Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  I was in a different position in that I was still only nineteen during the ’64 Olympics and had not even completed a full year of college. After I won my gold medal, I went back to the same routine I’d always had: I was back in school, I had Mr. Temple there to guide me, and I was doing all the things that got me to the ’64 Games—why wouldn’t I get to the ’68 Games?

  Other athletes, ones who ran for clubs instead of schools, had to put themselves through college if they wanted a degree, and for many that meant that they also had to maintain a job and convince the person that they were working for to let them go on trips, to take four-day weekends for meets or even go to the Olympics for a month, which was not fashionable for companies to do at that time. So for club runners, retiring at an early age was a matter of economic necessity. And even for those who ran for schools, graduation meant that your life was going to change. You had to get yourself a full-time job, eight to five, figure out some way to continue to practice, and find someone who was going to be very understanding to work for. That was just not happening in the 1960s, especially not for women—and even less so for Black women. The support was just not there.

  So I was lucky that I went to my first Olympics when I did, at the age that I was. I was in good shape—I could feel it—and I was beating not only the runners from other schools and clubs but also the other Tigerbelles. If you could beat a Tigerbelle, Mr. Temple would say, you could beat anybody—anybody in the world. Not that there was anybody else running sprints from Tennessee State in ’68; it was just me. Edith was two years ahead of me in school, so she had graduated in ’66.

  As the Olympic Trials drew closer, I knew I was ready, both physically and mentally. I had a new way of walking, so to speak. My attitude was: I am going to graduate from college, and I am going to go to the Olympics and win my last gold medal. And then I’ll be done. Those were my goals.

  By August of ’68, I had reached the first goal: I graduated from Tennessee State with a degree in recreation[18]—not that I ever used it in any direct way, although it was helpful when I worked in outdoor education. What I really wanted to do was become an athletic trainer. I’ve always been fascinated with biology, kinesiology—anything that has to do with observing the human body and analyzing how it works. I took a class called “Care and Prevention of Athletic Injuries” and just loved it. But that kind of career was not available to me at that time; it was not something women were supposed to do. It probably would have been possible at one of the other schools, and it might have been possible for me at Tennessee State if someone had been encouraging me to take the extra classes and do it. But nobody was doing that. In fact, Mr. Temple just said, “You need to get out of school! Don’t be trying to change your major. You need to get out of school now—that’s what you need to do.”

  It’s official! College graduation picture, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Tennessee State University.)

  * * *

  Although I knew many of the athletes from the US men’s track-and-field team, I didn’t see a lot of them in the run-up to ’68. We rarely competed at the same time or in the same places—we had our Olympic Trials in one place, and they had their Olympic Trials somewhere else. I don’t know why, but they never had us together. And when we went to our Olympic Trials, there would be nobody in the stands for the women, while the men’s Trials were televised. But we never let that bother us. Being seen was not what we were there for; we had bigger fish to fry.

  What did bother us in ’68 were the separate and unequal locations of the men’s and women’s Olympic training camps. The 1968 Olympics were held in Mexico City, where the elevation is over seven thousand feet. So we needed to train at a high altitude, and they placed our camps accordingly. The men’s Olympic training camp was in Lake Tahoe, California—a beautiful place. The women’s Olympic training camp was in Los Alamos, New Mexico—that Los Alamos—where it’s very hot, and where the government carried out all their nuclear weapons development and testing.

  At first, we didn’t know a lot about Los Alamos or the things that went on there[19]; our main objection was the isolation. When we got off the bus, we all looked around and said, “Wow, there’s nothing here.” Because there was nothing in that town—nothing but all the nuclear weapons development facilities. As time went on, we began to understand why it was so isolated. There was a long-distance runner who would just go off and run, and one day she headed into an area that she shouldn’t have been in. That’s when the coaches called us together and told us, “You should not be running anywhere but where you’re told. For you long-distance runners, we have a place for you to run, and these are the areas you go to. Don’t go off the beaten path.” They didn’t say it like that, exactly, but basically it was, “Stay where you’re supposed to be. Don’t go gallivanting off into places where there’s no telling what might happen.”

  After that, even breathing seemed suspect. What am I breathing in? Have I not adjusted yet? Is it the altitude? Or is it the chemicals? Yet there was nothing we could do. As far as I could tell, nobody was concerned about our health. Nobody cared. And I think we talked about it more because we had nothing to do—nothing except touring the nuclear development facilities, which is one of the activities they arranged for us. Okay, we’re here. Let’s go see these plants! But I didn’t want to be around those things.

  In addition to taking us on tours of the facilities, they were doing all kinds of tests on us: measuring our body fat, putting us in tubs of water to see what got displaced. Basically, we were guinea pigs. We weren’t thinking like that at the time, but that’s what we were: experimental subjects. I don’t know what they used the information for; that’s something I wonder about to this day. Also, at that time they had started testing us to see if we were truly women. They would scrape around in your mouth, and if you had the wrong chromosomes, they would say, “Something’s wrong. You’re not a woman!”

