Something in the Air

In his history book Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics (2009), American sports journalist Richard Hoffer tells the story of the 1968 Olympics, focusing on the efforts of African American athletes to use the games as a platform for civil rights protest. The book’s central figures are sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who famously gave a black power salute on the medal podium, having placed first and third in the 200m final.

Hoffer begins with the iconic image of the 1968 Olympics: Smith and Carlos stand on the podium, shoeless, heads low, but with gloved fists raised high.

From here, Hoffer moves back in time, seeking the origins of this iconic moment. He finds them in the early 1960s, at California’s San Jose State University, then nicknamed “Speed City,” for its ability to produce great track athletes. San Jose’s track coach, Bud Winter, had recruited Smith and Carlos alongside a host of other talented black athletes.



One of these athletes was a discus thrower named Harry Edwards. Academically talented and already involved in civil rights politics, Edwards was only in his second year at San Jose when he took Winter to task about the living conditions of the black athletes Winter had recruited. Winter responded angrily, the confrontation almost reaching boiling point.

Edwards quit the track and field program, switching to basketball. He might have had a professional career, but he chose the academic route, taking up graduate studies at Cornell. As an academic and an activist, he strove to organize black athletes, arguing that the racial inequalities of American society were writ large in sports.

Ahead of the 1968 Olympics, Edwards organized a group called the Olympic Project for Human Rights. At their first meeting in L.A. in 1967, Edwards proposed that African American athletes boycott the upcoming games. He argued that the games were already politicized by the contention between the US and USSR’s teams. A boycott of black athletes would strike a powerful propaganda blow for the civil rights movement. He said that unless black athletes stood up, they were allowing themselves to “be utilized as performing animals.”



Edwards also pointed to some of the more glaring injustices of the American sporting system. Many Southern universities still did not sponsor black athletes. Despite the success of black players in professional football and basketball, there was still not a single black manager or head coach in either sport.

However, Edwards’s efforts were counteracted by pressure from the US government. Athletes drawn from the military or ROTC were threatened with tours of Vietnam if they joined Edwards’s boycott. Other athletes simply did not wish to forgo the Games after years of arduous training. By spring 1968, although pressure from African American athletes and the athletes of several African countries had forced the non-participation of apartheid South Africa in the Games, it became clear that the US team would field its black athletes.

The summer of 1968 was politically fervid. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in April. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was also killed. In Vietnam, the US Army launched its Tet Offensive, while Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Just 10 days before the Games’ opening ceremony in Mexico City, the Mexican army opened fire on student protests, killing hundreds.



Edwards and his peers renewed pressure on the black athletes who had traveled to the Games to at least register some form of individual protest. However, as medal ceremony after medal ceremony went by without a black athlete demonstrating, even this started to look unlikely.

Smith and Carlos decided to take their stand at the last moment. They devised the gesture to achieve maximum symbolism. While Smith raised his right fist, Carlos raised his left, to signify black unity. Their bare feet represented poverty, and Smith wore a black scarf to signify blackness itself. Hoffer argues that their almost spontaneous gesture achieved a power that could not be explained away or soothed: “words piled up uselessly against the image they’d created.”

The American media reacted with rage. So did the (all-white) International Olympic Committee, led by American Avery Brundage. The Committee pressured the US team to drop Smith and Carlos, and the athletes were soon sent home in disgrace.



This was only the beginning. The pair received death threats. Neither would be able to have an athletic career. Both men felt that their gesture hastened the ends of their respective marriages.

Back in Mexico City, other great dramas played out in the shadow of Smith and Carlos’s gesture. Another African American athlete, Bob Beamon, smashed the long jump record by 22 inches. Dick Fosbury—another American—revolutionized the high jump with his “Fosbury flop” technique. The African American boxer George Foreman achieved the political messaging the US team had been hoping for when he beat Soviet boxer Ionas Chepulis in the second round of their final.

Hoffer concludes that the 1968 Olympics was a defining moment in the history of sports’ long relationship with politics, creating a new political consciousness amongst Olympic athletes.