Yesterday on NPR's "Talk of the Nation", one segment dealt with the issue of politics at the Olympic Games. Two of the guests were Tommie Smith and Margaret Lambert. You can listen to the segment here.
I figure that if you don't know who Tommie Smith is, you probably wouldn't be reading this blog. The second athlete is considerably less known. Now in her nineties, in 1936 she was known as Margaret Bergmann and was a Jewish German high jumper who moved to the UK after Hitler's rise to power. She was enticed to come home and train for the German Olympic team (implicit threats against her family were the enticement) in order to help quell the fears of a US team which was considering a boycott. But the day after the Americans set sail for Berlin, Bergmann--who had just set the German record--was informed that she wasn't good enough to make the Olympic team.
Smith is always an interesting speaker, but Lambert stole the show.
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