Jesse Owens

Being a black man in the United States in the 1930s was about as much fun as having your nuts smashed shut in a vice grip while creepy leprechauns throw horseshoes at you and insult your virility.  There was little opportunity for any social or financial advancement, few chances to improve your station in life, and the time-honored American Traditions of rampant unabashed racism and segregation forever were still incredibly popular with dumbass white people in pretty much every corner of our great country.  In this atmosphere of hatred, ignorance, and general dumbassitude, Jesse Owens, the grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper (the term used to refer to slaves in the 30s), went from being an impoverished gas station attendant to become an Olympic legend, an American hero, and a fucking badass who overcame a shitstorm of adversity to shove his foot up Hitler's ass and prove to the world that he was the greatest athlete alive.

Owens first exploded onto the national scene like an atomic bomb of awesome when he tied the world record in the 100-meter dash as a lowly high school student in 1933.  In college, he continued to be fucking faster than a sportscar with a racing stripe and flames painted down the side, winning a record eight NCAA track titles in only two years at Ohio State University.  Four national titles in a single meet is still the collegiate record, and Jesse fucking did it twice in a row.  He was also tougher than the fucking MCATs - one week after badly injuring his back falling down a flight of stairs, Owens went to the Big Ten Championship meet and set four world records in the span of fucking forty-five minutes.  That's one world record every ten minutes.  Holy shit, in the time it's taken me that long to write one and a half paragraphs of text for my shitty website Jesse Owens would have already broken three world fucking records.  He was so goddamned fast that at one point in his career he held the world record for every single sprint distance recorded by the IAAF, which, as far as I can tell, is the International Association for Atheletes that run Fucking fast and who are also otherwise awesome.

Despite the fact that he generally made the fastest men on the planet look like liquefied shit running uphill, Jesse was still treated like a second-class citizen in his own hometown.  For some dumbshit reason he was never awarded a scholarship at OSU, so he had to work bullshit part-time jobs as a gas station attendant and a shoe repairman to pay his way through school.  Thanks to the magic of segregation, when Jesse traveled with the team he wasn't even allowed to sleep in the same hotels or eat at the same restaurants as the white athletes, which is total bullcrap.  Even though he fucking got the royal shaft-job everywhere he went, Jesse Owens never backed down - he just channeled all of his get-pissed powers into running faster than a cheetah on meth being chased by the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and proved his ability on the world's largest stage - the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.