Prologue: The Genre of Sport as a Means to an End

In April 2001, I had the privilege of interviewing Pedro Ramı́rez Vázquez, chairman of the organizing committee for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. I ended the interview by recalling my own memories of the games, as a 12-year-old watching the events on a black-and-white television in England. For me, four salient moments stood out: Bob Beaman’s record-breaking long-jump; Dick Fosbury’s revolutionary technique in the high-jump; the raised fists of the African-American athletes; and, being British, the unforgettable commentary of David Coleman, as he saw David Hemery home to victory in the final of the men’s 400 metres hurdles. Expecting a positive reply, I asked if he was pleased that the majority of my recollections were of great sporting moments. He replied with a blunt ‘No’. Although he understood why I remembered what I had, he said that what the organizing committee had wanted above all else was for the world’s audience to remember Mexico. [1]. Bearing Ramı́rez Vázquez’s words in mind, this collection asks what Mexicans hoped to achieve by hosting the games and what image of Mexico they sought to portray. In doing so, it considers what these aspirations reveal about the nature of Mexican society 50 years after the Mexican Revolution (1910–17); a destructive civil war that was credited with having ended class privileges and ethnic tensions, and that had led Mexicans towards a bright future in which all its citizens had a stake. The 1968 games provided a rare opportunity for the nation to demonstrate such advances to a world-wide audience. It also presented an opportunity to separate substance from rhetoric and reveal the true extent of progress in post-revolutionary Mexico. Mexico’s bid to host the Olympic Games could hardly have come at a more contentious phase in international relations. As Cold War politics went, the 1960s was a particularly chilly period. The construction of the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis were all fresh in the minds of International Olympic Committee (IOC) delegates as they descended upon Baden-Baden in October 1963 to consider the candidates bidding for the 1968 games. In the years that followed, President John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X would be assassinated; the Vietnam War would escalate to new heights; Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara would be killed trying to export revolution to Latin America; and European colonialism would enter terminal decline as former African territories took on new names and new leaders and embarked on new disputes with their neighbours. In the year of the games themselves, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague; the streets of major European and US cities were filled with students who dared to ‘take on the system’; Martin Luther King The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 26, No. 6, May 2009, 711–722