The man is six feet tall, at 80 years old he looks like a prophet and freely quotes the Bible: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, of mothers against sons and fathers against daughters, and yet we must endure the agony and the pain.”
It’s Tommie Smith. He won gold in the 200 metres at the Olympic Games in Mexico and when he stood on the podium he was the protagonist of one of those moments that define an era. Next to him was another black athlete, John Carlos, a bronze medallist. Both of them, while the Stars and Stripes anthem was playing, raised their gloved fists in protest against the discrimination against blacks in their country.
It was 1968. The year in which the Vietnam disaster became clear in the United States. The year of the barricades in Paris and the Prague Spring. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and Bobby Kennedy. And today there is talk of a charged geopolitical context in Paris 2024… The Tlateloco massacre ten days before the opening of Mexico 68 set the stage. “Wars, rumors of wars.”
And here is Tommie Smith in Saint-Ouen, a commune on the outskirts of Paris where he has just inaugurated a sports ground bearing his name, and the passerby asks him why it would be worth raising his fist today, and he warns straight away: “I won’t tell you to raise your fist.” He then corrects himself: “What you have to do is raise the mind from which this fist comes.”
Tommie Smith and John Carlos paid for their gesture in Mexico with years of ostracism, before official bodies and their contemporaries recognised them for what they were: pioneers, brave men. “They were world champions, but they were not recognised as having any legitimacy,” says Harry Edwards, professor emeritus at Berkeley and a key figure in the movement of African-American athletes since the 1960s, by telephone from California. “It was a fight for dignity and respect.”
“In my mind,” Smith recalls now, “I had pumped my fist at every race, but I hadn’t had a way to show it. It would be over in a race and that was it, and I would go back to an empty dorm room, hungry, because there was no money in athletics back then.” “Winning,” he notes, “is more than just coming in first…”
And who would be the Tommie Smiths and John Carlos of Paris 2024? Tommie Smith declines to answer.
Professor Edwards responds by citing a number of American athletes who symbolically raised their fists: “Don’t look for a Smith or a Carlos, or a Bill Russell, or a Mohammed Ali among today’s athletes, just as Smith and Carlos were not Jesse Owens and Ali was not Joe Louis, Russell was not Chuck Cooper, and Jim Brown was not Kenny Washington.”
Granted, there are no such visible figures today, he says from California, but “she is coming.” She? Edwards sees the next battle as being over abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s repeal of the ruling Roe v. Wadewhich protected this right in all states of the Union. The next Tommie Smith, in his opinion, will be a woman.
“The revocation of Roe v. Wade “It is an existential threat, to women in sport, and to sports in general,” she says. “And this,” she predicts, “will precipitate a movement among female athletes to elect people who will reverse the repeal of Roe v. Wade.”
Kamala Harris? Back to Saint-Ouen. “Yes,” Tommie Smith replies. “I hope she becomes president and does the job that will help not only America, but the entire world.” The fist is Kamala.
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