A new PBS documentary details the life of Jesse Owens before and after his historic performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Laurens Grant’s film hits many familiar themes and surprises with others, but one of its gems is Owens’s compelling rivalry with Eulace Peacock, one of the few contemporary sprinters who, during a stretch in 1935, had Owens’s number.

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Eulace Peacock, in 1951, and Jesse Owens, developed a rivalry in the year before Owens’s historic Olympics in Berlin.

The popular approach to Owens is to race past the guts of his competitive career to show how Owens stuck it to Hitler and Nazi Germany. Often overlooked is that Owens was a flesh and blood human being who had challenges.

He also had a rival.

“I wasn’t trying to take anything away from all of his wins or his career,” Grant said, “but I was thinking that there had to be some sort of rival.”

There was: Peacock, who in 1935 defeated Owens repeatedly in the 100 and in the long jump. In fact, Owens suggested that the explosive Peacock may have been the better sprinter. Yet Owens is emblazoned in the annals of history while Peacock is an asterisk.

Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Games, designed by Adolf Hitler as a monument to Aryan supremacy. Owens also became a symbol of the hypocrisy of the United States, which decried racism and bigotry abroad while practicing discrimination at home.

Peacock, meanwhile, is a prime example of the “what if” moments of sports, and life.

What if Wally Pipp had never had a headache?

What if Portland had drafted Michael Jordan instead of Sam Bowie?

What if Eulace Peacock had not pulled his hamstring? Would the history of the Nazi Olympics have been reconfigured?

“As a filmmaker I’m astounded at how literally history is made in the span of a few seconds sometimes,” Grant said. “In just a split second history could turn left or right or up or down.”

Owens and Peacock had parallel lives. Each was born in Alabama, 11 months apart, sons of sharecroppers who migrated north around the same time in search of a better life.

While Owens rarely talked about his life in Alabama, Peacock was more forthcoming. In William J. Baker’s “Jesse Owens: An American Life,” Peacock said: “When I look back over my lifetime I can get so bitter about things that happened to me. And actually I should hate white people, but fortunately my family didn’t bring me up that way.”

Peacock and his family settled in northern New Jersey, Owens in Cleveland. Peacock became a gifted long jumper, pentathlete and football player who went on to run track at Temple. Owens was a track sensation by the time he was a high school junior and then starred at Ohio State.

In 1935 Peacock equaled the 100-meter world record of 10.3 seconds — Owens had never run that fast. A month later, on May 25, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Mich., Owens broke three world records — in the 220-yard dash, the 220-yard hurdles and the long jump — and equaled another, in the 100-yard dash, in the space of an incredible 45 minutes.

Owens defeated Peacock in their next three meetings that year and was thought to be unbeatable. But on July 4 at the University of Nebraska, Peacock beat Owens in the long jump and the 100 meters.

At one point, after Owens was defeated by Peacock in consecutive races, the former Olympic sprint champion Charles Paddock predicted that Peacock, of all American sprinters, was the only sure thing for a berth on the 1936 Olympic team and said he felt Owens was burned out.

Owens seemed to agree. After losing to Peacock five straight times beginning in July 1935, he said Peacock was the better sprinter. “It’s going to take a special man to beat Eulace Peacock,” he told one newspaper. “You see, I’ve already reached my peak. Peacock is just now reaching his. He’s a real athlete. I don’t know whether I can defeat him again.”

Either way, track and field experts saw Owens and Peacock as the United States’ unbeatable one-two punch at the 1936 Games.

Then fate intervened.

In August 1935, Peacock pulled his right hamstring while competing in Milan. Then at the Penn Relays in April 1936, he tore his hamstring while running a relay.

The dream was over. Owens would make history that August in Berlin; Peacock did not make the Olympic team. The next two Olympiads — in 1940 and 1944 — were canceled because of World War II. By 1948, Peacock had retired from track and field.

Peacock, who died in 1996, said in an interview that he had moved on. “What can you do?” he said. “I couldn’t shed any tears. It happened and that was it. Sure I was disappointed, but you can’t spend your life thinking about what might have been.”

Harrison Dillard never knew Peacock well, but he knows how Peacock felt about being cheated by history. Dillard, the pre-eminent hurdler of his era, experienced his own “what if” moment in 1948.

Dillard was the world-record holder in the 110-meter hurdles going into the 1948 London Games. He was favored to win and set a world record. But he did not even qualify in the hurdles.

More than 60 years later, Dillard can’t explain what happened. Unlike Peacock, who could point to an injury, Dillard simply had a bad day in the Olympic trials.

Dillard said he rarely hit hurdles in a race but did so four or five times at the trials. “I guess it was fate,” he said during a recent phone interview. “In my case, that’s the only thing I can attribute it to; fate said you’re not supposed to win.”

Dillard was fortunate. He and his coach had decided before the trials that he would also attempt to qualify for the 100 meters. “It was a chance to get an additional medal,” Dillard said. “Plus the fact that Jesse was my idol and that was one of the events he ran.”

Not only did Dillard qualify for the 100 meters and earn a spot on the 4x100 relay team, but he also won gold medals at the Olympics in both.

But the disappointment, the embarrassment of not even competing in the event he supposedly owned, haunted and drove Dillard for the next four years.

“Your failure, or perceived failure, can be great motivation for you,” he said. “I was the best in the world in 1948 but I didn’t win the Olympics, so that was in the back of my mind: You’re the best, why don’t you prove it? I wanted to show the world I was still the best at jumping over fences.”

Unlike Peacock, Dillard got a second chance. He ran in the 1952 Helsinki Games, winning gold medals in the hurdles and the 4x100 relay.

This summer he will go to the London Games, the only male Olympian to win gold in the 100 meters and the 110-meter hurdles.

Still, at age 88, he thinks about the medal fate took away more than 60 years ago.

“It’s always there,” he said. “Obviously, you can’t rewrite history, you can’t change it, but sometimes, every now and then, you ask yourself, ‘What if I had qualified in the hurdles?’ That’s a big ‘what if.’ ”

The Olympic track and field trials are next month, and of the hundreds of competitors, some will advance and a handful may go on to soar as Owens did, into the record books.

And some will suffer the fate of Eulace Peacock and spend the rest of their careers haunted by time’s cruelest lament.