  We did get to learn a little about the Native American culture down there, and about making turquoise jewelry, and that was interesting. But other than that, there was absolutely nothing. Far, far away from everything—desolate. Nobody. Nothing. And we were there for at least three weeks, maybe four, with no choice in the matter at all, and nothing to do but stay in the motel the whole time. They had one movie house. That was it. It was horrible. And I would always wonder, What are they trying to do, putting us down here with all this nuclear stuff, experimenting on us? What was going through the Olympic Committee’s brain to put us here? Getting acclimated to the altitude was the stated reason. But there are other places in the US at that altitude—Santa Fe, for example, which was not very far away. And I never understood why they didn’t just put us with the men in Tahoe—that’s where we should have been. But no. Separate-and-not-equal ruled the day. So that’s where we spent our time.

  The movement was still on the West Coast, and it stayed on the West Coast—and it was not, at that point, a women’s movement.

  Chapter 7.

  B2B100m

  Once we all were in Mexico City, we had to make a decision about whether or not to boycott. There were people for, people against, but nobody could really bring everybody together and say, “Okay, we’re all going to do this.” So we had lots of meetings.

  The meetings were not just for Black athletes. They were for all the athletes who wanted to be involved, and that included white athletes. The movement had started with the idea of just a Black boycott of the Olympics, and that’s how people thought about it: “This is what the Blacks are talking about. They’re not going to the Games.” But by the time we got to Mexico City, the organizers had decided to change the focus from Black Power to human rights, and that’s how the Olympic Project for Human Rights was started. Because there were a lot of things happening in the world that were wrong. In addition to Black oppression in America, people were protesting the massacre of the student activists in Mexico City itself, in Tlatelolco. They were protesting apartheid in South Africa and the crackdown on the student
uprising in France—not to mention what had gone on in Algeria, which only got its independence from France in 1962—and the war in Vietnam, although that was never one of the talking points. Human rights violations were not just happening to Black people in the United States. They were happening to people all over the world. All kinds of people’s rights were being taken away or had always been denied.

  The cause of human rights was broader than the cause of Black Power, and in my view, that’s why the direction of the movement changed—it had to change, if you ask me, because I never felt that there would be enough people who would stand up just for Black rights. In any case, after it changed, there were a lot more people involved. They had buttons made and everything, and in Mexico City they were giving out those buttons to anyone who wanted them. Of course, as I have mentioned, neither I nor any of the other athletes on the women’s track team were involved in the decision to change course or the button making. I guess that all happened up in Tahoe while we were down in lovely Los Alamos.

  Two of the white athletes who were very involved were Hal and Olga Connolly. Hal was a hammer thrower for the US, and Olga threw the discus for what was then Czechoslovakia. They were in the 1956 Olympics together and fell in love, and when they got married, Olga came to live in the US. They were part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights right off the bat, and one of the things they did was keep in contact with the Harvard rowing team, who were also white. The Harvard rowers were all in support of the Project; they wore the buttons and came to the meetings and spoke out whenever they got the chance.

  The meetings were in the Olympic Village gathering area, and there were some fifty or so athletes at most of the meetings, and when they left, most were wearing buttons. Pretty soon the people from the Olympic Committee started saying, “You can’t wear those buttons, that’s not part of the uniform.” But the athletes would wear them anyway. They’d say, “What are you going to do? Put me off the team?” And at some point the Olympic Committee must have figured out that putting people off the team was going to attract more attention than us wearing the buttons. So we wore the buttons. I sure wore mine; at that point, I knew that I was going to be me, and whatever else was going to happen was going to happen.

  Eventually, the Olympic Committee got so worried that they decided they would send in their gold medal troop to address us: Jesse Owens. At one of the meetings, he came in and started saying what a wonderful thing it is to be a part of the Games, and that we wouldn’t get this opportunity every day, and we should think about what’s going on and how we were affecting the world. I thought he was saying some of the right things—affecting the world was exactly what we wanted to do—but trying to bring us to the wrong conclusion. The Olympic Committee thought Jesse was going to be their Olympic savior. But when he finished his speech, we just looked at each other and thought, Oh, please. Nobody was interested in listening to Jesse. We pretty much waited for him to finish and then said to ourselves, Get him out of here.

  This was both because he was representing the Olympic Committee and because of the way he was seen personally. He was respected as a runner, but not as someone who was ever part of a movement. We would all say that Jesse was their poster child. But when you really talked to Jesse and thought about what he did, you wondered why he let them make him be that. Because after he went to Germany and stood up to Hitler—represented the US and stood up to Hitler—he came back to the US and had to run against horses for money. How degrading must that be? To run against an animal? And I’m sure there were many other things that happened to him because of what life was like for Blacks back then that I don’t know about. There was a time when Jesse had nothing—absolutely nothing. And then he comes in and tries to say to the group, “You shouldn’t do this. This is America, and we should be proud of our country.”

