any word on the movie SALUTE it was due for cannes but noticed it was not there…
anyone know when its due for release?
Hi all,
Again congrats on keeping Peter’s name alive on this site. I am honoured to see so many people telling stories of my late Uncle and look forward to sharing the film SALUTE with you.
It’s been a really long road to get the film done but finally its here. Paramount Pictures have bought the film which in itself for a doco feature is outstanding.
The film will start screening in Cinema’s around Australia from the 24th July 2008. It’s World Premiere is at the Sydney Film Festival on the 8th June at 3.30pm at the State Theatre in Sydney. Come say hello. I’ll be there doing a q&a after the screening.
Also Qantas have bought the film to screen on all international and domestic flights from 24th July onwards. The ironic side to that is that the Entire Australian team will get to watch a film about civil and human rights on their way to Beijing. Got to love the way the world turns sometimes. I know Peter would have thought that was funny.
ANyway, back to the business of promoting this film. If you’d like to check out the films teaser which will be in cinema’s in the coming weeks go check out www.salutethemovie.com
I hope you all can help promote this film for me and peter as its important that I get the World to know his name and not thought of as just “The white guy in the photo”. It’s Peter Norman in the photo and I’m proud of that. Now it’s his time to get the recognition he truly deserves.
Kindest Regards
Matt Norman
Director/Producer
Salute
www.salutethemovie.com
Matt,
That trailer was moving and inspiring, it looks a must see, well done. Are there plans for it to show in NZ?
When is it coming to Canada?
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23747027-5001021,00.html
By Mike Hurst
May 24, 2008 12:00am
A NEW film in which the great Australian sprinter Peter Norman implores the current generation of Olympians to protest against human rights violations will be screened on all Qantas flights carrying team members to Beijing.
The film Salute documents the so-called Black Power Protest during the medal ceremony for the men’s 200m at the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games.
In the aftermath of the global Olympic torch relay which was beset with protests over China’s oppression of indigenous people in occupied Tibet, the film and Norman’s sentiments could light the fuse for a new Games protest 40 years on.
Paramount have bought Salute for worldwide distribution and Qantas picked up the rights to screen it on all flights from July 24.
The film has been five years in the making but tragically in 2006 Norman died of a heart attack, never having seen the finished product directed and produced by his nephew Matt Norman.
In 2005, Norman showed he was still an activist with a strong social conscience when he told The Daily Telegraph: "Today there is a whole new generation but someone still has to stand up and make a statement on behalf of the down-trodden.
"Once you’ve earned the right to stand on that podium you’ve got that square metre of the world that belongs to you. What you do with it is up to you - within limits.
"I’m not sure a rehashing of what happened in 1968 would have the same impact.
"And if a Chinese gold medallist made a civil rights protest the risk to them would probably be far greater (than it was in 1968 to Tommie Smith and John Carlos) because they’re doing it on home turf.
"We’re not advocating a repeat of 68 but people should be aware of the civil rights situation in China. It’s a wonderful opportunity to do something of a positive nature.‘’
Australian Olympic Committee spokesman Mike Tancred said despite an International Olympic Committee rule prohibiting any form of protest at the Games, Australian team guidelines had been redrafted to permit freedom of expression.
"The team will be able to express a point of view on human rights, Tibet and any other issue in media interviews and, for the first time ever, in blogs,‘’ he said.
"However, they won’t be allowed to stage demonstrations of political, racial or religious origin - certainly not in venues - and that would include wearing a Free Tibet T-shirt.
"We’d be encouraging our team members not to do what they [Norman and the Americans] did in '68 _ that black power salute _ which would be a breach of IOC Rule 51.
"In saying that, AOC president John Coates will deal with any breach on a case by case basis.
"We are mindful of the fact that in 1968 the then chef de mission of the Australian Olympic team, Julius ‘Judy’ Patching, dealt with the matter in this way: he spoke to Norman, slapped him on the wrist and offered him some free tickets to the hockey and told him to go and enjoy himself.
