On October 16, 1968, Tommie Smith won the gold medal in 200-meter dash at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, while fellow American John Carlos took the bronze (the silver was won by Peter Norman of Australia).
During the ensuing medal ceremony, Smith and Carlos donned black gloves on one hand — Smith on his right hand, Carlos on his left — and raised their respective gloved hands in a gesture that has been associated with the communists for decades.
International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, 81-years-old at the time (he would die in 1975 at the age of 87) took a tough stance, seeing the display as unfit for the apolitical, international forum the Olympic Games were intended to be.
In response to their actions, he ordered Smith and Carlos to be suspended from the U.S. team and to leave the Olympic Village. When the U.S. Olympic Committee refused, Brundage threatened to ban the entire U.S. track team. This threat led to the expulsion of the two athletes from the Games and a lifetime ban from future Olympic competition.
However, contrary to popular belief, the IOC did not disqualify Smith and Carlos from their gold- and bronze-medal finishes, respectively — mainly because to do so would have elevated the race's fourth- and fifth-place finishers to the silver and bronze.
The action of Smith and Carlos touched off a huge public outcry, and political historians have claimed that it was a significant contributing factor in Democrat Hubert Humphrey's near-landslide defeat to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1968 Presidential election, contested just 20 days later (just like Colin Kaepernick's blasphemy of the national anthem may have had a great deal to do with Hillary Clinton losing the election of 2016).
A mere four years later, the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich was also marred by unnecessary political controversy, when Americans Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, respective winners of gold and silver in the 400 meters, besmirched the national anthem by twirling their medals, with Collett also stroking his chin while the anthem was being played.
Brundage reacted in the same manner as he had in Mexico City, slapping a lifetime ban on both runners, but the IOC lifted the bans on December 11, 2022, with Matthews five days shy of his 75th birthday (Collett, however, had died of cancer on St. Patrick's Day of 2010 at the age of 60).
But this of course was not the only political controversy to mar the Summer Olympics that year: In perhaps the greatest instance of sheer chaos in Olympic history, the Soviet Union snapped a 63-game lifetime winning streak by the United States with an improbable 51-50 upset in the gold medal game, played on September 9, 1972.
To this day, the American players have refused to accept their silver medals. Guess they retroactively agreed with Nike: You don't win silver — you lose gold!
Three days earlier, real tragedy — once again of a political nature — had cast the darkest shadow of all over this Olympiad, when the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September, named after the September 1970 Jordanian civil war in which 3,400 Palestinians perished at the hands of the forces of the totally illegitimate Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (installed by John D. Rockefeller and Edward Mandell House to be "hall monitors" for Standard Oil and BP), seeking to avenge the aforementioned massacre, abducted 11 Israeli athletes from the Olympic Village, demanding the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
When Israel refused, the terrorists killed all 11 of the hostages (a West German police officer and five of the eight terrorists were also killed; the remaining three were jailed — only to be freed by the Germans after Lufthansa Flight 615 was hijacked less than two months later). As Linda Ellerbee of the TV documentary Our World put it: "Black September sure blackened that September for all of us."
Now, let's fast-forward to the twin Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984. On Christmas Eve of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, to keep the puppet government they had installed there six years earlier in power. The Summer Olympics was to be held in Moscow in 1980 — so in an effort to pressure the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, both U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark threatened to boycott the Games unless all Soviet troops were out of Afghanistan by 12:01 AM on February 21.
Since this day happened to be Ash Wednesday, supporters of the boycott were delighted by the spiritual implications — and many a college dorm room was festooned by a poster depicting a Russian weightlifter with his back turned and both hands on his crotch, accompanied by the slogan "Let the Russians Play With Themselves."
Naturally, four years later, the Soviets retaliated by having most of their satellites boycott the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, resulting in the United States running away in the medal count.
That brings us to this year's Summer Olympics in Paris, which were kicked off by an utterly reprehensible display of sacrilege in the form of the Last Supper being desecrated by drag queens — a particularly vicious broadside against the world's 2.4 billion Christians because Deuteronomy 22:5 reads, "A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, nor shall a man don a woman's garment; for all who do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God."
The Trump campaign is going to have a field day with this. It will be the GOP's most effective dog whistle since Willie Horton.
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