Jesse Owens

Triumph: Jesse Owens & Hitler’s Olympics
Jeremy Schaap
Head of Zeus, 2014
272 pages

He may have been the world’s greatest athlete at the time, writes Jeremy Schaap in Triumph, but Jesse Owens was also a Black American. Therefore Owens, the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was refused a room at hotel after hotel on his arrival back in New York, until a agreed on condition that he use the service entrance.