Authorities must not silence athletes finding their voice
Coe’s stance on Beijing boycott threat makes mockery of his admiration for Black Power salute, writes
When I heard Lord Coe talking this week about Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games, my ears pricked up. “If you go back into the history of sport,” Coe told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, “whether it’s the 1936 Games of Jesse Owens or the Black Power salutes in 1968, sport is a very powerful driver of integration and change.”
The president of World Athletics was making the case – amid global anger at the treatment of tennis star Peng Shuai following her #Metoo claims against China’s former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli – for why a boycott of the Winter
Olympics in Beijing next year would be a mistake. Sport, he argued, “gets a darn sight closer to shining a light on these issues and giving amplification to it than most jobbing politicians”. The power of sport as a vehicle for change is undeniable. But, for Coe to praise the 1968 Black Power salute as the right kind of activism, while a potential boycott of the 2022 Games would be “a meaningless gesture and a damaging gesture” is gaslighting at best. Or as John Amaechi put it, tweeting his reaction to Coe’s interview, “pure, unadulterated lies”.
I grew up with a poster of Smith and Carlos’s salute on my wall. When I had the honour of interviewing Smith for the Runnymede Trust in Manchester, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of those Games, it was an emotional moment for me. As I stepped out from behind the lectern to introduce my idol, I proudly wore a T-shirt emblazoned with that iconic moment on the podium in Mexico.
What followed was a powerful and deep conversation where Smith recounted some of the devastating impacts the iconic salute had on him and his family, including death threats, exclusion, stigma, media vitriol and the International Olympic Committee’s lifetime ban on his participating in the Olympic Games. It is a scene we
Athlete activism challenges and disrupts status quo in a mission to protect human rights
have seen play out over and again in the modern era as athletes who take on an activist role have grown to expect punishment in some form or other as the price of speaking out. Their sacrifice was immense, their inspired action luminous; they stood up for their beliefs, despite fully knowing the price they would pay.
Fifty-three years on from that feted day when Smith and Carlos raised their black-gloved fists to the sky, symbolic acts of protest in sport are still seen as hugely threatening. The
IOC banned athlete protests at the 2020
Tokyo Summer Olympics, while debate continues to rage around taking a knee. Coe’s insistence on referring to “empty gesture” politics, as he grappled with how sport should respond to China’s troubling omerta over Peng’s allegations, left me questioning whether he ever truly understood the significance of Carlos and Smith’s protest.
The very point of athlete activism is to purposefully challenge and disrupt the status quo in a mission to protect human rights. As the African-american civil rights titan John Lewis put it: “You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.” His words reaffirm a lesson I learnt from spending time with Carlos in 2012. Recalling the negative publicity he received after the salute, he said that one headline stood out for him in particular: “John Carlos Troublemaker”. The truth is that sport does hold power. Power to act, power to protest, power to pause. But any attempt to silence sportsmen and women cannot be applauded, or mitigated through the playing of sport alone.
From dialogue about racism in football and cricket, to allegations of sexual assault, the world of sport is slowly waking up to new and urgent conversations around discrimination of all kinds. In response, there is a pressing need for leaders to stop being, as Prof Ibram X. Kendi puts it, “racism deniers” – or deniers of any other discrimination – and instead go about the untidy and unglamourous work of creating antiracist outcomes and inclusive protocols in sport and beyond.
Peng, and so many other athletes before her, have spoken their truths. Now the authorities, and senior figures in decision-making positions, need to listen, and face the reckoning.