Jesse Owens Trivia
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77 free Jesse Owens trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jesse Owens won four gold medals in a week at the 1936 Games in front of the Nazi leadership, and a year earlier had set or tied six world records in three-quarters of an hour with a sore back. Then he came home to a freight elevator at the Waldorf Astoria, a lifetime ban from amateur sport and years of racing horses for cash. This quiz covers all of it: the sharecropper's son who became the Buckeye Bullet, the Berlin sprints and jumps, the teammates dropped from the relay, and the German rival who became a friend. It also follows the long second act: the Ford job, the jazz band, the Mets, the goodwill tours, the tax case, the presidents who honoured him and the films, novels and asteroid that carry his name. Questions run from easy warm-ups to details only track historians will know, so it works as a family quiz or a real test. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Owens, the 1936 Games and the people around him, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 77 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city did Jesse Owens win his Olympic gold medals in 1936?
Berlin
Berlin. Hitler meant the Games to prove Aryan supremacy, and the grandson of an enslaved man went home as their most successful athlete.
Q 02How many gold medals did Jesse Owens win at the 1936 Games?
Four
Four. He won both sprints and the long jump inside three days, then added a relay gold he had not been due to run for.
Q 03In which US state was Jesse Owens born?
Alabama
Alabama. He was born in the farming hamlet of Oakville, which his family left for the North when he was nine; a memorial park and museum to him now stand there.
Q 04When Owens was nine, his family joined the Great Migration north and settled in which city?
Cleveland
Cleveland. His father and older brothers found work in the steel mills there, while the boy delivered groceries and worked in a shoe repair shop.
Q 05How is Owens, known at home as J. C., said to have become Jesse?
A teacher misheard his initials
A teacher misheard his initials. The story goes that he answered 'J. C.' in a Southern drawl on his first day at school in the North, and she wrote down Jesse.
Q 06Where did Jesse Owens enrol as a student in 1933?
Ohio State University
Ohio State University. He agreed to go only once officials had found his father a job, and with no scholarship he waited tables and worked part-time to pay his own way.
Q 07In which event did Jesse Owens win the first of his gold medals at the 1936 Olympics?
100 metres
100 metres. He won it on 3 August, the start of a week that ended with gold in a relay he had not been picked to run.
Q 08What illness caused Jesse Owens's death in 1980?
Lung cancer
Lung cancer. The man who had once been the fastest sprinter alive smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 35 years.
Q 09What is the title of the 2016 biopic in which Stephan James plays Owens?
Race
Race. Montreal stood in for the American locations, and the film was made with the backing of Owens's family and the foundation that bears his name.
Q 10Short of money after the Games, Owens earned cash by racing against which animals?
Horses
Horses. He later let on that the trick was to pick a jumpy thoroughbred, which the starter's gun would startle into a slow break, and said simply that he could not eat his medals.
Q 11Who finally matched Owens's haul of sprint, relay and long jump golds at a single Olympics?
Carl Lewis
Carl Lewis. He needed only one legal long jump in the final, and passed the rest of his attempts so as to save his legs for the sprints still to come.
Q 12Owens said in 1936 that it was 'our president who snubbed me'; which president did he mean?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. He never phoned, wired or invited Owens to the White House, and Owens said so from a rally platform weeks before that year's election.
Q 13The runner-up to Owens in the 1936 Olympic 200 m was the older brother of which sporting pioneer?
Jackie Robinson
Q 21Owens ran the 1936 relay after Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were dropped; what did the two men have in common?
Both were Jewish
Both were Jewish, the only Jews on the US track team. Glickman, later the radio voice of the New York Knicks, came to believe they were benched to spare Hitler embarrassment.
Q 22What kept Owens's 10.2-second 1936 Olympic 100 m heat out of the record books?
Following wind
Following wind. The time would have equalled his own world record, and the breeze cost him again a day later, when his gold-medal run in the final could not count as a record either.
Q 23Which 1936 US Olympic teammate of Owens later survived 47 days adrift at sea and a Japanese prison camp?
Louis Zamperini
Jackie Robinson. Mack Robinson finished four-tenths of a second behind Owens for the silver, and eleven years later his kid brother broke the major leagues' colour line.
Q 14Which German finished second to Owens in the jumping pit and struck up a famous friendship with him?
Luz Long
Luz Long. He was the first to congratulate Owens and went arm in arm with him in front of Hitler, a friendship Owens said took real courage.
Q 15Months before his death, Owens spoke out against which president's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter. Owens held that sport should stand apart from politics, but the boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan went ahead.
Q 16What was the occupation of Owens's father, Henry?
Sharecropper
Sharecropper. Henry Owens gave up the struggle when Jesse was nine and took the family north, where he and his older sons found work in a steel mill.
Q 17Which president awarded Jesse Owens the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the 1970s?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford. He presented the medal at the White House in 1976, with the whole US team just back from the Montreal Olympics looking on.
Q 18Which president sent Jesse Owens on goodwill tours of Asia in the 1950s?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower. In the Cold War his administration saw a use for Owens's fame abroad, and sent him out in 1955 to speak up for American freedom and opportunity.
Q 19What was Jesse Owens's real first name?
James
James. At home the name went unused: his family knew him as J. C., from the initials of his first and middle names.
Q 20Which US teammate finished a tenth of a second behind Owens in the 1936 Olympic 100 m final?
Ralph Metcalfe
Ralph Metcalfe. He had beaten Owens when Owens was still a schoolboy, and days after this final the two shared a gold medal in the sprint relay.
Louis Zamperini. The 19-year-old ran the 5,000 metres at those Games and came eighth; his wartime ordeal later became the bestselling book and film Unbroken.
Q 24Who finally broke Owens's long jump world record in 1960?
Ralph Boston
Ralph Boston. He took the record that August, and weeks later Owens was in the stands in Rome to watch his successor win the Olympic title.
Q 25Who broke the long jump world record by more than Owens did?
Bob Beamon
Bob Beamon alone, by 55 cm in 1968. Owens added 15 cm with the only jump he took all afternoon, and became the first man to clear eight metres.
Q 26At which 1935 meet did Owens shatter world records inside an hour?
The Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor
The Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor. So many fans mobbed him afterwards that he had to slip out of the locker room through a window.
Q 27Owens set his 1935 world records while nursing an injury to which part of his body?
His back
His back. He could not bend to touch his knees that morning, yet he said the pain vanished the moment he crouched for his first start.
Q 28On his record-breaking day in 1935, which event did Owens merely tie the world record in?
100-yard dash
100-yard dash. It came first, as a test of whether an injury would let him compete at all; satisfied, he went on to break the records in his other three events.
Q 29Which shoemaker persuaded Jesse Owens to try his firm's spikes at the 1936 Olympics?
Adi Dassler
Adi Dassler. Accounts differ on whether Owens competed or only trained in them, but the link made the brothers' small firm famous, and Adi went on to found Adidas.
Q 30At his New York ticker-tape parade, a stranger handed Owens a paper bag containing what?
$10,000 in cash
$10,000 in cash. He left the bag untouched until he got out of the car at the end of the parade, and his wife said he never learned who the giver was.