"So it’s highly unlikely we’ll be heavy-handed for any breach in Beijing.
"We have no problem with our athletes watching that film if it’s on the plane on the way up to Beijing. That’s fine.‘’
Norman set an Australian record - which still stands - in winning the silver medal, splitting two giants of American athletics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
As the American national anthem played for the winner Smith and Carlos stood in their long black socks, heads bowed, each with one arm raised with a fist gloved in black leather.
Norman, who empathised with the protest movement of the period, wore a Project For Human Rights button to show his solidarity during the medals ceremony.
Salute will premiere on June 8 at the State Theatre during the Sydney Film Festival and will open nationally from July 24.
here was the australian teaser for those who didnt see it do yourself a favour and track it down somehow.
wow - looks cool as. Nice find.
Has anyone heard any comments from the Aus athletes about it that went to Bejing? Wasn’t it being screened on their flight?
Tommie Smith: ‘Hate was so entrenched in America, and it took lives’
The Brian Viner interview: Tommie Smith recalls the difficult run-up – and disturbing sequel – to the ‘Black Power salute’ that came to define the 1968 Mexico Olympics
Monday, 13 October 2008
DAVID ASHDOWN
Tommie Smith today
Independent.co.uk
Some words are grossly over-used in the sporting universe. “Hero” is one, “iconic” another. But no word except “iconic” will do to describe the image of American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos after receiving their medals at the 1968 Olympic Games, in Mexico City 40 years ago this week, fists raised and heads bowed to draw attention to racial inequality back home.
And no word but “hero” will do for the gold-medallist Smith in particular. The 24-year-old had just established a new 200 metres world record, but was prepared to sacrifice sporting achievement on the altar of civil rights, well aware that his moment on the podium would eclipse his 19.83sec on the track.
Nothing else that happened at the 1968 Olympics not Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump, not Dick Fosbury’s new-fangled high jump – caught the world’s attention like that so-called “Black Power salute” in what was already a convulsive year for protest statements. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had both recently been assassinated, and in Mexico City itself, just 10 days before the Games, more than 200 student demonstrators had been massacred by soldiers. Smith headed down to Mexico feeling charged by the electricity of the times.
On the day we meet, in the heartbreakingly prosaic surroundings of the Novotel, Euston Road, he is feeling a different kind of charge. It is a few hours since Smith, now a retired sociology professor, arrived in London from Atlanta, Georgia. He reached England with his wife but not, thanks to Delta Airlines, their luggage. So they have just been in the West End shopping for clothes, not the easiest or cheapest of tasks for a 6ft 4in man aged 64. His credit card has taken a hammering and, what with the jetlag and all, he could be excused a certain shortness of temper. Yet he is the essence of genial politeness both with me and with the Camden Council press officer, who has arranged a short series of interviews for him.
Smith has been invited to London to launch Camden’s “Black History” season. He is being interviewed first by The Independent, then the Hindi Times, then Socialist Worker – very Camden Council – but there is not so much as a sigh when I pose the first of what will doubtless be hundreds of questions about events long ago. Can he give me the background to what the world knows as the Black Power salute, but to him remains the “victory stand”?
“Sure,” he says, taking a long, fortifying slug of coffee, into which his wife, Delois, has heaped about eight sugars. “I’d got involved with the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which was developed at the University of San Jose State, and saw the need for young black athletes to get involved in social change. And at a meeting held in Denver, Colorado, en route to Mexico City, we took a vote on whether we should actually boycott the Olympics. We voted against, but Ralph Boston, the great American long jumper, said ‘what are we going to do instead?’ We agreed that each athlete would represent themselves according to how they felt about a country that didn’t represent them fully, and some chose to go ahead with their own personal boycott. The great basketball player Lew Alcindor, who later became Kareem Abdul Jabar, did not go.”
A pause, for more coffee. “You see, hate was so entrenched in America at that time, and it took lives. White lives also. It took the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many people we don’t even know.”
