Flop To The Top

Tommy Smith is auctioning off his gold medal from wining the 1968 Olympics 200-meter dash. Smith and teammate John Carlos, who won the bronze, caused a firestorm of controversy when each raised a fist in a black-gloved salute during the playing of the national anthem at the medal ceremony. The photo of their silent protest has become one of the civil rights era’s iconic images, its power ultimately outlasting the backlash (including death threats) that pursued both men and their families for years.

For anyone under a certain age, it is hard to imagine the sparse media landscape of that time, and how it amplified the impact of their gesture. In the pre-internet and pre-cable era of broadcast television, the Olympics was the first globally televised real-time event of its kind. The 1968 Summer Games was only the third to be televised live, and the first to receive a significant audience.

This was in large part due to the coverage concept put together by ABC’s Roone Arledge, who saw the Games as a live dramatic mini-series in which the athletes were the characters. Arledge’s story-driven approach struck ratings gold, helped along by three of the most unforgettable storylines in Olympic history: Smith and Carlos, Bob Beamon, and Dick Fosbury.

Fosbury, the offbeat high jumper, became my instant favorite, winning his gold medal using a technique that was the opposite of every other high jumper in Olympic history. This was heady stuff for a 15 year-old like myself, who was pretty sure almost everyone was doing almost everything the wrong way.

Instead of diving over the bar face down in a slowly torquing sideways straddle, Fosbury launched himself into a high, arcing twist that sent him over the bar head first, feet and face to the sky, landing on his back. They called it the Fosbury Flop. Not only did Fosbury flop his way to the top of the medal stand in Mexico City, but by the next Olympics 70% of high jumpers had switched to his method. Floppers have won all but two of the 36 Olympic high jump medals since.

Beyond the minor detail of changing his sport forever, the most memorable thing about Fosbury was his facial expression. While everyone else wore the heavy, hyper-focused glare of champions, Fosbury had this goofy zen grin, which erupted into an expression of pure joy after every successful jump. He looked more like a kid leaping into a giant leaf pile than a highly trained athlete going for Olympic gold. Dick Fosbury was clearly having the time of his life.

Bob Beamon’s achievement was equally rare: a singular moment of athletic perfection. His winning long jump broke the existing world record by almost two feet, setting an Olympic mark that still stands and a new world record that lasted for 23 years. It’s been called the Perfect Jump, which it certainly was in Beamon’s career. He would never again jump even as far as the old world record that he shattered in Mexico City. But on that day, on that stage, in the moment when it mattered most, Beamon did more than just jump. He flew

Smith’s and Carlos’s protest came on only the fourth day of competition. I don’t remember watching the medal ceremony live. I do remember the outcry that followed, as Smith and Carlos were banished from the Olympic Village and the remainder of the Games.

1968 had delivered more than the average amount of shocking news for Americans.  Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated. Vietnam drenched in its bloodiest year ever. The Prague Spring crushed by an onslaught of Soviet tanks. Worst of all was an America helpless to prevent any of these things from happening.

The Olympics was supposed to give us a break from all of that, though medal counts had already become a proxy battleground between the Cold War superpowers. Instead, two of our own had turned on us and hit us in our weakest link – race* – in front of the whole world. It stung.

But it was also an act of unmistakable courage and dignity, not only by Smith and Carlos, but also by silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia. He joined Smith and Carlos in adding an Olympic Project for Human Rights patch to his tracksuit for the ceremony, and was excoriated by the Australian press and public for his participation. He was pointedly left off the 1972 Australian team, and was even snubbed by the organizers of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, only to become a part of that event at the invitation of the American team.

Looking back, Smith and Carlos were merely the first to recognize the global media platform the Games inevitably created. Four years later came the unthinkable massacre in Munich. Eight years after that, the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics altogether, ostensibly to punish the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Thank goodness the USOC has since changed that metric, or we would’ve had to boycott ourselves in the last two Olympics, and possibly the next.

Now Smith has put his gold medal, along with a pair of his signature red running shoes, up for auction. The starting bid is $250,000. One wonders whether Glenn Beck, with his twin passions for gold and wrapping himself in civil rights iconography, will be able to resist. Almost anything is possible in our current media landscape. Anything, that is, but the pure defiance, pure perfection, and pure joy of America’s 1968 Olympic champions. We don’t do purity anymore, unless you count pure crassness. That competition is at an all time high.

*A little-known sidebar is that Beamon had been suspended from his UTEP track team four months before the Olympics for refusing to compete against Brigham Young, due to BYU’s alleged racist admission policies at the time.