1968 OlympicsMexico City

What are they saying?

Location

controversies

•altitude 2,300 m, 30% less oxygen

•first sex testing for women (steroids)

• ‘professional’ athletes (Soviet system)

•political problems within country

•political problems around the world

Political issues around the world

Spring 1968•Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

•assassination of Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy

•Vietnam

•civil rights movement in the U.S.

Political problems – Mexico City• massacre at the Plaza of Three Cultures on

Oct. 2, 1968• Official count – 35 killed• Unofficial est. – 267 killed, 1000+ wounded

Boycott?• South Africa (apartheid) and

Rhodesia

• Soviet Union and newly independent African nations (proxy wars)

• Threaten boycott

• Avery Brundage – “If participation in sport is to be stopped every time the politicians violate the laws of humanity, there will never be any international contests.”

potential American boycott?

• Dr. Harry Edwards, sociologist, San Jose St. University

• decision for each athlete to do their own thing

the image

John Carlos

Tommy Smith

Peter Norman

Fosbury flop

Bob Beamon

29 ft. 1/2 inches 22 3/4 inches

Mark Spitz

“Brundage did succeed in eliminating pictures of the black-power protest from the lavishly illustrated official report published by the USOC. When the Mexican organizing committee released a film in which Smith and Carlos appear, Brundage objected, “The nasty demonstration against the United States flag by negroes . . . Had nothing to do with sport . . .[It] has no more place in the record of the games than the gunfire” at the pregame riots. Coming from a man unbothered by the prominent appearance of Adolf Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia, these were odd remarks. Indeed, one might argue that the gunfire provoked by social unrest was as important a part of Olympic history as the pigeons released to symbolize a world at peace.

Allen Guttmann, The Olympics, 132.