Jesse Owens had hit the road again. He had arrived in Havana the day before, on a wet Christmas Day. The rain made him think of Ruth and Gloria, his wife and their four-year-old daughter at home in Cleveland. This was meant to be the most special Christmas of their lives. But here he was - back on the dirt.

As he neared the start he looked at his rival. Unlike Owens, who was five feet ten and weighed a shade under 12 stone, Julio McCaw was big. He was very big. It was a racing certainty he would also be quick and strong - far quicker and stronger than any man Owens had ever beaten. That, according to Marty Forkins, Owens's irrepressible agent, was the point. Jesse Owens vs Julio McCaw would be the Race Of The Century.

Owens dug two holes in the cinder for his feet. In a time long before starting-blocks, he always carried the same little trowel with him wherever he ran.

To make the race fairer, Owens was given a 40-yard start. The starter's pistol also startled Julio McCaw, allowing the world's greatest athlete to sprint away into an even bigger lead. Julio McCaw responded with a tremendous burst, but Owens finished just ahead of him - completing the 100-yard dash in 9.9sec. He turned to the crowd to celebrate.

Jesse Owens had just beaten a horse.

'Since I haven't competed for a long time,' he said afterwards, 'and considering the condition of the track, I am satisfied with my showing. I would be willing to race a horse without a handicap, even from scratch, provided the animal selected is not remarkably fast.'

Owens's last words were the most revealing. 'It sure feels good,' he sighed, 'to get out on the cinders again.'

Just four months earlier Jesse Owens had captivated the world and infuriated the Nazis by winning an unprecedented quartet of gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. Yet it had already come to this: running against a horse before a paltry crowd of 3,000 during the half-time interval of a Cuban football match.

Later, he would look back and take a more realistic view of the humiliating charade. 'It was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse,' he reflected. For Owens, however, the Havana race was far from his last bizarre stunt-run. In the ensuing years he also raced trains, cars, motorbikes, baseball players and even a dog. 'Those races made me sick,' Owens said, 'I felt like a freak.'

His involvement in every one of them reflected a simple, desperate truth for Jesse Owens as he left the track on that miserable Boxing Day.

At just 24 his career as a serious athlete was over.

Ruth Owens stares at a photograph hanging from the wall of her small study in Chicago. It shows Jesse Owens walking through the gates of the Olympic village in 1936. As he gazes back at her, his expression lost in the black frame, Jesse is forever 23 years old. Ruth is 85. Her face creases and melts at the sight of her husband, who died of lung cancer in March 1980 at the age of 66.

'Mmmmhmmm,' she eventually sighs, 'ain't he fine?' Owens made history in five remarkable days at the Berlin Olympics (see p47), establishing himself, alongside Muhammad Ali, as the iconic sportsman of the twentieth century. Yet, incredibly, his final performance as an athlete came just 10 days later: during the third leg of a meaningless relay - which an American team won on 15 August 1936, at White City in London.

'That Avery Brundage feller,' Ruth recalls, 'tore a big hole inside Jesse.' Brundage had arranged a post-Olympic tour across Europe with the sole purpose of making money for the two administrations of which he was president, the American Athletic Union and US Olympic Committee.

The tour began on 10 August, the day after the track and field programme ended in Berlin. The organisers of the first meeting in Cologne told Brundage that, if Owens performed, they would increase the AAU's cut of the gate receipts from the agreed 10 per cent to 15 per cent. The AAU brushed aside Owens's exhaustion and insisted he take part. After the long jump and the 100m final, he had to attend a banquet which only finished at midnight. Early the next morning he travelled alone to Prague for another exhibition.

Owens had no money when he arrived at the airport, leaving a fellow passenger to buy him some milk and a sandwich. The plane was delayed and Owens finally arrived in Prague at 4.30pm. He was immediately driven to the stadium where the meeting began at six. Over the next three hours he won the 100m and the long jump, though with performances that barely matched his best schoolboy efforts.

The following day he flew to the German town of Bochum, eating his first meal at four o'clock that afternoon. Two hours later he equalled his own world record of 10.3sec for the 100m. That night he and his team-mates left for England, arriving at Croydon Airport long after midnight. They were forced to sleep in an empty hangar.

