Ten Unforgettable Olympic Moments

Ten Unforgettable Olympic Moments

Since French baron Pierre de Coubertin gave fresh life to the Olympic movement in 1896, the Games have been witness to some of the most unforgettable moments in sports. ¹ Some of those moments have been dazzling athletic achievements. Others have been moments that organizers would have preferred never happened. But good or bad, these events have helped create the memories that shape our perceptions of the Olympic Games to the present day.
So here, in no particular order, are ten unforgettable moments from the Summer Olympic Games.

Jesse Owens ² —Berlin 1936

In 1936, Nazi Germany played host to the Summer Olmpics, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler was determined to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. ³
African-American track star Jesse Owens, a son of a sharecropper and the grandsons of slaves, had other plans. ⁴ In a display that dealt a tremendous blow to the Nazi’s racist ideology, Owens won the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash and the long jump. ⁵ He was also a key member of the 400-meter relay team that won the gold medal. He set records in three of those events. He was the first American to ever win four medals in an Olympic Games.
But as Owens himself later noted, his single-handed destruction of Hitler’s myth of Aryan superiority did little at the time to advance the cause of African-Americans in the US.
"When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus, ⁶" Owens said. "I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either."

The Soviet Union-USA Gold Medal basketball final—Munich 1972

It was as bad a call by officials as has ever been made in a sporting contest. ⁷ The 1972 gold medal basketball game between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real squeaker, but it looked as if the Americans had pulled it out. ⁸ But that was not to be, as long-time Monitor sports writer Ross Atkins recalled recently:
After the US appeared to have kept its perfect Olympic record intact and escaped a huge upset by the Soviets in the men’s final, the referees twice decided to put three seconds back on the clock. ⁹ The Soviets managed to score the winning basket on the second replay and win the gold medal. Distraught by what they considered an injustice, the members of US team voted unanimously to refuse their silver medals. ¹⁰ They’ve never reneged, and to this day the medals sit in a Swiss vault. ¹¹
How seriously do the American players who played on that team take this boycott ¹²? Team captain Kenny Davis actually placed in his will a request that his wife and children can never, ever receive the silver medal from that game.

Ethiopian Abebe Bikila ¹³ wins a gold medal while running barefoot—Rome 1960

Abebe Bikila was a young member of the Imperial Bodyguard of Ethiopia when he ran the marathon in the 1960 Games in Rome. Up until that time, no black African had ever won a gold medal in the Olympic Games, let alone a prestigious track and field event like the marathon. But Bikila, running without his shoes in the chilly dawn of a Roman summer day, broke that dry spell, and set a new world record at the same time. ¹⁴
It was fitting that his win came in Italy, the nation that had invaded his homeland three decades earlier. His feat captured the imagination of the entire world. Four years later in Tokyo, he repeated it, becoming the first man to ever win gold in two Olympic marathons (a feat only duplicated once ¹⁵).
He also established a trend that has to this day dominated long-distance events around the globe: the superiority of runners from eastern Africa.

Mark Spitz’ ¹⁶ seven gold medals—Munich 1972

Before anyone had ever heard of this year’s hyped Olympic swimming hopeful, Michael Phelps, ¹⁷ there was an even greater sensation in the pool: Mark Spitz. Spitz promised he would win seven gold medals at the ’72 games in Munich, Germany.
Not only was he as good as his word, winning four individual and three relay golds, but he also set, or helped set, a world record in each race. No athlete in any discipline ¹⁸ has come close to matching his performance.
In 1990, 18 years after his Olympic medal spree, Spitz announced he planned to try to qualify for the 1992 Barcelona Games in the 100 metres butterfly. ¹⁹ But he did so poorly that he announced that, once and for all, his swimming days were over.

Ben Johnson loses gold medal in doping scandal—Seoul 1988 ²⁰

It was arguably Canada’s greatest athletic achievement when Ben Johnson raced across the finish line first in the 100-metre dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, making him the "fastest human being ever". Within two days that joy turned into one of the Olympics’ most disappointing moments, when Olympic officials announced that Johnson had been disqualified because he had tested positive for steroid use. ²¹
After Johnson, Olympic organizers could no longer avoid the fact that many top athletes were using drugs to help them win. The cat-and-mouse game between athletes and Olympic officials over the use of performance-enhancing drugs continues to this day. But at the 2004 Games in Athens, there was a new wrinkle —along with urine, the blood of gold medal winning athletes was also tested, ²² which was "considered a huge threat to cheaters".