By October 1968, the deaths of two of their champions, King and Bobby Kennedy, had left African-Americans feeling even more disenfranchised than before. Smith, who had grown up one of 12 children of a poor Texan farmer hardly expecting to reach a position of influence, at least had the franchise of a global television audience. But to exploit it he had to finish in a medal position.
“I don’t know what would have happened had I not won the gold medal,” he tells me. “And I had a pulled muscle, so I was not the favourite. But I did win, and John Carlos won bronze, with [the Australian] Peter Norman in second place. We were then escorted to a place known as ‘the dungeon’ to prepare for the medal ceremony, and that’s where John and I decided what we would do. Peter listened, but he didn’t have much to say because this was an American situation.”
Nonetheless, Norman lent his support by wearing an OPHR badge, unwittingly writing himself, too, into the history books. When he died, in October 2006, both Smith and Carlos were pall-bearers at his funeral. During the ceremony, however, all eyes were on the two Americans, who wore one black glove each. Smith had his right fist raised, Carlos his left. It was later claimed that Smith’s right fist denoted black power, with Carlos’s left fist representing black unity. The slightly less stirring truth is that the gloves were Smith’s, and they only had one pair between them.
“I had gotten my wife to send them from California, though I didn’t know how I was going to use them,” he says. When did he raise his arm? “As soon as I could recognise the first key of the national anthem. The crowd were completely silent.” A short chuckle. “Silence is golden, you know.” And with the ceremony over, then what? “Then what? I had to get off the victory stand and get the heck out of Dodge.”
The reverberations began almost immediately, with Avery Brundage, who had represented the United States in the 1912 Olympics and was now the reactionary 81-year-old president of the International Olympic Committee, conducting the chorus of disapproval.
The smile fades from Smith’s face when I mention Brundage. “Avery Brundage was a racist. He had admired the SS at the 1936 Games in Berlin and he hadn’t changed one bit. But all he could do was denounce me verbally. As IOC president he had no jurisdiction over the American team. But he forced Douglas Roby, the president of the United States Olympic Committee, to do his dirty work. He told Roby that the whole team could be disqualified unless I was sent home. So that’s what Roby did, kicked us off the team and sent us home. And to this day I am not a member of the USOC hall of fame, and nobody there will admit that what they did was wrong. They say ‘I wasn’t there, I wasn’t even born’. They do not have the backbone to do what is necessary … and I’m not a beggar.”
Smith says all this quietly and without obvious rancour; even his moral indignation is cloaked in geniality. But four decades have not diminished it. “Bob Beamon wore black socks,” he tells me, when I ask whether other black American athletes registered defiance in any way, “but the entire 4 by 100 relay team did nothing. Two of them, Mel Pender and Charlie Green, were in the army, and would probably have been court-martialled. Jimmy Hines didn’t do anything. He said the gold medal was going to make him a million dollars. He thought America was going to embrace them. It didn’t work out that way.”
If America failed to embrace those black athletes who didn’t protest, it positively shunned those who did. “I started seeing the backs of people more than their fronts,” says Smith. “I held 11 world records at the time of Mexico City, more than any man or woman in track and field history. In fact two still stand because they’re not run any more – the 220 yards on the straightaway (ie run straight), and the 200m on the straightaway. So I was a hot item back then, but when I came back from Mexico, I was too hot. And people didn’t want to feel the heat.”
Smith and Carlos were widely denounced for showing “disrespect” for the American flag. The Associated Press report had described their “Nazi-like salute”, and for Brent Musburger, the influential columnist in the Chicago American newspaper, they were “black-skinned stormtroopers”. Smith, who was also in the army, was granted an honourable discharge for “unAmerican activities” and the surprise was only that it was honourable. For months after he got home, he received abusive phone calls and even death threats. While some of his countrymen were refining the technology that would soon put a man on the moon, others were phoning in the dead of night and calling him an “uppity nigger”. In 1970, Smith’s mother died of a heart attack, aged 57, not long after she had been sent dead rats in the post. He is entitled to an enduring sense of grievance.
