Phil Gifford: The harsh reality of mixing sports and politics for athletes

OPINION:

As a wide-eyed 21-year-old journalist I spent a month in Mexico City in 1968, working for the New Zealand Press Association at the first of the openly politicised Olympic Games.

In the 200 metres two Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, finished first and third respectively. On the podium both men gave black power salutes, each wearing one black glove, and refusing to hold their faces up to the American flag, as a protest about racism in the United States.

At the Games village that night, at the press conference announcing that Smith and Carlos were being expelled, I watched in naïve wonder as American journalists and officials fumed over the behaviour of what a Texan writer spluttered were "two uppity assholes".

Smith and Carlos were vilified at the time, and would never run for the United States again. The visceral reaction against them mixing politics and sport would also mean it took 50 years for Peter Norman, the Australian silver medallist that day in Mexico, who backed the Americans' stand, to be posthumously awarded an Australian Order of Merit, 12 years after he died in 2006.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest on the podium during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Photo / Getty

We'll probably see Russian tennis player Daniil Medvedev, No 1 in the world, banned from Wimbledon by the British government, unless he condemns the invasion of Ukraine. This time the intrusion of politics has largely been welcomed.

History shows that emotion, rather than logic, always rules in the arm wrestle between politics and sport. A perfectly reasonable aversion to Russia's leader Putin, who presents as a deeply unlikeable megalomaniac, and his brutal invasion of Ukraine, will over-ride any sympathy for Medvedev, even if making a public statement on Ukraine would almost certainly mean exile from his homeland until Putin is gone.

On the other hand, who could ever explain the most bizarre acceptance of politics in sport by the public of New Zealand, the forced withdrawal of 93 of our 97 athletes from the 1980 Moscow Olympics?

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, and the United States led a worldwide move to stay away from the '80 Games, our government, led by Rob Muldoon, was quickly onside with America, and successfully strong armed every major sport in New Zealand to boycott the '80 Games.

One by one individual sports in New Zealand buckled. Sports historian Ron Palenski has written of how athletes here were covertly put under enormous pressure to stay home. "It was a dirty business," said Palenski, "never before seen in New Zealand sport."

As with Putin and his invasion of Ukraine now, there was no emotional sympathy here with the communists running the USSR in '80s, and the killing of an Olympic dream for our Kiwi competitors was largely met with a collective shrug.

Daniil Medvedev of Russia is facing a ban from Wimbledon. Photo / Photosport

What makes that truly weird is that the Games could have been a triumph for a full New Zealand team. John Walker had just broken the world indoor 1500 metres record, Dick Quax was running world class marathon times, the men's hockey team would have been aiming for a repeat of the gold medal they'd won in Montreal in '76, and two months before the Moscow Games a young rider from Cambridge, Mark Todd, had won the Badminton horse trials.

But by 1980, Muldoon knew exactly what he was doing when it came to using sport to his own ends.

Much earlier, in 1973, he had been acutely aware that in rugby, people dubbed by a then young firebrand Tim Shadbolt the KEEPOOS (keep politics out of sport), would be outraged when Labour's Norman Kirk ordered the cancellation of a proposed Springbok tour here.

After Kirk died in 1974, Muldoon correctly predicted that the cancellation of the '73 Springbok tour was "one issue on which people would change their vote". Muldoon scorned Kirk's decision, and that helped him and National sweep to power in the 1975 election.

In the 1970s and '80s, apologists in our rugby for sporting contact with the apartheid regime in South Africa were thick on the ground. So when the Springboks were due to tour here in 1981 Muldoon read the room, and was happy to give the tour his blessing.

Demonstrations in '81 reached such a crescendo Graham Perry, the head of the police operation at the final test at Eden Park, would tell me 20 years later that, "If the tour had gone on for another couple of weeks, bloodshed would have been involved. Firearms would have come into it. It was mayhem".

I was reporting on the whole tour for the Listener. As Graham Perry noted, every day felt more hectic and crazed as the winter went on. In hindsight that daily, unrelenting turmoil may be the reason not much was noted at the time about the astonishing hypocrisy of Muldoon riding high on not interfering with sport, just a year after he'd rammed through the Moscow boycott.

The harsh reality is that by sport's very nature, drawing those of us who love it in by its drama by the skill and daring and commitment of the great athletes, it will always be a potential weapon for use as a political tool, as Medvedev is discovering.