Then there was Jesse Owens who, at the 1936 Olympics, startled the world by winning four gold medals.He upset the world because he debunked Hitler's Aryan racial policy which expounded the racial supremacy of  the white man.Even though I was not born during this time,Jesse Owens was a household name in The Bahamas.

There was one Olympic sporting icon and national hero, I had never heard about until my Olympic research during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. His name was Dhyan Chand, an Indian hockey player whose exploits on the hockey field at Olympiads in Amsterdam 1928,Los Angeles 1932 and Berlin 1936.His athletic skills with the hockey stick ,particularly his dribbling and scoring ability, labelled  him the wizard of field hockey.His performance at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 were so dramatic that  Hitler offered him German citizenship and a  post as a  Colonel in the German army.Chand,however, refused the Fuehrer's gesture.

What is significant here is that Hitler did not  discriminated against Indians as he did with Africans.He refused to meet him Jesse Owens but was prepared to offer Chand, the Indian, German citizenship.

Olympic history is very revealing because it reflects the geopolitics of the day.The world was European centered and controlled. Africa and the Caribbean did not enter the equation to any relevant degree.Even though Haiti was the first Black country to gain Independence, it was also the first Black country to participate in an Olympiad.Haiti participated in the sport of Fencing in 1900. I am sure that the Haitian Olympian would have been a mulatto or a retrenched Frenchman and not a descendant of the Haitian Revolution.

The 1936 Olympics had two sporting icons emerge,Jesse Owens and Dhyan Chand.All of us in the African Diaspora knew about Jesse Owens and the manner in which Hitler snubbed him and his success on the track;however, very few of us know about Dhyan Chand.In India , Chand's birthday on August 29th is celebrated as National Sports Day and the National Stadium in the capital city of Delhi was renamed in his honour  after him.

We in The Bahamas and the Caribbean can learn many lessons from the Olympics, particularly in nation building. I am sure in The Bahamas, for example, the gold medal victories in the 400 meters respectively by Stephen Gardiner and Shaunae Miller-Uibo were unifying moments for a highly politically polarized small island state.

I  will like to add a noteworthy comment by Dr. Thomas Cherian, an India native from the province of Kerala as follows:

Perhaps the Indian hockey player -Mr Chand caught Hitler’s attention may be because
1.He served in Royal Indian Army and his father also did so
2.He is from a Rajput caste which is considered as higher caste and in Sanskrit Rajput means “Son of a king”

May be Hitler had some hidden agenda as well.
India won a Gold in Tokyo after Long, long spell of emptiness.Hope they will learn from
Other small countries like Bahamas  
This comment by Dr Cherian was very revealing. Maybe Hitler had a  hidden agenda. Who knows?