The records came in 1968
There was no Summer Olympics in 1967. The Games that produced the famous upsets and records were in Mexico City in October 1968, the first Olympics in Latin America. 1967’s part was the preparation: the Mexican organisers held a pre-Olympic sports week in October 1967 to test their venues, and athletes and scientists began arguing about what the altitude would do.
Why altitude mattered
Mexico City stands at about 2,240 metres. At that height the air is thinner, which has two opposite effects. For short explosive events, such as sprints, jumps and throws, thin air gives less resistance, so performances can improve. For endurance events, less oxygen is available to the body, and athletes who live near sea level generally run slower than they would at home. As a result, the 1968 Games produced several remarkable sprint and jump marks, while distance races were often slow.
Bob Beamon
The defining moment was on 18 October 1968. In the long jump final the American Bob Beamon jumped 8.90 metres, which is about 29 feet and 2.5 inches. The world record before his jump was 8.35 metres, so he added 55 centimetres in one leap, an enormous margin for the event. The measuring equipment was designed for shorter jumps, and officials reportedly had to measure the distance by hand. Beamon is said to have been overcome with emotion when he learned what he had done.
Thin air and a favourable following wind within the legal limit helped, but they do not fully explain a jump of that size, which was also down to a fast run-up and an unusually good take-off. The mark stood as a world record until 1991, when Mike Powell jumped 8.95 metres, and it remained the Olympic record for much longer.
Dick Fosbury
The high jump saw a change of technique. Dick Fosbury, an American, went over the bar head first and on his back, arching his body over it. He had developed the style in the mid-1960s, while still at school, and refined it at college. Most jumpers of the time used the straddle or older rolling methods. Fosbury won the gold medal with 2.24 metres, an Olympic record. The style came to be known as the Fosbury Flop, and within a few years it had become the standard in the event.
Landing technique mattered here. Fosbury’s method needed a soft landing area. The foam-style pits that were by then replacing sawdust and sand made it much safer to land on the back, which helped the new approach spread.
Other records and upsets
- Jim Hines won the 100 metres in 9.95 seconds, widely described as the first sub-10-second run in a final timed electronically to the hundredth.
- Lee Evans won the 400 metres in a then world record of 43.86 seconds.
- Al Oerter won the discus for a fourth Olympic title in a row.
- In the 1,500 metres, Kenya’s Kipchoge Keino beat the favourite, the American Jim Ryun, who took silver. Keino had been ill beforehand, and his win was a signal of Kenya’s coming strength in distance running.
- Ethiopia’s Mamo Wolde won the marathon, showing that runners from high-altitude countries adapted well.
The Black Power salute on the 200 metres podium came from the same athletics programme, but it belongs to a different, more political story.
The wider context
The performances were also reaching television audiences. These Games were widely described as the first Olympics broadcast in colour to many countries, so images reached color television sets abroad over satellite links of the kind pioneered by the Early Bird satellite. The feats were thus seen with unusual immediacy.
The Mexico City Games remain a standard example in discussions of how conditions shape sporting records. The title’s talk of a 1967 Olympics is mistaken, but the underlying story of upsets and records is real, and it belongs to the autumn of 1968.