  At a certain point, your country has to give you a reason to feel proud, has to recognize your accomplishments—not to mention your humanity. And remember that in ’64 they didn’t even give Edith and me a parade in downtown Atlanta. Just in the Black community. Which I was okay with because those are my people. But I was lucky that I had my life at Tennessee State to go back to because my country, which Jesse was telling us to be proud of, was not offering me anything in return for how well I had represented it. And after a while you start to look around you and think: What’s wrong with this picture?

  Not that the country didn’t claim our victories—that’s the reason you’re allowed to be a part of the USA team: because they want to claim all that’s good. So if I’m winning, of course they’re claiming it. It’s all about counting medals; it always has been and I think it always will be—even though the Cold War is over. And in the sixties, for women, particularly Black women, that’s all you were: part of the count. Before the Olympics, they don’t say anything about you, and then you win and they’ll mention you in maybe a couple of articles: “Our girls are doing wonderful.” Or “Our gals”—that’s how they used to refer to us—“Our gals did great. Let’s move on.” Grrr. We weren’t treated like the men, never saw articles that said we “came through for our country.” But if we didn’t do well, then: “You really let your country down”—like that Russia trip with Flamin’ Mamie. Nobody ever asked whether the country let us down. That’s the real question. Because the country did let us down. Many times. As Black people and as women. Not that that affected me because I had enough love and support from my family, Mr. Temple, and the Tigerbelles, and knowing that what I did was a good thing—for me, if nothing else.

  I think that what had happened to Jesse Owens bothered him, but—from the way I see it—in ’68 they needed him, so they were doing a lot for him then: giving him a cushiony job and all the respect he hadn’t gotten in the forties and fifties. Maybe that allowed him to put the past behind him. But it didn’t make us any more interested in what he had to say.

  We had flown straight from New Mexico to Mexico City right before the Games started, about two weeks before we were supposed to compete. We didn’t have an acclimation period in Mexico City like we did in Tokyo because there was no time zone difference, long flight, or altitude adjustment (since we had taken care of that in Los Alamos) to worry about. But it also meant that everything happened very quickly. The meeting with Jesse Owens occurred within two or three days of our arrival, and it was not the first meeting we went to. The first meeting didn’t have very many people at it, and then at the second meeting there were a lot more, all saying different things. They couldn’t reach agreement. They wanted to vote on what to do, but could never even get a majority of people to agree to vote. Whenever they asked for a vote, someone would say, “Why do we need to vote? The people who want to do something should just do something.”

  And that’s what eventually came out of it. It was decided that the action was all up to the individual: whatever you wanted to do to support the movement, you should do. If you wanted to speak, if you wanted to wear something other than the assigned uniform—however you wanted to demonstrate, that’s what you would do. I don’t think anyone went home from the meeting thinking they were going to do anything specific. There wasn’t that much direction. I don’t think even Tommie Smith or John Carlos knew, at that point, what they were going to do. At least from what I know, they didn’t. How could you sit in a room and think of doing what they did? That’s one of those things that I always felt was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But it was a great spur—an inspiration. It was a spur of the moment that lit a light—one that’s still shining. It was one of those things.

  Unlike Tokyo and the ’64 Olympics, I had been to Mexico City before. They had invited the Tigerbelles down there to race, so I knew what to expect, running-wise. The pollution was not as bad there as it is now. It was bad, but I don’t remember it being an issue. And the altitude didn’t affect us sprinters in any negative way; the thinner air makes you run faster. So even with all the political conflict that was going on, I was still feeling good, physically and mentally. My
goals were still the same, and looking back on it, I was pretty focused and hoping that whatever other things I was going to do would not interfere with those goals. But I was also open to anything. If the group had come to a consensus that we would not compete, if that’s what it was going to be, then my goals might have changed. It wouldn’t have been a big change for me, on the inside. It would have been something that I could do. Like I said before, I’m not the person who is going to go out and take their licks in a protest. But changing my goals to serve a purpose? That I could do. Because that wouldn’t make me feel like I’d been stepped on, trod on, nothing like that.

  In the discussions, I just listened; I was still not someone who was going to speak up. Part of it was that, as well as I knew Tommie and Carlos and Lee and all that, they never, even there, came to us and asked us to join them. I never thought of them as selfish personally, as selfish individuals. It was just that whole male thing that I always hated, that “Whatever we say, you’re going to do.” Not “Be a part of it.” Not “Stand up with me.” But “Get behind me.” That never appealed to me; my mom and dad did not raise me that way.

  After the fact, when I talked to Tommie—and Tommie is not a big talker—he’d say, “I’m just a good old farm boy!” And I’d say, “Yes, you are.” And eventually he realized, “Well, we’re just the same—we have a lot in common.”

  “Yeah,” I would say, “we do.” But see, I had known that a long time before; I was just not on his radar in ’68. None of us women were. It’s no big thing. I feel that we are all always at different stages of our lives. And we all change, or we don’t.