Larry Snyder, Owens's college coach, claimed angrily that they were being treated like 'trained seals', while Owens himself told the New York Times: 'Somebody's making money somewhere. They are trying to grab all they can and we can't even buy a souvenir of the trip.'

Meanwhile, he was being bombarded with telegrams from America, each containing another lucrative offer: $40,000 from the radio entertainer Eddie Cantor to work on his show and $25,000 if he appeared on stage with a Californian orchestra were supposed to be just the start of a growing mountain of money.

Brundage, though, had other plans. He accepted further invitations from Sweden, Finland and Norway and insisted that Owens would spend the following week running across Scandinavia. Owens had lost 11 pounds in weight since arriving in Europe. He had also run in eight additional races for Brundage's benefit and had grown, in his own words, 'pretty sick of running'. After the White City relay, he and Snyder refused to board the Stockholm flight. Owens, instead, would take the next boat back to America.

'Jesse's got a big chance back home,' Snyder said. 'He's got a break that comes once in a lifetime and never comes at all to a lot of people. It's tough for a coloured boy to make money, at best. What kind of friend would I be to stand in his way?'

Brundage's response was swift and brutal. He instructed the AAU secretary Daniel Ferris to announce that: 'Jesse Owens is per- manently suspended from all amateur athletic competition. The suspension became automatic as soon as Owens refused to fulfil his competitive obligations.'

Brundage was emphatic that he would never allow Owens to run competitively again as long as he remained in power. Even the horse race in Havana carried the stamp of Brundage - for Owens had originally been contracted to run against Conrado Rodriques, Cuba's leading sprinter. But once Brundage threatened to ban him from all amateur competition in America if he raced against the 'professional Owens', Rodriques withdrew. Julio McCaw trotted into his place.

While Owens languished, Brundage's authority grew ever stronger. A former Olympic athlete himself (he competed in the 1912 decathlon) Brundage, who was then 49, had turned his construction and real-estate firm into a million-dollar business. He was as single-minded as a sports administrator - almost 40 years later he was still president of the International Olympic Committee.

But, in 1936, Owens was unaware of the enormity of Brundage's ban. 'This suspension is very unfair,' he told the Chicago Defender. 'All we athletes get out of this Olympic business is a view out of a train or airplane window. It gets tiresome. It really does. This track business is becoming one of the biggest rackets in the world. The AAU gets the money. It gets all the money collected in the United States and then comes over to Europe and takes half the proceeds here. A fellow desires something for himself.'

'It was a strange time,' Ruth Owens remembers, 'I went to New York to meet Jesse off the boat. His face was in every newspaper and everyone was his friend. We were taken to expensive restaurants and swanky hotels. But whenever Jesse looked a little deeper into each offer he saw there was nothing there. People kept telling him they were gonna do this or that for him. It was just fancy talk.'

In his 1978 autobiography, Owens admits that he was more naive than his wife. 'Ruth got a kick out of being wined and dined, too, for a couple of days anyway,' he wrote. 'But then I could tell she was starting to get edgy...[I told her] "You wouldn't believe some of the jobs these millionaires have offered me."

'She didn't say anything. I tried to persuade her to stay, but she went back [to Cleveland]. I had to stay. I had to decide which millionaire or two I wanted to work with.'

The pattern was set. As Owens was let down with one deal evaporating after another, Ruth stayed at home, looking after Gloria and, later, two more daughters, Beverly and Marlene. For the next 16 years Owens searched for both a steady income and a destiny more befitting his status as an Olympic champion. He found neither, and instead was forced onto the exhibition circuit. Amid the horses and trains he also once ran against Joe Louis. The world heavyweight champion was no sprinter, so Owens pretended to trip so the heavy-legged fighter could beat the 'world's fastest man'.

'It was a terrible time for him,' remembers Marlene Owens Rankin, his youngest daughter. 'They took away his career. They took away his life. Today, it would be the same as administrators telling Tiger Woods his career is over. Can you imagine how Tiger would feel, and how the rest of the world would react, if he was told at 24 he could never hit another golf ball again in serious competition?

