Summer 2016
Racing into history
The Olympic moment of WSU Hall of Famer Lee Orr
As rain fell in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in 1936, Lee Orr, a Washington State College student not yet 20 years old, didn’t realize the magnitude of the events surrounding him.
“I was pretty young and didn’t know what was going on,” he said.
It had been over seven decades since Orr raced against Jesse Owens at the ’36 Olympic Games when, in 2008, the soft-spoken Orr recalled his Olympic experience in Germany.
A year after the interview, Orr passed away; however, the story he told lives in sports lore.
Owens’s four gold medals and his … » More …