Race Brings Home the Power of the Olympic Games

Tomorrow, the 33rd Olympiad begins in Paris. For over two weeks, the world’s great athletes will compete in 329 events, providing a riveting spectacle of physical prowess and thrilling rivalries. Perhaps at no time was the drama more fierce or memorable than at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The undisputed star of those games was Jesse Owens, the hero of Stephen Hopkins’ Race, a film that The Wrap calls “a soaring story that isn’t afraid to explore moral depths.”

Watch Race on Apple TV or Amazon.

Working with the blessing of The Jesse Owens Foundation, screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse felt the best way to showcase Owens was to focus on the ’36 Olympics. “In order for the audience to appreciate the enormity of Owens’ accomplishments—the scale and importance of his victories—we had to give them background and history,” Shrapnel told The Writing Studio. From the start, the games were controversial; the USA and other countries threatened to boycott the games because of Adolf Hitler’s threat to exclude Jewish athletes. In that political cauldron, Owens won four gold medals, becoming an international hero.

In Race, Stephan James plays Owens, with Jason Sudeikis as the Ohio State University coach who helped get him to the Olympics. James, who considers Owens a personal hero, told Time Magazine, “This is a story of inspiration, a man who did incredible things during a time when everything was set out against him.” The San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Race takes time to make audiences feel the courage Owens’ feats required, particularly in the simple yet remarkable sequence in which Owens enters the Berlin stadium on the day he is to compete.”