Which U.S. athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

Which U.S. athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Jesse Owens did, winning four athletics titles for the United States.

Owens won the 100 meters on August 3, the long jump on August 4, and the 200 meters on August 5. He completed the quartet on August 9 as part of the U.S. 4 × 100-meter relay team, which set a world record of 39.8 seconds.

His performance was especially notable because the Berlin Games were staged by Nazi Germany, whose regime promoted racist ideas about Aryan athletic superiority. Owens’s victories directly challenged that propaganda, although the often-repeated claim that Adolf Hitler refused to shake his hand is more complicated than popular retellings suggest.

A common mix-up is confusing Owens’s four medals with Carl Lewis’s four golds in the same events at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Owens’s individual victories were in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and long jump; his fourth gold came in the relay.