And tragedy in 31 chapters
His 9.69sec was impressive enough — Richard Thompson was second in 9.89sec — but analysis of Bolt's run by the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo suggested that the Jamaican could have finished in 9.55sec had he pushed to the end.
Bolt copped a bit of flak for his celebrations, including from buttoneddown IOC president Jacques Rogge, but it was unlikely to keep him awake at night as he added eight more golds to his Olympic tally, remaining unbeaten at 100m, 200m and the 4x100m across Beijing, London and Rio.
He would have to return one, when a blood sample from teammate Nesta Carter came back positive, eight years after Jamaica’s 4x100m win in Beijing.
Almost as important to the sport as his infectious personality and flat out speed has been the fact that Bolt has never returned a negative test.
Smith said.
They received an unexpected boost when Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore the Olympic Project for Human Rights badges in solidarity.
The protest was, said some contemporary reports, barely acknowledged at the stadium, but it did not go unnoticed.
Enter Avery Brundage, a thoroughly reprehensible human — a dyedinthewool white supremacist — who held the IOC presidency from 1952 to 1972.
Brundage, an American, threatened the entire US team with expulsion unless they acted against the pair and they were given 48 hours to pack and leave.
“Once we got back we were ostracised, even by our own,” Smith said. “Folks were scared, man. No jobs. We couldn’t find work. People even told us, ‘We can’t get close to you guys because we have our own jobs to protect.’ These were my friends. At least, they were my friends before I left for Mexico City.”
Smith and Carlos found redemption. They have won awards and have statues in their likeness. As the godfathers of the activist athlete era, they have overcome.
How the other half runs (1948)
The Olympic Games had been a maleonly enterprise until 1928, but it was not until 1948 and the emergence of a prejudicebusting Dutchwoman that perceptions as to the credibility of women’s sport started to shift.
Fanny BlankersKoen is arguably the most important female athlete in history. In winning four golds in London, matching Owens' record in Berlin before the world exploded, the “Flying Dutchmam” shattered preconceived notions of motherhood effectively signalling the end of athletic aspiration.
BlankersKoen was 30 and the mother of two when she dominated the cinders at Wembley Stadium.
In 1936 she went to Berlin and finished sixth in the high jump and fifth as part of the 4x100m relay team. Her most treasured possession, however, was the autograph of Owens.
BlankersKoen spent the war years in occupied Netherlands and fitted a number of national and world records around the birth of her two children. She was criticised for being a selfish mother and that only escalated when she announced her intention to travel to London for the 1948 Olympics.
“I got very many bad letters, people writing that I must stay home with my children and that I should not be allowed to run on a track with — how do you say it? — short trousers,” she told the in 1982.
“But I was a good mother. I had no time for much besides my house chores and training, and when I went shopping it was only to buy food for the family and never dresses.
“One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children. When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said: ‘I show you’.”
She did, winning the 100m, 80m hurdles, 200m and came from 5m behind in the anchor leg of the 4x100m relay to lead her Dutch team to gold. It was a stunning haul, but even then she was shortchanged, only being allowed to enter three individual events when she was the current world recordholder in the long and high jumps as well.
BlankersKoen returned home to much fanfare and a bicycle gifted to her by the citizens of Amsterdam. Her trailblazing legacy was more profound than even she could have imagined. In 1972, she bumped into Owens at the Munich Games and started to excitedly introduce herself to tell him about the autograph she still had: “You don’t have to tell me who you are, I know everything about you,” Owens said.
Jesse Owens beats the Aryans (1936)
Anybody who thinks the modern Olympics came fully formed out of the mind of Pierre de Coubertin in 1896 probably hasn’t read a lot about the early events. They were largely homespun affairs, were often attached to other exhibitions and were a bit of a shambles.
That changed in Berlin 1936, when Germany’s ruling
National Socialist Party used the event to showcase the militaristic discipline that it would so grotesquely demonstrate in a few years’ time.
They also planned to use it to confirm the widely held belief that the Aryans were the master race (they were not the first to do this: in 1904 the “Savage Olympics” were staged in St Louis alongside the actual Olympics and the World Fair to prove anthropologically “in quantitative measure the inferiority of primitive peoples”).
What a shock it was to see, then, a Black American, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, win four golds under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler — and, importantly for his legacy, in front of the cameras of propagandist filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl — and dominate the discussion.
Owens was a global superstar, but it did not do him much good at home as he returned to a life of struggle, for many years taking races against animals and automobiles to make money.
The Munich tragedy (1972)
There had never been an Olympic story like it and hopefully never will be again.
The simple facts are these: Palestinian Black September militants broke into the Israeli lodgings at Munich’s Olympic village, killed two and took nine hostages. Having apparently negotiated safe passage to
Cairo, five of the eight terrorists, all the hostages and a West German policeman were killed during a calamitous rescue attempt at Furstenfeldbruck, a Nato air base.
There was nothing simple about this story, however, and its tentacles were farreaching. It turned out that West German authorities were armed with startlingly accurate information about a planned attack but didn’t act on it; that security was inconceivably lax at the village; and that the planning for the ambush at the air base was fractured and chaotic.
Like many tragedies, it has contributed to the pop culture canon, with Academy awardwinning documentary
and Steven Spielberg’s among the titles.