My obituary of Wayne Collett (third from the left, UCLA vs USC), whose protest at the 1972 Munich Olympics failed to have the impact of Tommie Smith and John Carlos' in Mexico four years earlier, is in today's Independent. You can link to it here. As usual, Avery Brundage, the head of the IOC (or, as British papers called him in the recent obits of Juan A Samaranch, the 'American head of the IOC') gets to be the villain; the guy spent decades on the wrong side of every issue, but then, that's par for the IOC course. I thought most of those Samaranch obits went very easy on Olympic corruption,especially the ways Samaranch's inclusion of federations, and his stocking the IOC with friendly broadcasters and pliant ex-athletes encouraged it, on right-wing Spanish politics and the continuing preference of the IOC for hereditary privilege and totalitarian government. We need more protests like Colletts, not fewer.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
WAYNE COLLETT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY
My obituary of Wayne Collett (third from the left, UCLA vs USC), whose protest at the 1972 Munich Olympics failed to have the impact of Tommie Smith and John Carlos' in Mexico four years earlier, is in today's Independent. You can link to it here. As usual, Avery Brundage, the head of the IOC (or, as British papers called him in the recent obits of Juan A Samaranch, the 'American head of the IOC') gets to be the villain; the guy spent decades on the wrong side of every issue, but then, that's par for the IOC course. I thought most of those Samaranch obits went very easy on Olympic corruption,especially the ways Samaranch's inclusion of federations, and his stocking the IOC with friendly broadcasters and pliant ex-athletes encouraged it, on right-wing Spanish politics and the continuing preference of the IOC for hereditary privilege and totalitarian government. We need more protests like Colletts, not fewer.
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