ABSTRACT
On 16 October 1968, the Olympic 200 metres gold medal was won in a world record time of 19.83 seconds. Broadcast live and in colour – the first time the summer Olympics had been generally available in this format – viewers witnessed the most extraordinary event in the history of the Olympics, if not modern sport itself. As the US national anthem played at the medal ceremony, the gold and bronze medallists bowed their heads and raised their clenched fists in protest against racism and poverty in America. Those viewers who looked closely at their screens would also notice that the Australian silver medallist was wearing a badge of solidarity with his brother athletes. Thanks to television, not only sport but politics had been brought into tens of millions of living rooms around the world, ensuring that the protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos would be seared into the global memory. Politics had been at the forefront of international sport since the 1950s. One
common accusation that the West regularly levelled against the Soviets was that they had made sport political. Of course, as we have seen, nationalist and conservative politics had always been part of modern sport. But the Russians brought a different type of politics. In particular, the USSR campaigned for greater representation in the Olympic movement of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia and for the expulsion of South Africa for its apartheid policies.2 To a large extent this was because Soviet officials were aware of the growing radicalisation that was taking place around the world and sought to take diplomatic advantage from it. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, independence struggles in Africa and the Cuban Revolution.
The 1960s became a decade of revolutionary fervour and social change that inspired new generations to challenge the established authorities. And, for the first time, sport was not immune to that challenge. It is a remarkable fact that before the 1960s there had been no significant internal
challenge to the orthodoxies of sport. The workers’ sport movement had attempted to build an external alternative to amateur and commercial sport. Those who had suffered at the hands of the leadership or the ideology of mainstream sport had simply accepted it and made the best of their situation. Jack Johnson was not a radical or revolutionary but simply believed in his right to live his life as he chose – and was persecuted for it. But he was not interested in politically challenging the racism of boxing. Jesse Owens, driven out of amateur athletics days after his triumph at the Berlin Olympics by Avery Brundage’s demand that he compete in fund-raising exhibition races for the United States Olympic Committee, never questioned Brundage’s right to govern athletics.3
