Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Jesse Owens vs Usain Bolt: Who Would Win?

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

Jessie Ownes was the world record holder in the men’s 100m dash and won the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. Usain Bolt is the current world record holder in the men’s 100m and won 3 gold medals in the event. This episode is going to try and answer an impossible, yet interesting question: who would win in a race between Jessie Owens and Usain Bolt? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jesse Owens was the world's record holder in the men's 100-meter dash and won the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. He is famous for winning four gold medals in one Olympics and foiling Hitler's plans for the Berlin Games. His 100-meter world's record stood longer than anyone else's in the event. Usain Bolt is the current world record holder in the men's 100 meter and won the gold medal at the 2016, 2012, and 2008 Olympics. This episode is going to try to answer an impossible question. Who would win a race between Jesse Owens and Usain Bold? You might think the answer is obvious, but the truth is anything but, as you'll find out in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by G Adventures.

These are very troubled times. Even though things are starting to get better and more countries are opening up, people are still hesitant to travel, and that is totally understandable. That is why G. Adventures has announced its new Travel with Confidence Plus collection. The Travel with Confidence Plus collection are 37 tours in 27 countries that have increased safety and sanitation protocols to protect you and other travelers. These tours will have smaller group sizes, private transportation, and cheaper options to get your own room, as well as more personal space. Gadventures has also earned the World Travel and Tourism Council's Safe Travel Stamp for their health and hygiene protocols,

and has implemented the Adventure Travel Trade Association's COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines. The Travel with Confidence tours are available for booking today, and we'll be departing from October 2, 2020, to the end of 2021. For more information and to book your tour, click on the link in the show notes. When doing comparisons across time with athletes, there are always major difficulties. This is an issue when trying to compare baseball players from different generations because there are so many variables you have to account for. The reason why I want to focus on these two athletes is that the 100 meter dash is a very simple event. You run quickly over a short distance, and that's it.

So it should be relatively easy compared to other sports to do a temporal comparison between two athletes. Also, I could have picked almost any two track stars to make this comparison, but these two men are both very well known and are far enough apart in time that the differences between them are much more glaring. So with that, let's start the discussion with their personal best for each athlete. Jesse Owens' personal best in the 100 meters was 10.2 seconds, which he set at the NCAA Championships in Chicago in 1936. Usain Bolt's personal best was 9.572, which he said in Berlin at the 2009 World Championships. So at first glance, this is a really easy debate. 9.572 is much faster than 10.2, so the debate is settled. If their personal best were run during the same race, Jesse Owens would have been 14 feet or 4.2 meters behind Usain Bolt when he crossed the finish line, which is a huge difference in the 100 meters.

Jesse Owens couldn't even qualify for the Olympics with a time like that today. If only it were that simple. There is a lot you have to consider when evaluating these times, especially the conditions which Jesse Owens had to run under. Let's start out with a metal-level comparison with the conditions they had to work under. Back in the 1930s, training regimens weren't very sophisticated. The science behind achieving optimal human performance was really more guesswork than anything else. Jesse Owens was attending college at Ohio State during the P.

peak of his athletic success. While he was competing for Ohio State, despite unquestionably being the best athlete in the country, he did not receive an athletic scholarship because of his race. In addition to taking classes and training, he had to work a part-time job to pay for school. He also was not allowed to live on campus because of his race, so he had to spend a good deal of his day going back and forth between his home, work, and campus. When the team traveled, Jesse wasn't allowed to stay or eat with them. He had to stay in hotels and eat in restaurants, which catered only to blacks. In the 1930s, one amateur status was taken very seriously. You couldn't make as much as one dollar in endorsements or for taking part in any athletic competition, even if it wasn't in

your sport. After the 1936 Olympics, he had to drop his amateur status so he could take advantage of endorsement deals so he could earn money. Today, an athlete like Usain Bolt can earn money in endorsements from the start of his career and not have to worry about his amateur status. He can be a professional track athlete and focus all of his energy on being the best competitor he can be. It wasn't until 1986 that professional athletes were allowed to compete in the Olympics. Before then, many athletes would only have one good Olympic games before they had to quit and get a job, even if they could have physically competed for years more. Bolt also has professional coaches using state-of-the-art equipment to perfect his technique

and to get his body into perfect shape. So before we even begin looking at specifics, we can see that Usain Bolt was able to train at a higher level and had an entire career where he was able to focus on nothing but track and field, whereas Jesse Owens really had to treat athletics like a part-time job, with a great many other difficulties and social obstacles he had to overcome. Next, let's look specifically at the conditions they had to run under. We'll start with the track itself. The tracks that Jesse Owens had to run on back in 1936 were made out of cinders,

cinders as in what is left over when wood is burned. All tracks at the time had a cinder surface, and they were used. used at every Olympics through 1964. There are very few cinder tracks in the world today, and most of them are actually used for horse racing. The problem with cinder tracks is that they absorbed a lot of energy robbing runners of speed. It is no coincidence that the first sub-10-second time in the 100 meters came at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, which was the first Olympics not to use a cinder track. Today's tracks are modern synthetic creations designed to let athletes run as fast as possible. If you've ever been on such a track, you've probably noticed how much energy it gives back.