'It took some real mental gymnastics for Jesse to rationalise this awful truth. It seems ridiculous now when you consider the multi-million deals that await any athlete who wins the Olympic 100m gold. But America was very different in 1936.

'On the one hand Jesse was being touted as this legend who had beaten Hitler. Yet he was continually reminded he was not so special. He was still black.'

In May 1939, Owens filed for bankruptcy. His laundry business - The Jesse Owens Dry Cleaning Company, which boasted a 'Speedy Seven Hour Service By The World's Fastest Runner' - had collapsed.

The following January, he accepted a position as a salesman with the Lyons Tailoring Company who hired him 'because of his popularity among the negro population'. Cleveland newspaper adverts featured Jesse in a 'dazzling three-piece suit' as he crouched in the sprinter's traditional starting pose. 'Come in and shake hands with the greatest athlete of all time,' the caption read. 'Jesse will be glad to show you the newest and smartest spring patterns and colors in fine imported and domestic fashions.'

Owens was not the best salesman in the world - or even Cleveland. His contract was terminated after six weeks. 'He spent too much time observing people,' his boss complained. 'Whenever a pretty girl passed the store he ran down the street after her.'

Despite his lack of involvement in serious athletics, Owens remained a phenomenal sportsman. In September 1950, just days after he turned 37, Owens completed the 100-yard dash in 9.7sec during a Milwaukee exhibition. 'The slender Owens was out the holes like a flash,' one reporter wrote, 'floating over the terrain like a feather. He was breathing easy at the finish.'

Jesse Owens' post-Olympic life was a maze of contradictions. Beyond the stunt-runs he had a dazzling variety of jobs - from nightclub entertainer and motivational speaker to director of the Illinois Youth Commission and 'international sports ambassador' for the American government. He survived a $114,000 debt and endless tax problems while always managing to sustain a comfortable middle-class existence.

His life was not tragic, yet it was marked by paradox and pain. And despite his symbolic role against Nazism, Owens was never free from racism himself. A few months before leaving for the Olympics in 1936 he and his best friend, the high-jumper Dave Albritton, had travelled across America with Ohio State University's athletic squad. On their return from an indoor meeting they stopped for a meal in Richmond, Indiana. While their white friends found seats around the empty tables, Owens, Albritton and another black athlete were blocked at the entrance.

The restaurant manager grunted: 'White folk only...' Albritton stepped towards him with clenched fists. 'Now then, Papa,' Owens said to Albritton, 'take it easy.'

Two months later, on another dark trip to Indianapolis, they were forbidden to drive into a roadside cafe. They had to wait outside in a parked car. When their white team-mates finally brought Albritton and Owens their chicken sandwiches, the proprietor rushed out. His arms pumped comically in time to his rant: 'We don't feed no niggers here.' Owens had to again restrain his friend.

'Jesse,' his wife suggests, 'was not a bitter man. He liked moving ahead with life. He was gearing up for the Olympics - and nothing was going to stop him.'

That prejudice was the underlying reason for the abrupt end of his athletic stardom. But his politically loaded Olympic victory also explains why he is still a greater icon than Carl Lewis - who matched his gold medal haul at the 1984 Games.

Lewis avoided Owens's fate. He had a long, seriously competitive and highly lucrative career. He did not have to race horses. He did not have to run against Mike Tyson. He did not have to move into the laundry business or work in a suit store. Lewis became a different kind of salesman. He made commercials for fast cars and rubber tyres. He marketed himself ceaselessly. Lewis became very rich - and unpopular.

His sleek confidence 'reeked of arrogance'. In Newsweek he was described as 'a master self-promoter... a fabled loner... with a whining attitude'. The damning assessment concluded that 'mere records do not make legends'.

But if Owens is blessed with eternal popularity it came at a high price, and not just for him. For while Owens was devastated, his family were also affected in the bleak aftermath of his Berlin triumph - Ruth most of all.

'My mother had to be very strong,' Gloria Hemphill says. 'It was lonely. I know this because I was the oldest daughter by six years. I would sit by her bed at night and talk to her for hours. I was her only company.'

