Horace Ashenfelter, an American runner who set a world record in the steeplechase at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, beating an overwhelmingly favored Soviet champion in what was billed as a test of Cold War supremacy, died on Saturday morning in a nursing home in West Orange, N.J. He was 94.

His wife, Lillian, confirmed the death.

Nearly a generation after Jesse Owens shattered the myth of Aryan invincibility by sweeping four gold medals in Hitler’s Swastika-draped Olympic Stadium in Berlin in 1936, United States athletes faced another challenge on the world stage. For the first time since 1912, when the Czars ruled in St. Petersburg, Russians were competing in the Olympics. This time it was American Democracy vs. Soviet Communism.

Ashenfelter’s event was the 3,000-meter steeplechase — a punishing obstacle course of nearly two miles with 35 waist-high hurdles that do not topple, seven of them followed by water pits almost 12 feet long. Runners leap most of the fixed hurdles, but at the water jumps they use it as a step to bound toward the shallower end; after splashing down, they scamper out to continue the race.

There were a dozen runners in the steeplechase final in Helsinki. But all eyes were on two athletes: Ashenfelter, a clean-cut F.B.I. agent with the rawboned frame of a Pennsylvania farmer, and Vladimir Kazantsev, a Red Army hero of World War II and the pride of Dynamo Moscow, where elite state-supported Soviet athletes were trained. Ashenfelter had run the steeplechase only six times, while Kazantsev was the unofficial world-record holder.