The Long History of a Famous Sprint ‘Olympics Über Alles,’ a Story of the 1936 Games
Daniel M. GoldSeptember 15, 2014: Before he became a pioneering sports broadcaster, Marty Glickman was a Syracuse University track and football star, and Olympics Über Alles, now at St. Luke’s Theater, recalls the notorious behavior that victimized him in 1936. Or would, if it could get out of its own way. Glickman, then 18, made the United States Olympic track team for the Berlin Games. Both he and Sam Stoller, a University of Michigan sprinter, were to run legs of the 4 x 100-meter relay. But the morning of the first heats, the track coaches replaced both men, the team’s only Jews, with the black runners Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. While the relay team won the gold in world-record time, Glickman and Stoller were the only two American track athletes not to compete at the Olympics. Glickman made no secret of his belief that anti-Semitism by the coaches and the head of the United States Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was behind the move. In particular, he felt that Brundage — after Owens’s already superb performance in Berlin — did not want to further embarrass Hitler with gold medals for Jews.
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