Yet he must surely feel some satisfaction now when he surveys the political landscape in America, and sees, for heaven’s sake, a black man seemingly within a month of becoming president. And did he not, in his own way, contribute to the conditions in which Barack Obama now prospers? “Well, many people died for civil rights so that door could be opened. Do I feel satisfaction? No, because satisfaction implies satiation, and I do not feel sated. There is a lot to do still, but black athletes don’t stand up for anything much any more, because million-dollar contracts have bought their souls. I am pleased that Obama is a man of colour, of course I am, but he is not there because he is African-American, he is there because he is a good politician. He needs more than colour. If when he gets in he has the same attitude as Bush, what am I supposed to do?”
Has he met Obama? “No, but you’d better believe I’d like to, though I don’t think I’ll be getting in my raggedy Chevrolet van to drive to Washington and say ‘hey dude, what’s happening?’” The lounge of the Novotel, Euston Road, rings to the sound of Smith’s laughter.
So who did he meet as a result of his fame? What about the most decorated black American Olympian of all, Jesse Owens? “I wrote him a letter, shortly before he passed [away]. But Jesse Owens was like my dad. He stayed in his place as a black man. He couldn’t afford human aspirations. And America liked that. Even now, America looks positively at the 1936 Olympics, when Jesse made Hitler mad, and negatively at the 1968 Olympics.”
Having effectively put a match to a dazzling athletics career with his actions in Mexico City, in 1969 Smith joined the Cincinnati Bengals as a wide receiver, where he stayed for three years before pursuing a career in education. “No black man was involved in hiring me,” he explains. “It was [the coaches] Bill Walsh and the legendary Paul Brown who took me to Cincinnati. I wasn’t just helped by black people.” A pause, and a chuckle. “But of course they weren’t looking at my idealism. I was 6ft 4in tall, weighed 205lb and ran [200m in] 19.83.”
He must, I venture finally, have enjoyed Usain Bolt’s Olympic exploits? Smith makes a noise that can only be described as a coo. “Oh my, yes. And ooh, would I love to coach him. I can see areas where he can improve, oh my goodness, yes. He’s 6ft 5in but in many ways he runs like a man of 5ft 10in. Puma gave him a big birthday party, which I went along to because he’s a Puma man and so am I. They gave me a replica of one of his gold shoes, which he signed, and I gave him a red one of mine.” I leave the obvious unsaid, that the item that really symbolises the impact Tommie Smith made as an athlete, is not a red shoe, but a black glove.
Tommie Smith by numbers
24 Smith’s age when he won the 200m at the 1968 Games in Mexico City.
11 Smith’s 200m world record of 19.83sec at the 1968 Games stood for over 11 years.
2 Number of games Smith played for American Football League side Cincinatti Bengals, at the age of 25.
41 Distance in yards of Smith’s reception average at the Bengals.
1 Smith gave Usain Bolt one of his running shoes as a birthday gift.
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doesnt mean anyone watched it though. nobody has ever said anything about it which i found weird, maybe its just me but i am into the history of the sports i like, i see it like this, if you have no idea where you have come from, where can you go to
My Athletic club (Athletics Essendon) is holding the 2nd memorial meet for Peter Norman (who was an Essendon club member) in March 2009.
http://peternormanclassic.athleticsessendon.org.au/
The club record for the 200m incidentally, is 20.06, set in 1968…
Page last updated at 09:11 GMT, Friday, 17 October 2008 10:11 UK
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The other man on the podium
By Caroline Frost
The famous salute
Enlarge Image
When Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a gloved Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in October 1968 it sent a shockwave through sport. But what happened to the other man on platform?
Forty years ago, two black Americans, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze medals in the 200m final at the Mexico Olympics, and used their time on the victory podium to protest with a Black Power salute.
The photograph of the two men with their heads bowed, each of them with an arm raised in the air and a fist clothed in a black leather glove, is one of the most striking images of the 20th Century.
