50 years later, Olympic protest still resonating

LOS ANGELES — Fifty years after raising clenched fists in protest during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the shock waves unleashed by John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s salute of defiance are still rippling around the sporting world.

The image of the African-American sprinters standing on the medal podium on Oct 16, 1968, heads bowed while each raised a solitary, leather-gloved fist into the night sky would become one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

The protest redefined the concept of athlete activism as the stuffy, antiquated world of the Olympic movement under then--president Avery Brundage collided with the political and cultural mael-strom raging across the globe.

The United States had already been convulsed by the twin assassinations of Doctor Martin Luther King in April and the murder of presi-dential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy in June. In between the trauma of those events, deadly rioting erupted in Chicago.

Large--scale protests against the Vietnam War gained momentum through--out a year which also saw civil unrest in France as student--led demonstrations and gen-eral strikes plunged the country into chaos.

By the time of the Olym-pics, the febrile mood sweep-ing the world had reached Mexico City.

Just days before the Games got under way, Mexican gov-ernment forces crushed a protest by students and civil-ians

That crackdown set the stage for an Olympics that will forever be associated with Smith and Carlos’s “Black Power” salute.

On the morning of Oct 16, Smith won the 200 meters in a then--world record of 19.83 sec, with Carlos taking bronze behind Australia’s Peter Nor-man.

At the medal ceremony that evening, Smith and Car-los proceeded with their planned protest which had been hatched before the Olympics.

The repercussions for Smith and Carlos were severe.

Brundage, the Internation-al Olympic Committee’s American President, demanded the duo be kicked out of the Games for what a spokesman decried as “a vio-lent breach” of the Olympic spirit.

Within two days, the Unit-ed States Olympic Committee had bowed to an IOC demand that Smith and Carlos be sent home, where they were greet-ed by opprobrium including death threats.

Carlos blames the 1977 sui-cide of his wife Kim on the turbulent aftermath of the controversy, calling it the “greatest sadness” of his life.

As Smith and Carlos grap-pled with the consequences of their protest, the rest of the sports world was also funda-mentally altered.

Dave Zirin, the sports edi-tor of The Nation magazine and author of The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, said the recent activism of athletes such as former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kae-pernick was linked directly to Carlos and Smith.

“So many athletes cite 1968 as their touchstone, to say ‘Hey, it’s happened before, this is our legacy as protesting athletes, and we’re not giving up that legacy,’” he said.

AGENCE FRANCE--PRESSE