With the opening ceremony of the Paris Games just around the corner, AFP continues its look back at the history of the Olympics to pick out some of the legends that have lit up the festivities.
Jesse Owens: infuriating the Fuehrer
Owens, an African-American, exploded the Nazi-propagated myth of racial superiority at the age of 22, when he won four athletics gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under the nose of Adolf Hitler.
He won the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and long jump, setting three world records and reportedly prompting Hitler to storm out, though the “Buckeye Bullet” later said the Fuehrer had waved to him.
The grandson of slaves, Owens was snubbed by his own president when Franklin D Roosevelt failed to greet him, a customary honour for returning Olympic champions.
“When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus,” Owens said of the racial segregation that existed in the US at the time. “I couldn’t live where I wanted.”
Fanny Blankers-Koen: athlete of the century
Blankers-Koen blazed a trail for women’s sport when she swept to four athletics golds at the 1948 Olympics as a 30-year-old mother of two.
The Dutchwoman made her Games debut in Berlin in 1936, but it was at the first post-war Games, in London in 1948, that she really shone. She won every event she entered – the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4x100m relay.
“One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children,” she told the New York Times in 1982.
“When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said: ‘I show you’.”
Blankers-Koen was named female athlete of the century in 1999.
Abebe Bikila: barefoot marathon runner
In a feat that has become part of Olympic lore, Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila became the first Black African to win gold, running the marathon barefoot at the Rome Games in 1960.
Bikila set a world record of 2 hours, 15 minutes and 16 seconds barefoot, having discarded ill-fitting running shoes.
Four years later in Tokyo, he bettered the record, running all the way in shoes this time but barely a month after undergoing an emergency appendectomy, trimming a few minutes off his time. In doing so, the soldier became the first man to win an Olympic marathon twice.
At home, Bikila – a soldier in the Imperial Guard – was hailed a national hero, promoted in rank by Emperor Haile Selassie and presented with a Volkswagen Beetle car.
In a cruel twist, the car ended his Olympics career after he had a serious accident in 1969 that left him paralysed from the waist down.
Bob Beamon: historic leap
New York native Bob Beamon defied gravity with a record-smashing long jump at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
The leap shattered the previous world record by 55.88cm, his lead of 8.9m beating the old mark by 6.6% and lasting 23 years. It remains the second-longest jump not assisted by wind.
He almost missed the final after overstepping on his first two qualifying jumps.
The final, Beamon remembered, was an “extraordinary day”. Beamon was the first of the favourites to jump and won the competition with his opening leap.
“Everything was perfect for me. The wind was perfect. The weather when I jumped was perfect,” he recalled. “It rained right after I jumped.”
When teammate Ralph Boston translated the metric distance on the scoreboard into feet and inches for him, Beamon collapsed in what he later called a “cataplectic seizure” brought on by “emotional excitement”.
After retiring, he coached and promoted sport participation, as well as working as a graphic artist and pursuing his childhood passion of drumming.
Nadia Comaneci: the perfect 10
Aged just 14, the Romanian became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 – winning a jaw-dropping seven maximums from judges at the 1976 Games in Montreal.
She collected four 10s for the uneven bars and three for the beam to take gold in both events, plus the all-round title.
Comaneci competed until 1981 and then fled Romania just before the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, settling in the US.
From there, she used the archives of Romania’s feared communist-era secret police to reveal the beatings and humiliation she suffered even while being feted for her sporting glories.