Their actions caused havoc at the games, ensuring the pair were ejected from the US Olympic team. But three men won medals in that race, and the consequences for the third athlete on the podium would be every bit as significant.
The silver medallist was a laid-back Australian, an up-and-coming runner called Peter Norman who, in the words of his coach, “blossomed like a cactus” when he got to Mexico. While observers expected the Americans to make a clean sweep of the 200m medals, Norman kept them interested by breaking the world record in the heats.
Gloves idea
An apprentice butcher from Melbourne, he had learned to run in a pair of borrowed spikes. More significantly, he had grown up in a Salvation Army family, with a set of simple but strong values instilled from an early age.
As his nephew Matt Norman, director of the new film, Salute, remembers: “The whole Norman family were brought up in the Salvos, so we knew we had to look after our fellow man, but that was about it.”
Norman was one of Australia’s foremost athletes but was ostracised
In Mexico, that was enough for Norman, who felt compelled to join forces with his fellow athletes in their stand against racial inequality.
The three were waiting for the victory ceremony when Norman discovered what was about to happen. It was Norman who, when John Carlos found he’d forgotten his black gloves, suggested the two runners shared Smith’s pair, wearing one each on the podium.
And when, to the crowd’s astonishment, they flung their fists in the air, the Australian joined the protest in his own way, wearing a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights that they had given him.
The repercussions for Norman were immediate. Seen as a trouble-maker who had lent a hand to those desecrators of the Olympic flag, he was ostracised by the Australian establishment. Despite qualifying 13 times over and being ranked fifth in the world, he was not sent to the following Munich games, where Australia had no sprinter for the first time in the Olympics. Norman retired soon afterwards without winning another title.
Sydney hope
Divorce and ill health all weighed down on him over the next few years. He suffered depression, drank heavily and grew addicted to painkillers after a lengthy hospital stay. During that time, he used his silver medal as a door-stop.
One of the things that kept him going was the hope that he would be welcomed and recognised at the Sydney Olympics. As his nephew puts it: “Then his life would have come full circle.”
The US monument to the protest has an empty space
He was to be disappointed. In 2000, Peter Norman found himself the only Australian Olympian to be excluded from making a VIP lap of honour at the games, despite his status as one of the best sprinters in the home country’s history.
But the US athletics team was not going ignore this omission. They invited Norman to stay at their own lodgings during the games, and welcomed him as one of their own. In an extraordinary turn of events, it was hurdling legend Ed Moses who greeted him at the door, and that year’s 200m champion Michael Johnson who hugged him, saying: “You are my hero.”
In 2004, Peter’s nephew Matt started work on Salute, a documentary that, for the first time, brought all three athletes together in a room to tell their story of that day in Mexico.
Two years later, Peter had just seen the film for the first time and was about to embark on a publicity tour to the US when he had a heart attack and died. Tommy Smith and John Carlos, to whom he had always stayed close, travelled to Melbourne to act as pallbearers at his funeral, and remember their friend.
Empty place
“Peter didn’t have to take that button [badge], Peter wasn’t from the United States, Peter was not a black man, Peter didn’t have to feel what I felt, but he was a man,” says Carlos.
“He was that committed, and I didn’t know that,” adds Smith.
In 2004, a 23ft statue honouring Smith and Carlos was erected in San Jose State University. This huge replica shows each of them with their fists in the air, just as they stood four decades ago in Mexico.
Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at Norman’s funeral
The place for the silver medallist is empty. It is where students and tourists stand to have their picture taken, when they want to take their place in sporting history.
In the film now being shown all over Australia, the absent athlete reflects on his legacy.
"I’m a firm believer that in a victory ceremony for the Olympics, there’s three guys that stand up there, each one’s been given about a square metre of God’s earth to stand on, and what any one of the three choose to do with his little square metre at that stage is entirely up to him.
“If it hadn’t been for that demonstration on that day, it would have just been another silver medal that Australia picked up along the line. No one would ever have heard of Peter Norman.”
The film Salute is now on release in Australia, and being shown at various film festivals around the world.