1968 Olympics Were Epic for Torchbearers

The 1968 Mexico City Olympics will be remembered, if at all, by the sight of two African American medal-winning athletes standing on a victory stand, bowing their heads and lifting black-gloved fists in the air in protest. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, calling attention to social inequities at home in the land of Lincoln, produced the lasting image of those Games for history.

In a way, it was too bad, a regrettable way for those Games to go down in history. Because the ’68 Olympics were among the greatest ever held.

First of all, a guy broke the world long jump record by almost two feet. Now, world records are supposed to be broken by inches, nanoseconds, not two-thirds of a yard. Bob Beamon’s long jump from those games is still the Olympic record.

Jim Hines ran the first sub-10-second 100 meters, and it was 28 years before another Olympian broke his 9.95 clocking.

Two runners broke the world record in the 400. Then, a guy from Oregon showed up with a whole new way to high jump--backward. Dick Fosbury broke the Olympic record with a technique that looked like a guy falling off the back of a truck. Everyone uses it today, but they thought he was crazy at the time.

It was a glorious spectacle. The giant American heavyweight boxer, George Foreman, flattened the world’s best fighters, but he is best remembered for climbing into the ring waving a tiny American flag.

But it was the track and field team that would have dazzled the world, if the world had not been otherwise distracted. The U.S. won 12 gold medals in track and field and 24 medals in all. American track athletes produced eight world and seven Olympic records.

Actually, the ’68 Games were star-crossed from the start. Student riots in Mexico City almost prompted the IOC to move the Games elsewhere. White-gloved Civil Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators packed into the Plaza of the Three Cultures, killing scores and bringing bitter suggestions that they change the name of the Plaza to the Three Vultures.

Historians later sadly concluded that the experiences of Mexico brought home to the world what a perfect political forum it was for causes of all sort. With catastrophic results. The horrors of Munich four years later could have been incubated in the Mexican experience. The boycotts in Moscow and Los Angeles, the bombing in Atlanta were to follow.

So, the medalists of ’68 might just as well have been performing in masks. Save for Beamon and his prodigious long jump, they are the stepchildren of the Olympics.

Bill Toomey could tell you. When the world thinks of decathlon athletes, Jim Thorpe comes to mind. Then, Rafer Johnson, Bob Mathias, Bruce Jenner, Dan O’Brien.

What Toomey did at Mexico City, however, was as memorable as anything those others did. First of all, he stalked the decathlon gold medal. He went to the ’64 Olympics in Tokyo not as a participant but as a spectator. He made notes. He went home to California and even worked nights by car light.

Nature hadn’t given him that much to work with. At 6 feet 1, 195 pounds, he was not the physical presence some decathletes had been.

What’s more, a childhood accident--a broken saucer ripped through his hand, severing a nerve--left his right arm virtually paralyzed. This is a serious handicap in the decathlon, because four of the 10 events require the athlete to throw or carry something: a spear, a steel shot, a discus, a bulky vaulting pole.

Toomey knew he would have to excel at the running events. So he ran the 400 only seven-tenths of a second off the Olympic record. He ran the 100 in 10.4, which would have earned a medal in any previous Olympics.

He almost rapped out in the pole vault. Down to his last jump, with the clock ticking away and the dreaded “no-height” blinking on and off in his mind, Toomey desperately took off on the wrong foot, pushed off--and made his best vault ever.

I sat with Bill Toomey the other day, the first time I had talked with him since the night he won the gold medal in Mexico City all those years ago.

He looks as if he could still pull off a 10.4 100. The weight is the same, the belly is still hard, the eyes still piercing. He’s a marketing executive with Natural Alternatives International, still plays to win.

Toomey is excited these days because Xerox is sponsoring a reunion of the forgotten Olympians, the ’68 track and field wild bunch. A 30th anniversary get-together will be held in conjunction with the U.S. Outdoor track championships in New Orleans Friday through June 21.

Does he feel history has passed him by? Does he feel the ’68 team was the Olympics’ stepchild?

Toomey laughs.

“We did a lot of things to get noticed. Beamon. First guy under 10 seconds. First guy under 20 seconds. Lee Evans under 44 seconds. And don’t forget, we were performing under a stifling oxygen debt at 7,300 feet in the air.

“It was a vintage Olympics, all right. But we didn’t blame Tommie Smith or John Carlos or Lee Evans. They did what they thought had to be done. You remember, they had been under some pressure to boycott the Olympics altogether. That would have defeated the whole purpose altogether.

“What they did was not that damaging. It was when the Olympic committee kicked them off the team that it became a big international incident.

“But I am much more concerned with what has been happening to track and field generally. It is the whole sport that is getting overlooked today. Any sport which ignores its history will soon cease to be a sport. So I’m grateful [for the reunion]. I’m glad someone remembers.”