It's like running on a rubber surface. Experts have estimated that the difference between running on cinders versus running on a synthetic track is about 1.5% to 2%. Just the track alone would have shaved 2 tenths of a second off of Jesse Owens' time, bringing his personal best down to a flat 10 seconds. Next, we have to consider that Jesse Owens didn't use starting blocks. Owens just missed the starting block revolution in sprinting, which started in 1937 the year after his gold medal. It was then that starting blocks became mandatory so that everyone had an equal start. Owens carried a gardening trowel with him that he used to dig small holes in the cinder track for his feet. In fact, he had a lucky trowel that he brought with him to all his track meets.

These holes were his starting blocks. Digging these holes was no small thing. How far back you dug the holes, how deep you dug the holes, and how compact the scyons. cinders were in the hole would have an enormous impact on your final time. Estimates I've seen said that over a distance of 100 meters, the lack of starting blocks could add anywhere from one-tenths to two-tenths of a second for an elite sprinter. Finally, we have to consider the shoes they were wearing. Usain Bolt has an elite contract with Puma who has engineers working on creating the highest performance running shoe in the world. Jesse Owens did wear top shoes for his time.

In fact, Adolf Dazzler, the founder of Adidas, reached out to Owens before the 1936 Olympics to give him shoes to compete in because he wanted to grow his new company. Owens wore a pair of handcrafted leather running shoes with extra long spikes. And it also should be noted that Adolf Dasler, at the time, was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. Even though Owens wore 1936 state-of-the-art shoes at the Olympics, they were still a far cry from athletic shoes with rubber soles which would be developed decades later. How much of a difference do the shoes make? It's hard to say, but you could be talking about another one to two tenths of a second.

There are also other miscellaneous things that can make a difference with speed. Today, all of the timing is done electronically. Usain's Bolt world record time was measured down to the thousandth of a second using computerized systems. Jesse Owens' time was done by hand using a stopwatch. It's entirely possible that a full tenth of a second, or at least a few fractions thereof, could have been taken off the time he actually ran if it was measured more accurately. Also, every competitor in a race now has a speaker behind their starting blocks, so everyone can hear the starting gun at the exact same time.

This is also a few theoretical hundreds of a second which might come into play. All of these things were actually put into a test that was run by the CBC in Canada. They got Olympic sprinter Andre de Gras to run under similar conditions as Jesse Owens. DeGrasse was a bronze medalist at the 2016 Olympic. in the 100 meter dash and has a personal best time of 9.9 seconds. Owens and the grass were of similar height and weight. For the experiment, they created a pair of shoes similar to what Owens wore and had him run 100 meters on a track made of packed dirt.

He also had to dig holes for a starting blocks as Owens did, and they also hand timed it using a stopwatch. How fast did he run under these conditions? He ran the 100 meters in 11 seconds, a full 1.1 seconds slower than his personal best. Moreover, at the end of the sprint, he said he was more tired than he had ever been after running 100 meters, and this guy was an Olympic medalist. So, would Jesse Owens be able to beat Usain Bolt if they were both running under equal conditions today? David Epstein, the author of the book The Sports Gene, concluded,

Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens' joints shows that had he been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn't have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride. My conclusion is pretty similar. If you factor everything Jesse Owens had working against him, he comes out as being one of the fastest men in history. Only nine people in history have ever run the 100 meters faster than 9.8 seconds, and I think Jesse Owens would be one of them if he had modern conditions. It's possible he could have run a sub 9.7, which has only been done by three people in history. In the end, however, Usain Bolt is a unique specimen. Bolt is 6'5, whereas Owens was 5'10.

The number of strides Bolt requires to run a race is less than almost any other elite sprinter in history. Even factoring in everything Owens had working against him, it's enough to make the race close, but Bolt would still come out ahead in the end. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackala. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show. get discovered in the sea of other podcasts that are out there.