I Tried to Help Detroit Get the Olympic Games,
But They Long Jumped To Mexico City
By Paul O’Shea
Go back with me to the Nineteen Sixties. For many that will be pleasantly nostalgic, for others, a memory a bit too far.
I was in my late twenties, writing for a company magazine, married with kids, living in suburban Chicago. Away from the typewriter I was the long distance running chairman of the Central AAU, the Illinois governing body for competitive distance runners.
I scheduled races, recruited runners, fired the starting gun, timed competitors, handed out medals to the first finishers, repatriated the Did Not Finishers, logged the race results, and wrote the story for a running newsletter. It was plenty of work for precious few runners, a portfolio without staff. A seamless transition from running in races to race management, I loved it.
In the Sixties, I sometimes had more medals than there were runners who completed the required ten, fifteen or twenty miles. Today, if you haven’t run at least one marathon, the only way to gain respect is to selfie yourself waiting patiently to get to the top of Mount Everest.
That was the pre-Nike world, pre-running bloom. Road races were lonely competitions. In 1963, just 285 men-only started the Boston Marathon. It would be nine more years before women were admitted to the starting line. In 2019 13,684 women started and 16,556 men.
Then, career and volunteer worlds merged. I took on a different management challenge.
In l963 the Detroit Olympic Committee decided, again, that hosting an Olympic Games would bring great rewards to their winning city. Worldwide prestige. A building boom. Infrastructure improvements. Job creation. And, perhaps most important, an immediate infusion of tourist dollars into the local economy.
You had to admire their perseverance. The Motor City folks had bid for the ’52, ’56, ‘60 and ‘64 Games without success. Now, in l963 they were after the ’68 prize. Early money was on Detroit; the sports world thought it should be rewarded for relentless pluck.
This time, boy, we’ve got ‘em where we want ‘em. The International Olympic Committee couldn’t possibly turn us down again!
Could they?
To capture the interest, nay the votes of the International Olympic Committee, the Detroit ever-hopefuls decided to launch a grand gesture, something that would seize minds and votes. And what better idea than to recreate the Olympic torches first ignited by Germany in l936 Berlin. Answer: The Olympic Games Torch Relay to Detroit.
The cross-country promotional event called for building a cadre of thousands of runners to carry a blazing torch on foot from Los Angeles, through the West, into the Midwest, finally crossing the finish line in front of Detroit City Hall. Organize runners through nine states, small towns and medium sized cities, through the desert, across rivers, a trek of 2,521 miles.
For the Olympic Torch Relay to Detroit, the assignment called for shepherding the torch through a state, keeping it lit, going forward at all costs. Then, the anchoring team would arrive in Detroit to ecstatic citizen acclaim, worldwide press. This would pressure the International Olympic Committee, the hundred or so princes, presidents, dictators and oligarchs who trade money and political favors, before The Masked Country reveal.
Because of my one-man role, the Illinois landscape was mine. And so I contacted the coaches, running clubs and runners I knew who would want to be part of something bigger than the holiday Turkey Trot.
In downtown Chicago, employer Illinois Bell Telephone Company was delighted to learn about my involvement with the Olympic Torch Relay. Senior management was keen to be part of something bigger than installing Touch Tone phones from Waukegan to Pinckneyville.
On one bright Los Angeles morning the starting gun fired and the butane-fueled torch headed east. First off the starting line with the flame held high was Jim Beatty, first to run a sub-four minute mile indoors. From then on it was a mix of high school and collegiate runners, joggers, kids, many who just wanted to lope along with friends. Not all carriers were swift. Some were grim-faced contributors like the 250-pound Jaycee president.
Day and night the convoy lumbered east, accompanied by the Torch Relay headquarters housed in a motor home driven by the Jimmy Hoffa Teamsters relay team. In areas with large populations and commercial development, state police sedans accompanied the pioneers.
There were unforeseen hurdles. I learned later that it was 125 degrees in the desert, and the torch got so hot it blistered the hands of a few carriers. During the night, rattlesnakes crawled out and rested on the hot pavement, perhaps wishing to take a turn at the heel. One of the runners killed a rattler with a rock. I was comforted that the rattlesnake was not the Illinois state animal.
But you can’t expect seasoned runners to hold back, admire the scenery, chat up the locals. No, these zealots were primed to run as briskly as aerobic capacity allowed. Though it wasn’t a race against other competitors, some could not help treating the Torch Relay as a tough interval workout. Result: the torch was 15 hours ahead of schedule at the California-Arizona state line. Tempus and Achilles fugit.
It wasn’t as tough as putting on a race, but I did hope that everybody who signed up would show up. I planned on meeting the torch after it crossed into Illinois from Missouri. I would join the Torch Relay, comprised of a Detroit News reporter and the rolling home base.
