Ninety years ago, Adolf Hitler hijacked what should have been a celebration of athletic excellence, where competitors were judged on talent, not race or religion, and turned the 1936 Berlin Olympics into a global stage for Nazi propaganda.
Jesse Owens is rightly remembered as the hero of those Games for his four gold medals which exposed the lie of Aryan supremacy, but ninety years later, there are other Olympic stories that deserve to be told. Stories of champions the world never had the chance to see.
Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis systematically drove Jews out of sport and expelled Jewish athletes from clubs and national teams and ended careers overnight. Most notably, Gretel Bergmann, Germany's champion high jumper, who equalled the national record of 1.60 metres in June 1936, was forcefully removed from the Olympic team weeks before the Games because she was Jewish.
The Nazis knew that Jewish athletes had a significant hand in shaping Olympic history. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the first Games to feature women's gymnastics, five Jewish women, Helena Nordheim, Ans Polak, Stella Agsteribbe, Judik Simons and Elka de Levie, helped the Netherlands win Olympic gold under their Jewish coach, Gerrit Kleerekoper. Just a decade and a half later, four of those five women, along with Kleerekoper, were murdered in the Holocaust. Only Elka de Levie survived.
We only know these names because of the medals they won, but we will never know the names of the Jewish athletes who were cruelly prevented from even reaching the starting line. While The Olympics celebrate the very best of human potential, The Holocaust represented its deliberate destruction. At least 49 Olympians from 12 countries competing across 18 Summer and Winter Olympic sports were murdered.
Remarkably, there were four survivors who did manage to compete as Olympians, revealing just how much potential the Holocaust had stolen from the world, including Ágnes Keleti, who survived in Hungary under a false identity to become one of the most decorated Jewish female Olympian in history, while Shaul Ladany survived Bergen-Belsen, became a world-record race walker, and escaped the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
Yet no story better encompasses everything the Nazis sought to destroy, but ultimately failed to, than that of Sir Ben Helfgott MBE. Even three years after his passing at the age of 93, his life and legacy continue to inspire countless people of all ages around the world.
After surviving the Piotrków Ghetto and Nazi concentration camps, and losing his father and much of his family, Ben arrived in Britain at the age of 15 as an orphan refugee, brought by World Jewish Relief. Discovering weightlifting, he became Britain's Lightweight champion three times before captaining Great Britain at two Olympic Games.
Trained to lift weights, he dedicated the rest of his life to carrying the weight of the memory of those who never had the chance to fulfil their own potential. He became one of the world's foremost Holocaust educators, helped establish survivor organisations, mentored younger generations and ensured that those who did not survive would never be forgotten.
As he once reflected: "In spite of the fact that I have diligently pursued my career, sporting activities and social engagements, I have always been conscious of my responsibility to preserve the memory of those who have perished in such a barbarous way."
Without Ben and with the shrinking survivor generation, that responsibility now belongs to us, especially with rising Holocaust denial and rising antisemitism post October 7. While the methods of antisemitism in sport have changed in the last ninety years, the exclusion of Jews has not. Today, Israeli and Jewish athletes continue to face boycotts, hate-filled chants in stadiums, and persistent campaigns to prevent them from competing on the international stage.
Sport is good at remembering winners, especially its greatest champions. The world remembers Jesse Owens, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt because they were given the opportunity to fulfil their extraordinary potential. The Nazis robbed millions of Jewish children of that same chance. If one teenage survivor like Ben Helfgott could become an Olympian, what might the millions who never survived have become?
What about the 14-year-old sprinter who was murdered before her prime? The teenage gymnast who never reached her first Olympics or the footballer who never got the chance to showcase their skills on the world stage? While their names are lost to history, it is up to us to ensure that their potential is not. Not only did the Nazis murder six million Jews, they murdered six million potentials and futures.
As we mark the 90th anniversary of the Berlin Olympics where Jesse Owens defiantly showed the Nazis that their supremacist ideology had no place in the sporting arena, remembering all those who never had the chance to compete and their lost potential, may be the greatest victory of all.
Scott Saunders MBE is CEO of The International March of The Living, an educational program that brings together teens, young adults, and adults from around the world to Poland and Israel to carry the torch of Holocaust remembrance.