Thin air, a new track and a flop made Mexico 1968 a record factory
Mexico City sits 2,240 metres above sea level, and no Summer Olympics before or since has been staged so high. In October 1968 that thin air, plus a brand-new synthetic track and fully electronic timing, helped produce jumps and sprints so fast that some of their records survived for decades.
These were the first Games held in Latin America and in a Spanish-speaking country. Mexico City had beaten Detroit, Buenos Aires and Lyon for the right to host back in 1963, and the torch travelled to Mexico along the route Christopher Columbus once sailed, via Italy, Spain and the Bahamas. Norma Enriqueta Basilio de Sotelo became the first woman to light the Olympic cauldron.
Underfoot, athletes found something new. Earlier Olympic tracks had been cinder, but Mexico laid a synthetic all-weather Tartan surface, a material 3M first developed for horse racing that never caught on there. Combined with the altitude, it made the sprints and jumps extraordinary. Jim Hines, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans set long-lasting world records at 100, 200 and 400 metres. Bob Beamon's long jump of 8.90 metres beat the old world record by 55 centimetres and held for 23 years until Mike Powell broke it in 1991. In the triple jump, the world record fell five times, to three different men.
Technique mattered too. Dick Fosbury went over the high jump bar backwards and won gold with his flop, which soon became the standard way to jump. In the pool, Debbie Meyer, a 16-year-old high school student from Sacramento, became the first swimmer to take three individual golds, including the newly added 800 metres freestyle for women.
Altitude cut both ways. In men's distance running, athletes from high country in places such as Kenya and Ethiopia arrived already adapted, and Africans won medals in every running event from 800 metres to the marathon, setting a pattern for later Games. The first doping tests also produced the first doping disqualification: a Swedish pentathlete named Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, caught out by several beers drunk just before competing.
Source: 1968 Summer Olympics
