I have always wanted to post this since a long time ago but never got down to it. Its an article i read in the straits times, july 11 2008, about sportsmanship. After reading it i had this warm fuzzy feeling and got very touch by it. A short anecdote of courage under fire. Friendship, sportsmanship define in a single moment. The end is also poignant yet heartwarming... So here it is in its entirety. Enjoy =]

A great long jumper is struggling to qualify for an Olympic final. A rival steps in to help him. It seems at best a nice gesture, an old-fashioned extending of a hand of decency, nothing more than that.

But it is much more than that, which is why for 72 years people continue to resurrect this story as an example of Olympic man at his best.

Jesse Owens, the jumper who was struggling was an athletic genius. He was also black. It should not have mattered but of course it did.

And it mattered in Germany in 1936 when Adolf Hitler was propagating his despicable theories of of the superiority of the Aryan race, and when in some newspapers, pictures of and ape appeared alongside Owens.

On the day of the long jump, Owens ambled down the runway in practice and casually ran into the pit - only to be horrified when the judges considered it a qualifying jump and raised the red flag for a foul.

Suddenly only 2 qualifying jumps remained.

Owens again overstepped the take-off board. Foul!!

One jump remained.

Lutz Long, a gifted German long jumper, was blond, blue=eyed and the archetypal Aryan. Owens was his opponent and the better jumper. Still, in an act of startling generosity, the German approached the American and pointed out that the qualifying mark was so easy that if Owens took-off from behind the board, he would still make the final.

Owens listened, took off from a foot behind the take-off board and qualified.

Then the 2 men dueled in the final. Owens led. Long equaled him. Hitler applauded. But Owens was too good eventually, and when he broke the Olympic record with his last leap, Long was the first to embrace him.

Owens understood immediately the enormity of the German's gesture, a moment of beauty, in a time of ugliness.

"It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler," the American said later.

"You can melt down all the medals and cups i have and they would not be a a plating on the 24-carat friendship i felt for Lutz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace."

Long died in the war, but the story had one remarkable post scrip recounted in Donald McRae's brilliant book, In Black and White.

In 1951, Owens returned to Berlin and to the Olympic Stadium, and in the dressing room later, a young boy asked him to autograph a scrapbook.

As Owens scrawled his name, he noticed a familiar picture. He took the scrapbook and said, "That's Lutz Long."

And the boy, Karl, looked at him and said, " My father, sir." -- By Rohit Brijnath