This year's summer Olympics in Rio De Janeiro will be the 80th anniversary of track-and-field star Jesse Owens' historic run at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Amid adversity at home and abroad, Owens, at age 22, became the first American track athlete to earn four gold medals at a single Olympic Games, taking home gold in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and the long jump.
And now, his story is coming to the big screen.
On Feb. 19, "Race" will hit theaters nationwide starring Stephan James as Owens, Jason Sudeikis as his former Ohio State coach Larry Snyder and Jeremy Irons as former U.S. Olympic Committee chair Avery Brundage.
The film, directed by Stephen Hopkins, also has the approval of Owens' two daughters.
"I think it's time that people understand the true story of Jesse Owens and the Olympic Games that he participated in," Owens' daughter Marlene Owens Rankin told FOX Sports recently. "[The movie is] also for the children that don't know anything about Jesse Owens. They get a chance to see the true story and learn something from him."
"The movie was very accurate, very factual, and just very well done," Beverly Owens Prather added. "Stephan [James] does a fantastic job of portraying our father. ... We're hoping people will like it as well as we did."
Owens' daughters have been involved from the beginning after producer Jean-Charles Levy approached them five years earlier.
"When the script was ready, we had script approval," Rankin said. "So we reviewed it and made a lot of changes, which they honored, and then had a review of the rough [cut] of the film and then looked at the final. We've been involved in the process all along."
"I think that they did a great job in the concentrated fashion to express who this man was," Prather added.
Owens' story is about more than the hardware he earned. The movie begins in 1935, when Owens joins Ohio State's track team and shows Owens having to deal with segregation, calls for him to boycott the Games and the pressure of overcoming Adolf Hitler's propagandized Olympics along the way.
"It's really important for us for history not to be rewritten," Rankin said. "We wanted the facts to be right, and for the history to be expressed as it was."
"We want people to understand what kind of person he was and the things that he stood for," Prather said. "And hopefully it's really picked up by some people so they can understand his struggles and try to improve from there."
