The grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper, he was born in 1913 in rural Alabama. By the age of seven he was picking 100 pounds of cotton a day.

But Owens was a runner and in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, it was Hitler’s grandiose plan to prove that the “Aryan” people were superior. Jesse, a black American, almost single-handedly upstaged Hitler’s plans. He won four gold medals, which led the people of world to recognize him as “the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history”.