A tale of Olympic hurdlers ... and hurdles
By MIKE LACKEY
419-993-2092
mlackey@limanews.com
08.08.2004

The past week’s notable deaths included a man remembered for an Olympic medal he didn’t win.
Milton Green, a hurdler, was invited to try out for the American team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Instead he staged his own boycott of the games to protest the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany.
Coincidentally, Green’s story comes to our attention just as we mark the anniversary of another hurdler, George Poage, 100 years ago this month becoming the first black athlete to win an Olympic medal.
Poage was a 21-year-old graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he studied history, economics and languages. In the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, he earned bronze medals in both the 200- and 400-meter hurdles.
Poage retired from competition after the Olympics and became a high school teacher. Students decades later remembered him as an inspirational mentor. But neither sports nor education offered many opportunities. For much of his life, he was a postal worker in Chicago.
Green, who died Wednesday in Florida, was a developer of shopping centers before his retirement. He competed in the Senior Olympics and was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He said he never regretted passing up his shot at Olympic glory.
The lives of Poage and Green offer accounts of honest competition and principled choices. For all their dark undertones, their stories seem refreshingly straightforward when compared to more recent Olympic sagas of bribery in the selection of sites, cheating on the field and nationalist bias among judges.
With the 2004 games set to open this week in Greece, the news is full of all sorts of unpleasantness. The quickest sampler would include:
• Courtroom wrangling over a berth on the U.S. women’s mountain biking team.
• The likelihood that American sprinter Torri Edwards will be barred for using a banned stimulant.
• Suspension of a member of the Bulgarian Olympic committee following allegations of corruption.
• Revocation of the Belarusian sports minister’s visa after he was implicated in human rights abuses.
That’s not even counting a hangover from the last Summer Olympics. The International Olympic Committee is pondering whether to strip the U.S. 1,600-meter relay team of gold medals won in 2000 because of a prior doping violation by team member Jerome Young.
We once thought of the Olympics as a great international festival of sportsmanship and brotherhood, something that existed apart from the world’s usual strife and conflict. For many, that view didn’t begin to change until 1972, when terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympians in Munich.
Green’s experience is a reminder that politics has never been far beneath the games’ shiny surface. Adolf Hitler, with visions of conquest and holocaust already dancing in his head, planned the Berlin games as an international showcase and public-relations extravaganza on behalf of the Third Reich.
The ploy would have worked better but for the dramatic triumphs of Jesse Owens and a half-dozen other black champions, giving the lie to Hitler’s claims of Aryan supremacy. Green, a world-record hurdler from Harvard, would likely have shared in the medals if he hadn’t decided to boycott the games after talking with his rabbi.
Both Owens and Green should be applauded for shows of courage and principle. Evidence suggests that Green made the wisest choice for himself: In a shameful incident, two Jewish competitors who went to Berlin, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were pulled from the 400-meter relay at the last minute, apparently because American officials didn’t want to embarrass their German hosts.
With each Olympiad, we’re forced to confront something Poage and Green realized long ago: There are many kinds of hurdles to clear, and more than one kind of Olympic glory.