There is something almost unbearably moving about the way in which Ruth and her three daughters - 68-year-old Gloria, 62-year-old Beverly and 61-year-old Marlene - now remember Jesse. But if his autobiography is a slim account of a huge life (it even ignores the Brundage ban) Owens wrote of himself as a husband and a father in blunt terms.

'One way to cut through the painful periods of absence, to re-establish the intimacy at once,' he confessed, 'was to walk in with diamond bracelets for Ruth and exotic dolls for the girls from foreign lands. But intimacy takes time. And my time had been taken up making money that I spent to try and regain the intimacy I'd once known with my family without the money.

'I saw it happening and I struggled to change it, to break the bonds that held me away from home week after week, month after month, and reunite with the four human beings that mattered most to me. Like a man caught in quicksand, the harder I struggled the deeper I sank.' Owens recalled racing to be home in time for his 43rd birthday in 1956 having again been away for weeks. '"I'll be there in time to kiss the little one goodnight before she goes to sleep," I thought. But the little one was no longer little.

'That night, not only was my baby, Marlene, too old to be told any bedtime stories by her father because she had an important date but Gloria, my oldest, had to rush out for a civil rights meeting which she was into long before it was fashionable.' Owens thought of Beverly, his middle daughter, as 'outgoing and impulsive like me'. But, that night, he was shocked by an '18 year-old's bold determination' as she announced the news of her impending marriage.

'We always joked about dad being old-fashioned,' Marlene recalls. 'He was a real patriarch who thought his daughters should be dignified young ladies. He came from a conservative generation. We were obviously from a different era - and we wanted to lead our own lives.' A few days after those bitter-sweet birthday revelations, Owens decided to curb his previously elusive restlessness. He told Ruth he would give up the road, and 'for the first time, really, I would be a full-time husband and father'. Her response was to 'sob with relief'.

Looking back, Ruth is wistfully philosophical. 'Jesse was always on the move, trying to earn a living and find the magic he had on the track. Jesse was crazy about running. When that got taken away it was a shock to his system. But things got easier - and our last years in Arizona were especially fine. See, Jesse never spoke about racing horses or anything. It was like he could forget some of the bad times.'

His daughters place Owens's life in a more political context. 'Well,' Beverly says, 'we were just kids when he was away such a lot. He was just our dad and that's what he did. But now we know he had little choice.'

'People rightly celebrate Jesse's achievements in 1936 as a victory over Hitler,' Gloria argues. 'But there was a bunch of Nazis in American athletics. Avery Brundage just wouldn't accept that Jesse, a black man, could show defiance.' Owens initially concealed his feelings - leading to mistaken accusations from younger athletes that he was an 'Uncle Tom'. 'It was only when we became adults that he spoke more openly about his experiences,' Marlene stresses. 'We saw his anger then. He was such a patriot - but he'd encountered racism all his life.'

When Jesse Owens died, people from all over America sent money to his family. 'These were just ordinary people who had been touched by him,' Marlene recalls. 'This was their way of showing their love and respect for him. We opened a fund which soon reached $6,000. Gloria, Beverly and I, with our family and friends, asked: "What are we going to do with this money?" It did not take long to decide. We set up the Jesse Owens Foundation.'

As the Foundation's executive director, Marlene and her sisters have spent the past 20 years working in his name to help children overcome adversity. 'We offer scholarships to around 38 students a year across America. Apart from giving money to help them complete their education we remind them of everything Jesse had to overcome. Sixty-four years may have passed but they still feel an empathy with him.

'These are just average kids, who have limited opportunities. But our success rate is 97 per cent in helping these kids graduate. We've got this almost perfect record at the Foundation because we specifically help those disadvantaged young people who have the inner strength. It's been quite a journey. And it's not over. It's still a battle to get corporations working with us. And, sure, when you're fund-raising it's hard to stay detached.'

Marlene looks away for a moment, her gaze finally resting on a photograph of Jesse Owens racing across the Olympic track. 'Sometimes,' she says, 'when rejection happens, it feels personal. It feels like they're rejecting my dad.'

 Contributions can be sent to the Jesse Owens Foundation, 401 N Michigan Avenue, Suite #290, Chicago, Illinois 60611, US.