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What: “SportsCentury: Jesse Owens”

Where: ESPN Classic, tonight, 5 and 8

Jesse Owens, selected by an ESPN panel as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the 20th century, was profiled in a half-hour “SportsCentury” show on ESPN Dec. 17. Now ESPN Classic takes a one-hour look at Owens’ life.

The show begins with Owens winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and ends with Carl Lewis saying Owens was his inspiration when he won four gold medals at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

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In between, all aspects of Owens’ life are dealt with.

Owens’ greatest athletic feat was not in Berlin but a year earlier at the Big 10 track championships in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he set three world records and tied another within a 65-minute span. President Ford, a senior at Michigan at the time and a witness to Owens’ feat, is among those interviewed.

Bud Greenspan talks about going to Berlin to make the 1964 film, “Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin.” He says the plan was to shoot part of the film in an empty stadium but there was a short item in a newspaper about Owens being there and 10,000 people showed up.

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