Bob Beamon (© Getty images)
From 12 to 27 October, Mexico City was home to the XIX Olympic Games. For the first time ever, a major sports event was held in an unusual setting: the 2200m altitude of the Mexican mountain plateau, where the rarefied air contributed to heighten the drama which already surrounds every event.
That year of 1968 was already dramatic for the profound social movements which were in play around the world. Unsettled youth, wishful to accelerate the conquest of new freedoms and new rights had enflamed the university campuses of the United States and the flames quickly spread - taking the opposite route to that of the Olympic flame - to the shores of the Old Continent . Bursting from the doors of the Sorbonne, the protest put Paris in a state of siege: for weeks, the French capital was turned into a battlefield, putting at risk the very power and prestige of French President Charles de Gaulle. Even in what was then the communist world, violent protests were rife: Soviet tanks quelled the "Springtime of Prague" and in China, the "Cultural Revolution", started to show some cracks.
In the midst of all this turmoil, in Europe and in the United States (where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated during his Presidential campaign tour), the world of sport was unable to remain a haven of peace. Many athletes were university students who shared their colleagues’ thirst for change. A thirst which overtook the student masses of Mexico City, three hundred thousand of whom held a protest rally a few days before the start of the Games in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (representing the meeting of the cultures of the Aztecs, the Spanish Conquistadors and latter-day Mexico), to be met by the bullets of the Mexican Army. It was a massacre which will remain with me for the rest of my days.
But the Olympics was to go on anyway. Avery Brundage, then President of the IOC, spoke of an "internal affair" of the host country and reassured all concerned that public order had been reinstated. The athletes, engrossed in their forthcoming endeavours and encloistered in the confines of the Olympic Village, kilometres away from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, were oblivious to the pain of the people: only vague echoes of the tragedy rippled the peace of the village.
That Olympic Village played home to some of the greatest champions in the history of sport, this would become apparent as the competitions of the XIX Olympics unravelled. In this light, the Games were revolutionary, almost as though the tension reigning throughout the world had boosted the adrenaline coursing through the veins of the athletes.
Preparations for the Olympics were, perhaps for the very first time, truly scientific. This was imposed by the special environmental conditions in which the Games were being held and the need to adapt the respiratory and cardiac systems to the rarefied air. Extensive studies were conducted on the effect of altitude on athletic performances, for the first time altitude training was introduced, a direct consequence of the 68 Olympics. Not that those studies were innovative: a celebrated Italian physiologist, Professor Angelo Mosso of Turin, conducted research into the matter at the turn of the century and reached important conclusions on man’s ability to adapt to exertion in low levels of oxygen content. However, the Mexico Olympics obliged athletes, technicians and doctors to experience what had for many only been guessed at: the changes produced in the organism by high-altitude training.
Technology was also behind another, major revolution in the materials sector. The tracks and runways were no longer in clay but in synthetic material (tartan): the performance benefits were immediately apparent. These innovations, coupled with the rarity of the air and the reduction in gravitational effects were to push the athletes in the sprints and events requiring muscular elasticity to make incredible improvements in their performance, like England’s David Hemery in the 400m hurdles, who knocked fully seven tenths of a second off the world record.
Those who suffered were the women and men in the long desistance events and all those competing on the borderlines between the aerobic and the anaerobic. But the arrival en masse on the world sports’ stage of the East African runners would signal the start of another extraordinary revolution: the revolution led by Keino, Gammoudi, Naftali Temu and Mamo Wolde (who came second in the 10,000m and won the Marathon, succeeding Abebe Bikila), of Biwott.
For all of these reasons, I still consider - after participating in nine Olympics - that the Mexico Olympic Games were, at least from my point of view, the most fascinating. They were the last Games where journalists could practice their art without the fear of being beaten by television. TV coverage was modest, at least insofar as the rights received by the IOC were concerned: 4.5 million dollars (!)…. The difference in the time zone and lack - or scarce availability - of satellite communications (which only really came into their own two years later for the football World Cup) forced television stations to settle for broadcasting after the radio stations, and even after newspapers. Our work was, nonetheless, difficult: we wrestled with telephones, with the problems of getting a transatlantic connection and enormously high costs. Our editors asked us to try to save money and many resorted to sending their reports by telegram for rewriting by desk-bound colleagues back in the newspaper. This exercise of dashing off a piece in the middle of night to meet the deadline of the presses was for me and many others of the up and coming generation an unrepeatable school of journalism.
Like when you had to report, rewriting the article a number of times, on the incredible triple jump competition. It was the afternoon of 17 October, already night-time in Italy and Giuseppe Gentile - who had set a world record of 17.10m in the event the day before, in qualifying - started in the final with a bound of 17.22m. Gentile was an elegant and powerful jumper, with a low, beautifully rhythmic style. But he was facing that master, Victor Saneyev, the Georgian whose every gesture breathed perfection and Nelson Prudencio, a Brazilian of exceptional talent. In the end there were three world records more: Saneyev, with 17.23m, Prudencio with 17.27m, and finally, victory for Saneyev with 17.39m.
The following day, 18 October, was the day of Robert "Bob" Beamon. Today, his long jump record of 8.90m has been beaten, but at the price of 23 years of travail and thanks to a duel between the greatest athlete of all time - Carl Lewis - and that magnificent long jumper Mike Powell. Thirty years on, the records of Mexico City may have been broken, but their memory lives on!
In the limelight that their records throw on them, those men and women seem to grow in stature. The sprint of James Hines was unforgettable, but what of Tommie Jet Smith? I do not believe that anyone, in the United States or anywhere else, has ever had more talent. In a showdown between Smith and Michael Johnson, I wouldn’t give the double Atlanta Olympics gold medallist a chance: in either the 200 or the 400. Tommie Smith was a hurricane: he devoured both competition and track with his huge strides. The competition were his stable mate John Carlos and the Australian Peter Norman and he destroyed them. Unfortunately, the structure of athletics in those days gave these phenomenal athletes no chance to earn their living from their sport; and Smith and Carlos, anyway, bear the stigma or a terrible sin.
They committed it on the Olympic podium, that 16 October: they raised their black-gloved hands, their heads bowed as the Stars and Stripes was played and the US flag raised. They had a thousand reasons to make that gesture. It told the world of the racial discrimination which existed in the United States, and of the barriers which - the day after their Olympic triumph - would once more be raised about them, as they were about all coloured men and women.
This too was Mexico ’68: a stage where the demand for justice and equal rights could be made. Today, everyone recognises that Smith, Carlos, Evans, James, Freeman and Matthews were right and a ceremony will be held to honour these champions - and their partners - on 19-21 June in New Orleans, during the American National Championships.
The majority of critics agree that that was the strongest US team ever to participate in any of the 26 Olympic games. Another member of that team - Dick Fosbury - even revolutionised the high jump with his new style: the Fosbury Flop.
Giorgio Reineri was for many years a leading Italian journalist specialising in athletics. He is the director of the IAAF Media Department
