Word: africa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...twentieth century, sadly, there is very little which is apart from politics. In the past two weeks, 38 nations--predominately from black Africa--have made viable threats to boycott the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City. Angered over apartheid South Africa's readmission to competition, the African nations have taken their political protest into the world of athletics...
Early last week, the Soviet Union, obviously seeking to bolster its image on the Dark Continent, stridently denounced the International Olympic Committee and more specifically its president, multi-millionaire Avery Brundage. Letting South Africa participate, the Soviet's Olympic Committee said, would be "an impermissible act which contradicts the basic principles of the Olympic statute...
Brundage got into the current mess initially about a month ago. During the Winter Games at Grenoble, he announced that a majority of the 72 member nations of the IOC had voted by mail to readmit South Africa, which was barred, because of apartheid, from the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad. Brundage said the Johannesburg government had taken adequate steps to merit the IOC's forgiveness...
These moves satisfied enough members of the IOC (Brundage: "It was a real achievement."), but the African nations merely snorted. Correctly pointing to South Africa's unchanged discriminatory policies toward the rest of her non-white community, black Africa decried the Johannesburg concessions as virtually worthless. At a continental conference 32 of the fledgling states passed a boycott resolution which was soon endorsed by India, Malaysia, Cuba, Pakistan and several Middle Eastern nations. Russia and her satellites made threatening noises but refrained from joining the boycotters...
Donald Stevens, vice president of the Olympic Council of Malaysia, explained the feelings behind the resolution--the Olympics are so completely dominated by white nations, he said, that the IOC felt it could ignore the wishes of African and Asian nations by readmitting South Africa to the Games...