Pasadena, Calif., honored Jackie, left, and Mack Robinson with busts, but Jackie Robinson held a grudge over the way his brother was treated there

Jesse Owens won the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Summer Games in Olympic-record time, the third of his four gold medals in Berlin. Owens’s dominance will be remembered forever, but the silver and bronze medalists in that race, Matthew Robinson and Martinus Osendarp, also had fascinating life stories.

Robinson, who was known as Mack, also broke the old Olympic mark, with a time of 21.1 seconds. He was overshadowed by Owens, much as his accomplishments have been overshadowed by those of his younger brother, Jackie, the Hall of Famer who broke baseball’s color barrier.

A track star at Pasadena City College in California, Mack Robinson could not afford the trip to New York for the Olympic trials, so a group of local businessmen raised $150 for his train fare. Robinson had no coach, and he qualified for the 200 in the same battered pair of spikes he had worn during the college track season.

He ran a sensational race in Berlin although his shoes continued to deteriorate. He nipped at Owens’s heels, and finishing four-tenths of a second behind gnawed at him.

“Daddy always thought if he had better shoes, or some decent coaching, he could have beaten Jesse, or made it even closer than it was,” his daughter, Kathy Robinson Young, said.

The silver medal meant little in Pasadena, a city Robinson compared to the Jim Crow South.

“If anybody in Pasadena was proud for me, other than my family and close friends,” he once said, “they never showed it. The only time I was noticed was when somebody asked me during an assembly at school if I’d race against a horse.”

Robinson was reduced to pushing a broom, sweeping downtown streets while wearing his Olympic sweatshirt with a big “USA” on the front, unable to afford new clothes. Racial conflict cost him that job, too. When a judge ordered the desegregation of public swimming pools in Pasadena, the city retaliated by firing all its black workers, including Robinson.

Jackie Robinson was 17 when his brother took the silver in Berlin, and his anger over Mack’s treatment stoked a lifelong grudge against his hometown.

Mack Robinson wound up working in baseball, as an usher at Dodger Stadium.

“He would sneak the family into the blue level,” recalled Young, referring to the good seats.

But he found his calling as a truant officer for John Muir High School in Pasadena and in speaking out against local youth street crime.

“He was very strict, very strict,” Young said. But he was generous when it came to Muir football games.

“Daddy would flash his pass to get us in,” she said. “And any kids hanging around at the gate, he would sweep them all in, 20 or so at a time, saying, ‘They’re with me.’ ”

After decades of being ignored by his city and his country, Mack Robinson was chosen to be part of a group that carried a giant Olympic flag into the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles Coliseum.

“It was his greatest moment,” Young said.

In 1997, Pasadena honored the Robinson brothers by unveiling nine-foot-high bronze sculptures of their heads across the street from City Hall.

“When they were building them,” Young said, “I used to go down and take pictures of the two heads, Jackie’s and Daddy’s, lying on a flatbed truck.”

The inscription under Mack Robinson’s statue speaks to a life that was scarcely defined by his race in Berlin. It reads, “Athletes should recognize that once they establish themselves, people will attempt to pattern their lives after their sports heroes.”

As Young said, “I’m just as proud of his achievements with the youth of Pasadena as I am of his athletic achievements.”

Osendarp, a gangly Dutchman who finished two-tenths of a second behind Robinson in the 200 and also took third in the 100, was recognized immediately after the 1936 Olympics. He returned to the Netherlands a hero, the “best sprinter of the white race,” in the words of Han Hollander, the Dutch radio sportscaster who called Osendarp’s races. The president of the airline KLM sent a plane to Berlin to fly Osendarp home, where he was honored across the nation.

Born in Delft, near The Hague, in 1916, he preferred soccer like most Dutch youth. Osendarp was a fleet wing.

“I always had to wait up front until my teammates arrived,” he said in a rare interview with the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant in 1999, three years before his death.

When a trainer from Germany introduced him to the joys of running as sport, Osendarp gave up soccer for sprinting.

“Our boy is a quick one,” his parents wrote in a journal at the time.

Osendarp and his fellow sprinters did not have access to starting blocks, so they dug shallow holes in the track with spades. Thriving despite the conditions, he qualified for the Berlin Games in the 100 and the 200.

Before the 200 race, Osendarp later recalled, he shook hands with Owens, but they had no other interaction. Running in the innermost lane, Osendarp had a good view as Owens and Robinson shot past him. Osendarp concentrated on finishing third.

He would almost certainly have won a third medal, in the 4x100 relay, but he collided with a German runner as he began the anchor leg and dropped his baton, disqualifying the Dutch team.

Osendarp became a police officer in The Hague while continuing to run competitively, capturing the 100 and 200 in the 1938 European Championships. He was training for the 1940 Olympics when the Germans invaded on May 10.

The blitzkrieg rapidly overwhelmed the Netherlands. Osendarp’s parents were Dutch National Socialists, so it seemed natural for him to sign up for the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence arm of the SS, the Nazi special police.

“I thought I had to do it; I was wrong,” he told the Dutch newspaper Limburgs Dagblad in 1988. “Afterwards, I did ask myself: ‘What was I doing? How could I be so naïve?’ ”

Osendarp brought an athlete’s focus and a policeman’s skills to his new job, that of hunting resistance fighters. He arrested several dozen saboteurs, forgers and spies, some of whom died in prison.

In 1945, Osendarp was convicted of war crimes and given a 15-year sentence. He did hard labor in the Emma coal mine in Limburg, near the German border. After serving 12 years, Osendarp was released and found work as difficult to come by as Robinson had in Pasadena.

“I was unable to find a job in the west, so I returned to Emma to work,” Osendarp told Limburgs Dagblad.

After decades of being shunned, he was appointed the track coach at a nearby club, where he instructed young runners in the finer points of sprinting for nearly four decades. It is not known how many of Osendarp’s athletes were aware of his past.

“Of course I have remorse,” he told de Volkskrant, “but remorse always comes when it is too late.”

Matthew M Robinson