1968 olympics mexico city. what are they saying?
TRANSCRIPT
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.