The Missouri bearers turned out to be too fleet of foot. They glided
over the state line and infiltrated forty miles into Illinois, to Litchfield, where the Southern Illinois Saluki track team was poised.
Hundreds of people lined the road in some towns, while on other parts of the journey only the participants inhabited long stretches of the highway. I followed in my car, calling the coaches and others who agreed to provide the logistics, stopping to hear that there were runners up ahead.
After some thirty hours on the road, with just brief naps in my Volkswagen, our commitment to the Detroit cause was withering. The early plan was to move into Chicago where I had helped recruit area runners from the University of Chicago Track Club and DePaul University.
But there were still miles to go before a sleep, and by the time we hit the Chicago suburbs we were 45 minutes behind schedule.
Joining the caravan near Chicago was Hal Higdon, a member of the University of Chicago Track Club, reporting on the Torch Relay for Sports Illustrated. Hal’s piece would also appear in his delightful book, On the Run From Dogs and People. Himself a near qualifier in the 3,000-meter steeplechase for the ‘60 Games, Higdon would write some 34 books, many of them involving running.
An early goal was to pause briefly at City Hall, meet the imperious Richard J. Daley, and then take the torch down the pike to the Indiana line. But the mayor’s attendants were having none of us tying up Windy City traffic at rush hour. They offered two a.m. We adjusted our schedule and accepted. By this time Hal was sitting shotgun in my Beetle. As we stopped for a toll both, we importuned the toll taker to let us through quickly, so we could keep up with the lead runners. We paid the toll and hurried on.
Finally, at the Dyer, Indiana hand off, I had been thirty-eight hours on the road. I was drained, feeling like I had run a good chunk of the way myself.
Sadly, I learned later that our light had failed. The Detroit Olympic bid had lost for the fifth consecutive Games. Final IOC score: Mexico City 30, Detroit 14. You didn’t win silver, you lost gold, the Nike commercial snarled.
But while Detroit may have finished close, but no cigar, one athlete won 1968 Olympic gold with one of the most astonishing performances in the history of our sport. And the failed Detroit bid may very well have played a part.
Mexico City’s elevation is almost eight thousand feet above sea level. For track athletes the air is less resistant and therefore conducive to fast sprint times and lengthy jumps.
Bob Beamon had made the U.S. Olympic track team by the barest of margins. Down to his last attempt in the Olympic Trials, he earned a USA vest by making a last ditch-place making jump.
At Mexico City, Bob Beamon became immortal on his first jump in the final. Six seconds after starting down the runway, he was hunched forward in the pit, with the greatest long jump in history, breaking the world record by nearly two feet. Beamon not only soared past twenty-eight feet, he landed at twenty-nine feet two and a half inches, one giant leap for mankind. Sports Illustrated called it one of the five greatest moments in sport history.
If Detroit had hosted the Olympic Games, Beamon’s jump to infinity might have been still a world record.
Later, I realized the irony of thousands of average athletes running to bring fame and fortune to the Motor City. And, I wondered: Someday, might Bob be available for the next Olympic Games Torch Relay to Detroit?
(ed. note) Had Detroit been awarded the Games, who knows what the effect of the race riots in Detroit during the years leading up to 1968 might have been. Mexico City had its share of unrest just prior to their Games in 1968. Here is the Wikipedia version of those events.
Following a summer of increasingly large demonstrations protesting the 1968 Olympics held in Mexico City, the Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on 2 October 1968 on unarmed civilians, killing an undetermined number, in the hundreds. It occurred in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The events are considered part of the Mexican Dirty War, when the US-backed PRI regime violently repressed political and social opposition. The massacre occurred 10 days before the Olympics' opening ceremony.
The head of the Federal Directorate of Security reported that 1,345 people were arrested.[1] At the time, the government and the media in Mexico claimed that government forces had been provoked by protesters shooting at them,[2] but government documents made public since 2000 suggest that snipers had been employed by the government. According to US national security archives, Kate Doyle, a Senior Analyst of US policy in Latin America, documented the deaths of 44 people;[3] however, estimates of the actual death toll range from 300 to 400, with eyewitnesses reporting hundreds dead.
Here is a youtube description of these events prior to the Olympics. Remember this was just two weeks prior to the Opening Ceremonies.
Army Repression in Mexico City 1968 Note: This was not a riot until the army came in. ed.
Chilling- Geoff Pietsch
George,
from our house. I remember running at Wayne State while fires were
burning in all 4 directions. Tracer bullets from the National Guard went
by our bedroom window among other things. I did not sleep for 4 days.
40 blacks and 3 whites died. Detroit had Lou Scott in the 5000
and Jerry Bocci in the walk at Mexico City. Ned Price
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