Fifty years on, Matthews and Collett are owed an apology for their Olympic expulsion

Fifty years ago this week, two African American athletes, Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett, won gold and silver respectively in the 400m at the Munich Olympics. At the medal ceremony they threw themselves into the maw of history.

During the US national anthem, the athletes shared the top tier of the podium – which would usually have been reserved for Matthews alone as the winner – an act of unity that broke Olympic protocol. They angled their backs away from the American flag and chatted casually, looking uninterested. Matthews rubbed his chin pensively before folding his arms. Collett stood barefoot, jacket open with hands on hips. As they departed, Matthews twirled his medal on his finger while Collett thrust a clenched fist into the air.

The International Olympic Committee’s response dripped with venom. In a letter to the US Olympic Committee, IOC president Avery Brundage excoriated the athletes’ “disgusting display” before handing down a lifetime ban from the Olympics. The IOC allowed Matthews and Collett to keep their medals, but Brundage warned that: “If such a performance should happen in the future … the medals will be withheld from the athletes in question.”

It is past time that the IOC rights its historical wrong and apologizes to Matthews, Collett, and their families for the draconian punishment that Olympic powerbrokers meted out at the time.

Harry Edwards, the civil-rights stalwart and sport sociologist at San Jose State University, told me, “It’s never too late to apologize and to honor people who not only tried to reflect the Olympic ideals but to live by them, to be willing to sacrifice, to project and make real the ideals of the Olympic movement.”

Brian Lewis, the president of the Caribbean Association