There was no Summer Olympics in 1967
The Summer Olympics are held every four years, and 1967 was not one of those years. The previous Summer Games were in Tokyo in October 1964. The next were in Mexico City, from 12 to 27 October 1968. The Winter Games fell between them, at Grenoble in France in February 1968. So 1967 was a preparation year: the athletes, officials and host cities were getting ready, but no Olympic medals were awarded.
That does not make the year empty. Several decisions and test events in 1967 shaped how both 1968 Games turned out, and several of the arguments that would flare up in 1968 were already under way.
The calendar around 1967
The Olympic cycle is easy to lose track of, so it helps to set the dates side by side.
- Tokyo Summer Games: October 1964, the first Olympics held in Asia.
- Innsbruck Winter Games: January and February 1964.
- Grenoble Winter Games: 6 to 18 February 1968.
- Mexico City Summer Games: 12 to 27 October 1968.
- Next Summer Games: Munich, in 1972.
Anything described as “the 1967 Olympics” is therefore a mislabelled version of one of these, or a different event altogether. The big multi-sport gatherings of 1967 itself were regional ones, such as the Pan American Games in Winnipeg, and the sporting world was also busy with world and continental championships.
The IOC and Avery Brundage
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was led through 1967 by Avery Brundage, an American who had been president since 1952 and would remain until 1972. Brundage was a committed defender of the amateur ideal, which held that Olympic competitors should not be paid for sport. By the late 1960s that ideal was under strain. State-supported athletes in the Soviet bloc, and well-supported college athletes in the United States, made the line between amateur and professional hard to police.
Brundage also insisted that the Games stand apart from politics, a position that became harder to hold each year. The Olympic movement of the time was a small, mostly male, mostly European and North American club, and its leaders were often accused of being out of step with the world they governed. Newly independent states in Africa and Asia were joining national Olympic committees, and the question of how the movement should treat South Africa, which had been left out of the 1964 Games over apartheid, stayed on the agenda through 1967. The IOC reversed course more than once before the matter was settled for 1968.
Preparing Mexico City
Mexico City had been chosen to host the 1968 Games at an IOC session in Baden-Baden in October 1963, ahead of other candidate cities that included Detroit, Lyon and Buenos Aires. It was the first time the Summer Games would be held in Latin America.
The main concern of 1967 was altitude. Mexico City sits at about 2,240 metres above sea level, where the air is thinner. Critics worried that endurance runners and other athletes used to sea level would be at a serious disadvantage, and that the effects could be unfair or even unsafe. Organisers staged a pre-Olympic sports week in October 1967 to test facilities and to see how athletes coped. The results fed a debate that went on until the Games, and the medical side of it came to involve the IOC Medical Commission, set up that year.
Mexico’s government also wanted the Games to show the country as modern and stable. That ambition would collide with a Mexican student movement in the summer of 1968, a story that belongs to that year rather than to 1967. The lead-up to the Games was also tied to wider international events: the torch relay for 1968 began in Greece, which since April 1967 had been ruled by the Greek junta, and it was one of several details that gave the preparations a political edge.
Preparing Grenoble
Grenoble was awarded the 1968 Winter Games in January 1964. Through 1967 the French organisers built venues and facilities and tested them in international competition, including the new World Cup circuit for alpine skiing, which began in the 1966-67 season. The French state, under President Charles de Gaulle, treated the Games as a national showpiece. Those Games took place in February 1968, not 1967.
Sport and politics in 1967
Athletes were not insulated from the year’s wider events. In April 1967 the heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali refused military induction, and his Ali draft refusal led to the loss of his title and licence, making him a symbol in debates about sport and conscience. Ali was an Olympic gold medallist from Rome in 1960, which tied the Olympic story to the argument over the Vietnam War.
Black American athletes were also organising. Late in 1967 a group around the sociologist Harry Edwards at San Jose State began what became the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which considered a boycott of the 1968 Games. This was part of the wider Black Power current in American life. Its most famous Olympic moment came in October 1968, after the period this article covers.
The wider sporting world
The Olympic movement shared 1967 with other international events that drew far more public attention in some countries. Canada held Expo 67 in Montreal, and the centennial year produced its own sporting festival in Winnipeg. In Europe, club soccer and the Tour de France dominated the sports pages. Olympic sports such as athletics, swimming and gymnastics still produced news through national championships and dual meets, and the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union ran through all of them. For most fans, however, the Olympics were something that appeared every four years, and 1967 was a year to wait.
Doping and safety
Concern about drugs in sport grew sharply in 1967. A British cyclist died during the Tour de France in July, and the IOC created a Medical Commission that year. The key point here is that the Olympic movement began, for the first time, to treat doping control as a permanent responsibility.
What came next
When the Games arrived, 1968 turned out to be one of the most eventful Olympic years in history. The Winter Games at Grenoble were followed by Mexico City, where the 1967 preparations met altitude, politics and some remarkable performances. Looking back from 1967, none of that was certain. The year itself is best read as the quiet before a very loud Olympic season, and it is a reminder that “1967 Summer Olympics” is a label for something that never took place.