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Page 9 of 12
1968 Olympic Games
With the 2008 Summer Olympics only a few days away, it's timely that a new exhibition showcasing Mexico's staging of the games opens at the capital's Museo de Arte Moderno.
 The 1968 games in Mexico City was a series of firsts, most notably it was the first ever Olympics to be staged in Latin America. Forty years on and that remains the case. It was also a tremendous success with regards to organization and promotion as 5,516 athletes from 112 countries took part along with hundreds of thousands of tourists who came to watch the games.
It was a case of national pride for Mexico that an emerging country from the Americas could deal with the demands of hosting the biggest sporting event in the world. Mexico had to battle with the might of the United States to secure the Olympic committee's nomination and overwhelmingly did so in 1963 with a vote count of 30 votes in its favor (Detroit trailed in second place with 14 votes).
However, there were grave concerns by the Western press about Mexico's ability to host the games as well as how athletes would cope with the capital's 2,240-meter altitude and this was exacerbated by the tragic consequences at Tlatelolco - a public square in Mexico City - when local authorities opened fire on student protesters and killed more than three hundred people only ten days before the start of the '68 games. At the time, the official report issued by the government said 4 dead and 20 wounded and it would take many years before the true scale of the massacre was revealed.
While the Tlatelolco massacre left a black spot on the games - the events leading up to the incident are covered in the exhibition - the '68 Olympics was a remarkable success for Mexico and acted as a spur in securing the World Cup games two years later.
In trying to show the gargantuan effort that went into promoting the games at home and abroad, the exhibition has been divided into five sections outlining all the different types of design and typography that were used on an array of items: posters, tickets, balloons, flags, clothes, stamps and even wrist-watches.
What makes the design of the Mexico Olympics so iconic - and regarded as one of the best in the history of the games - is its adaptation of the Op Art style in its logo. Pioneered by the likes of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, Op art was a popular method of painting during the mid to late sixties. It's most striking feature is to create optical illusions of perception and this figures strongly in the prinicpal logo for the games.
Politics
Another focus of the exhibition was the politicization of the '68 games which saw famously two African-American athletes - Tommie Smith and John Carlos - raise their black-gloved fists at the award ceremony as a symbol of Black Power. As punishment, the International Olympic Committee banned them from the Olympic Games for life. Similarly, Czechoslovakian gymnast Vera Caslavska on receiving her gold medal for the Beam event turned her head down and away during the playing of the Soviet national anthem. The action was Caslavska's silent protest against the recent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
And finally, to round off all the firsts that punctuated the events in Mexico City, a woman - Norma Enriqueta Basilio - was to light the Olympic flame for the first time in the history of the games.
Museo de Arte Moderno, Reforma and Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec, 5553-6233/ 5211-8729 Tue-Sun / 10-18hrs, 20 pesos / Sunday free entry.}
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