59 Days to go (© World Athletics Nairobi)
James Cleveland 'Jesse' Owens (September 12, 1913 - March 31, 1980) also known also as 'The Buckeye Bulet' was an American track-and-field athlete that won four gol medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. He was recognized for his sprints and long jumps and he was known to be the 'greatest and most famous athlete in tracka and field history'.
Owens specialized in sprints and long jumps and was dubbed 'perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history' during his lifetime. At the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he set three world records and tied another in less than an hour — a feat that has never been equaled and has been dubbed 'the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport.'
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, he won four gold medals: 100 meters, long jump, 200 meters, and four 100-meter relays. He was the most successful athlete at the Games and was credited with 'single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy' as a black man, despite the fact that he 'wasn't invited to the White House to shae hands with the President.'
The Jesse Owens Award is USA Track and Field's highest honor for the year's best track and field athlete. ESPN ranked Owens as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the twentieth century and the highest-ranked in his sport. In 1999, he was one of six candidates for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Century award.
Owens first gained national attention while a student at Cleveland's East Technical High School, when he equaled the world record of 9.4 seconds in the 100-yard dash and long-jumped 24 feet 9+12 inches (7.56 m) at the 1933 National High School Championship in Chicago.
Sergey Nazarovych Bubka
Serhiy Nazarovych Bubka (Sergey Nazarovich Bubka, born December 4, 1963) is a former Ukrainian world record-setting pole vaulter who won a gold medal during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He represented the Soviet Union until 1991. When he was nine years old, he took up athletics in 1973 in which he started doing sprints and long jumping. By 1974, he switched to pole vaulting. Sergey Bubka first competed internationally as a senior at the 1983 World Championship. In 2001, he retired to embark on a career in sports administration and politics. He became a member of the IOC Athlete’s Commission, became president of the Ukrainian NOC and became a full member of the IOC in 2005.
Bubka won six consecutive IAAF World Championships, an Olympic gold medal, and broke the men's pole vault world record 35 times. He was the first pole vaulter to clear both 6.0 and 6.10 meters.
He held the indoor world record of 6.15 meters, which he set in Donetsk, Ukraine on February 21, 1993. For nearly 21 years until France's Renaud Lavillenie cleared 6.16 metres at the same meet in the same arena on 15 February 2014. He held the outdoor world record at 6.14 meters between July 31, 1994 and September 17, 2020, when Sweden's Armand Duplantis broke it.
Bubka officially retired from pole vault in 2001 during a ceremony at his Pole Vault Stars meeting in Donetsk.
