A tradition at my friend’s Passover seder is for guests to go around the table and say what they would carry with them when leaving Egypt.

For more than four decades after he was suddenly and unceremoniously removed from participation in the 100-meter relay race at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Marty Glickman—then a young athlete, later a beloved voice of New York sports radio—vaguely and quietly chalked up the greatest disappointment of his life to “politics.”