On Sunday afternoon, ESPN aired a documentary on Tommie Smith and John Carlos which featured their revisiting Mexico City last year to mark the 40th anniversary of their black power demonstration at the 1968 Olympics. American sprinters, Smith and Carlos, who won gold and bronze, respectively, in the 200 meters, raised black-gloved hands in protest when the U.S. national anthem was played during their medal award ceremony. This was October of 1968, and just two weeks before, hundreds of protesting Mexican students had been machine gunned by the Mexican government in order to ensure that the Mexico City Olympic Games would not be disrupted. 1968 was the craziest year planet earth had seen since World War II had ended in 1945.
The United States Olympic Committee was outraged by the Smith/Carlos protests, and the two sprinters had to leave Mexico City with their wives before the Games were finished.
Returning to the United States, they were ostracized and victimized by the American power structure, to the point where John Carlos’ first wife committed suicide in 1977. Tommie Smith and John Carlos paid a heavy price, both socially and financially, for their Mexico City act of racial protest.
The Mexico City Olympics were the first Games televised worldwide using communications satellites. There was an international audience before which the American corporate establishment wished to project the superiority of their free market, democratic system. From the late 1950’s, the Olympic Games had become a Cold War battleground for the United States, where their chief rivals were the communist, totalitarian states of Russia and East Germany. It does not appear that big a thing today, but the climate in 1968 was a lot different from present day realities.
It is said that by the year 2042 (See article by Hua Hsu in the January/February 2009 issue of The Atlantic), America will be a white minority nation, but in 1968, the United States was not only decidedly white, America was hard core racist. Just six months before the Mexico City Olympics, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, whereupon blacks exploded in American cities. Bobby Kennedy was white, but the Kennedys were considered more pro-black than the average American politician, so when Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination was cut down by assassin’s bullets a couple months after King’s assassination, at a time when young whites were already violently protesting the Vietnam War, it seemed the mighty U.S. was coming dangerously close to civil war. In the 1968 climate, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were demonized for accusing America of racism on the international stage of the Olympics.
At the time of the Sydney, Australia Olympics in 2000, the Cold War between American capitalism and Russian/East German communism was over, and the United States had won. Marion Jones did not accuse America of anything in Sydney. She was not protesting anything. But she chose the Olympics to express her love for her mother’s native country – Belize. The American corporate structure was no doubt miffed by the Marion Jones display in Sydney. The United States had “made” Marion: she was in 2000 arguably the Olympics’ biggest star, and she had distracted the world with the Belizean thing. They must have considered her ungrateful.
At this newspaper, we have never really shared the view of some Belizeans that the Americans threw the book at Marion (she served six months in jail last year) because of her Belizean flag in Sydney, but it certainly did not endear her to the power brokers in America.
Over the last three decades, a lot of people have been using steroids in the world of American sports, and the list of those being exposed just keeps getting longer and longer. More and more, the names of American superstars are being linked with steroids. Alex Rodriguez confessed. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are fighting in court. Mark McGwire took the Fifth Amendment, while Rafael Palmeiro and Miguel Tejada lied. Floyd Landis lied. The world of American sports has been tainted in a way which is causing an uproar. But Marion Jones is the only big name who has gone to jail. (Tim Montgomery, her first child’s father, is in jail because of crimes related to a check scam.)
If the American bosses are not happy with Marion Jones, we want to tell them a little story about steroids. There was this little country no one knew about which started a bicycle race on Holy Saturday in 1928. As the years went by, the race became like a religion for our people, and the Crosscountry trophy was the Holy Grail in Belize. In 1987, everything changed: cyclists from the United States who knew about the “supplements” began to come to Belize and embarrass our young men – on our turf. In the beginning, most Belizeans were quick to believe it was because “our boys” were inferior or undisciplined. But after a while, we Belizeans got the sense. Out there, they “take things.”
Steroids didn’t start in Belize. It was your scientists who cooked up all that stuff. If you think that Marion Jones undermined America prestige by waving a Belizean flag, how do you think we feel when one of you raises our Holy Grail year after year? It’s nothing personal, but it cuts both ways.