US 400m great, rights activist Lee Evans dies
LOS ANGELES: Lee Evans, the 1968 Olympic 400m champion and a founding member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, has died at the age of 74, USA Track and Field said on Wednesday.
The USATF did not give a cause of death, but the San Jose Mercury News reported that Evans suffered a stroke last week in Nigeria and had remained unconscious in hospital there.
Evans won the 400m at the Mexico Games in a stunning 43.86sec, becoming the first man to break 44 seconds in the event. The world record—which improved the 44.06 mark he had set at the US trials that year—would stand for 20 years. “I was so tired, I knew I did something I’ve never done before,” Evans told NBC Sports for the film “1968” that documented the Mexico Games. “I wasn’t sure I won. Nobody told me I won, so they said, ‘Lee, you son of a gun.’ I said, ‘Who won? Who won?’”
Evans, who went on to anchor the US 4x400m relay team to gold in a world record time, almost opted out of the 400m final after Tommie Smith and John Carlos were thrown out of the Games for their clenched, gloved fist salute on the 200m medal podium. “After what Tommie and John did, there was a lot of commotion,” Evans said in 2017. “We had meetings, and yelling, but it turns out, we stuck to our guns,” added Evans, who along with fellow US 400m medallists Larry James and Ron Freeman wore a black beret on the podium to show solidarity with Smith, Carlos and other civil rights organisations seeking to draw attention to racial inequality and oppression in the United States and abroad.