Nickname: “The Buckeye Bullet”
Sport: Track and Field
Country: USA
The story of 22-year-old Jesse Owens’ performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — games that the host country, Nazi Germany, hoped would offer a platform for “Aryan” athletic superiority — has been told countless times. And yet, all these years later, his record of four gold medals in track and field at a single Olympiad still amazes, not least because it took five decades for anyone to even match it. (Carl Lewis won four golds, in the same four events, at the 1984 Games.) Less mind-boggling than his ’36 feat but, nevertheless, still notable is that, of all the alliterative nicknames in sports — and there are a lot of them: Charley “California Cannonball” Paddock; Mickey “Commerce Comet” Mantle; Ted “Splendid Splinter” Williams; and on and on — The Buckeye Bullet (Owens went to Ohio State) is among the greatest, and surely the best of any Olympian.