The Games were in 1968, not 1967
No Summer Olympics took place in 1967. The Games that followed Tokyo (1964) were held in Mexico City from 12 to 27 October 1968. The events that give this title its “tragedy” belong to that year: the killing of protesting students in Mexico City on 2 October 1968, ten days before the opening ceremony, and the Black Power salute on the medal podium on 16 October 1968. This article covers those two episodes and does not attribute them to 1967.
A country under pressure
Mexico was the first Latin American country to host the Summer Games, and its government, led by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, saw the Games as proof of stability and modernity. It had spent heavily on facilities. But 1968 was a year of student unrest around the world. In Mexico City, a student movement began in late July 1968 after a clash with police, and it grew into large demonstrations demanding the release of political prisoners, an end to police violence and more open politics. The same year saw the May 1968 strikes in France and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
The Tlatelolco massacre
On 2 October 1968, thousands of students and others gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City for a rally. Security forces, including the army, surrounded the square. Shooting began in the evening and many people were killed or wounded, and many more were arrested.
The Tlatelolco massacre remains disputed in its details. The government at first spoke of a small number of deaths and blamed snipers and provocateurs. Other accounts, including later studies and witness testimony, have given much higher figures, ranging from several dozen to several hundred dead. No single figure is agreed, and it is reasonable to say only that the toll is uncertain. For many years the matter was officially downplayed, and later governments opened inquiries and commemorations. In Mexico, 2 October is remembered each year with marches.
The Games went ahead on schedule. The International Olympic Committee, led by Avery Brundage, did not postpone or move them, and the opening ceremony took place on 12 October. The student protests faded in the weeks that followed. A woman, Enriqueta Basilio, lit the Olympic cauldron, the first woman to do so.
The Black Power salute
On 16 October 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos finished first and third in the 200 metres final. Smith won in a world record time of 19.83 seconds, with the Australian Peter Norman second and Carlos third. On the podium, Smith and Carlos stood in black socks without shoes, each raised a black-gloved fist while the American anthem played, and kept their heads bowed. Norman wore a badge supporting the Olympic Project for Human Rights, the group behind a proposed boycott by Black athletes.
The gesture was a protest against racism in the United States and elsewhere, made in the year of the King assassination, and part of the wider Black Power current in American life. It followed the long civil rights movement, which had by 1968 seen both landmark laws and growing frustration.
The response was swift. Brundage and the IOC called the gesture a political act that violated the spirit of the Games and demanded that the two be sent home. The US Olympic Committee suspended them and sent them away from the Olympic village. Both faced hostility on their return and difficult years afterwards, though later decades brought recognition, including statues and honours. Norman, who had stood with them, was treated badly in Australia for years, and his role is now widely acknowledged.
Other moments of protest
The Games saw other political undertones. The Czechoslovak gymnast Vera Caslavska, who won several gold medals, reportedly turned her head down and away during the Soviet anthem, only weeks after Soviet-led forces had invaded her country in August 1968. South Africa, which had been invited and then disinvited by the IOC earlier in the year under threat of a mass boycott by African and other nations, did not compete.
Why the two events are linked
Both episodes show the Olympics as a place where politics could not be kept out, however much Brundage argued otherwise. The Mexican killings showed a government’s willingness to put the success of the Games ahead of protest. The podium salute showed athletes using the Games as a platform. Neither can be found in 1967. They belong to the fall of 1968, and any account that places a “1967 Summer Olympics” before them has the year wrong.