second and last big moment came when a tiny Tokyo student named Kitei Son trotted calmly into the Olympic Stadium at the end of an event which many other entrants took so seriously that they could not even finish, the 26-mile marathon. Not in the least upset by his exertion, 120-lb. Marathoner Son scampered briskly down the track, broke the tape for a new record of 2 hr., 20 min., 19.2 sec. removed his shoes, trotted off to his dressing room. There, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by Japanese journalists who wept with joy at the climax to 24 years of Japanese marathon preparation, Kitei Son amiably explained how it had happened. "Much credit for my victory must go to Mr. Harper of England. From the time we started he kept telling me not to worry about Zabala. . . . We paid no attention to him or any other runners but set our own pace. Zabala and the others went far ahead but we didn't -worry. ... I feel good now, only a little tired. Please say Mr. Harper is a very fine man for telling me about Zabala. . . ."

Defending Champion Juan Zabala, of Argentina, leader at the halfway mark, dropped out of the race when he fell back to third place a little further on. Obliging Ernest Harper finished second by 600 yd., a few seconds ahead of Son's teammate Shoryu Nan.

Women. Heroine of the 1932 Olympics was Mildred ("Babe") Didrikson, who became a professional five months later. Last week in Berlin, muscular Helen Stephens reached the climax of a career that began three years ago when her Fulton, Mo. high-school track coach chanced to glance at his stop watch as she was finishing a practice sprint. When Coach Bert Moore had assured himself that his watch was not wrong he began to train Sprinter Stephens seriously without telling her how good she was. In her first meet, at St. Louis last year, she surprised herself by breaking a U. S. record and beating Polish Stella Walsh, most famed woman sprinter in the world. Said Stella Walsh: "I can beat her any time I try."

Last week in Berlin Sprinter Stephens proved Sprinter Walsh, running for Poland under her real name of Stella Walasiewicz, wrong, by two full yards. Her time in the 100-metre final was 11.5 sec., a new record for women. When a Warsaw newspaper, with what is now a routine lack of chivalry toward female Olympic competitors, suggested that Sprinter Stephens was a man, the possibility that Sprinter Stephens' ignorance of her own abilities might include her sex was promptly destroyed by German Olympic officials. They announced that they had foreseen the dispute, investigated Sprinter Stephens before the race, found her a thoroughgoing female.

Minor Sports. U. S. basketball official Jim Tobin charged the U. S. Olympic Committee with failing to arrange proper ceremonies to honor Dr. James Naismith, inventor of the game, sent to Berlin by U. S. subscription (TIME, Feb. 24) to see its debut on the Olympic program. Minor sport winners: Egypt (weight lifting); Argentina (polo); Italy (fencing); Germany (cycling); Austria (canoeing). Jarretts. Dismissed from the U. S. swimming team for drinking three weeks ago, Mrs. Elinor Holm Jarrett last week continued writing for Hearst papers, said she planned to accept a Twentieth Century-Fox cinema contract, learned that she had been banned from all amateur meets presumably for professionalism. Art Jarrett, her radio-crooning husband, arrived in Berlin from the U. S. last week, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Chairman Avery Brundage of the U. S. Olympic Committee to discuss his wife's mishaps: Said he: "I have no idea what amount, no idea what court, and no idea of the precise basis of the action, but I definitely intend to sue."

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