How it unfolded
Owens, having won the 100m the day before, ran into trouble in long jump qualifying. His first attempt, treated as a practice run through the runway, was ruled a foul, and his second also overstepped the board. With just one attempt left of three, German record holder Luz Long approached and suggested he take off several tens of centimetres before the board to still clear the qualifying mark. Owens did exactly that and advanced. In the afternoon final, the two traded the lead back and forth; when Long reached an Olympic record of 7.87m, Owens surpassed it on each of his final two attempts, finishing at 8.06m, a mark that stood as the Olympic record until 1960. Long was the first to embrace Owens when it ended, and the two walked a lap of the track together in front of 100,000 spectators and the Fuhrer's box. Owens went on to win four golds at those Games — 100m, 200m, long jump and the 4x100m relay. Long was killed in action in Sicily in 1943, and the letters the two had exchanged only reached Owens after the war.
Why it still matters
At a Games staged to showcase racial supremacy, a German athlete coaching a Black American to victory and being first to celebrate his win publicly undercut Nazi propaganda more visibly than almost anything else at those Games. Owens's four golds set the benchmark for a sprinter-jumper for the following half century, a lineage Carl Lewis carried on by winning the same four events in 1984.