Russ Best

On Saturday 31 July 1976, nine athletes from eight nations lined up in the 1500m final at the Montreal Olympic Games. This is an event in which New Zealand has a remarkable history. Forty years earlier, at Adolf Hitler’s Olympic Games in Berlin, 1936, New Zealander Jack Lovelock won the gold medal in a world record time. Overnight, he became an international superstar and a national hero. Twenty-eight years later, in 1964, in Tokyo, where an Asian nation was hosting the games for the first time and Japan was opening themselves up to the world following World War II, another New Zealand superstar, Peter Snell, conquered the 1500m with a magnificent gold medal, with fellow New Zealander John Davies winning bronze. Snell would also back up his 1960 Rome 800m victory by defending his title in Tokyo. These were heady days in New Zealand athletics, and by the 1976 Olympic Games, another New Zealander, John Walker, was favourite to win gold in the 1500m. A year earlier Walker had become the first man to break the three-minute fifty-second barrier for the mile. It was Sunday 1 August 1976 in New Zealand when the final was screened live on television. New Zealand came to a standstill that morning with church services pausing for the Olympic final, and New Zealanders got what they wished for, a gold medal. As Walker crossed the line, Television New Zealand commentator Keith Quinn said, ‘in the best traditions of Jack Lovelock and Peter Snell, John Walker wins the gold medal in the 1500 metres in Montreal.’ This gold medal came just a day after an unknown and unfancied New Zealand men’s hockey team upset Australia in the Olympic final, to win the gold medal. Australia would fail to win a single gold medal in Montreal, and this failure would bring about the advent of the Australian Institute of Sport and a renewed focus on high performance sports as an important contributor to Australian identity and the opportunity to showcase themselves to the world. Nineteen seventy-six was a golden time for New Zealand at the Olympic Games and came just two years after Christchurch hosted a successful Commonwealth Games. The distinctive black singlet with the silver fern was on top of the medal dais and at the centre of the Olympic world. However, there was something wrong at the 1976 Olympic Games: the noticeable absence of African nations. In the days leading up to the Opening Ceremony, they walked out of Montreal because New Zealand’s All Black rugby team were touring apartheid South Africa. South Africa last competed at the Olympic Games in 1960 and had been expelled from the Olympic movement because of their racist political regime. The 1500m final, as well as many other athletic events, were an all-white event with the world record holder, and Walker’s major rival in the 1500m, Filbert Bayi of Tanzania, absent from the games. It had been two years earlier at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch that Bayi had run competitively to beat Walker and win the 1500m in a world record time. The scene was set for a battle royal in Montreal. However, it was not meant to be. Walker won the gold, and the Africans went home after New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon categorically stated that sport and politics do not mix and that he would not intervene in the All-Blacks’ tour of South Africa, though this itself was a political decision. However, this story shows that sport and politics do mix and despite New Zealand’s storied history in the Olympic Games, the country has at times, also been the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons. This example shows not only the emotion of sport and how sport is important to New Zealanders but also how politics plays an important and controversial role in sport. Ultimately, this example displays the potency sport has had in contributing to New Zealand’s national identity. #PhD #Olympics #OlympicsHistory #NewZealand @KeithQuinn88 @TheNZTeam #Montreal1976 #Sport #History