It was 2008, and John Rodda was dying. Suffering from a terminal illness, the longtime Guardian sports journalist nonetheless had work to do. Rodda had been invited to speak at an academic conference. Sensing it would be his last public appearance, he was determined not to let his body give out before he got the chance.
Stamp commemorating 1968 Olympics, Government of Indonesia, Public domain.
The conference, hosted by the Society for Latin American Studies, gathered to commemorate the 40th anniversary of 1968—a year that rocked Mexico City, just as it did the rest of the world. In what had been a nation under the rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (or Institutional Revolutionary Party) for decades, Mexican youth took to the streets demanding reforms. While many of their demands (greater civil liberties, freedom for political prisoners, etc.) would eventually become reality, 1968 itself would end not in triumph but tragedy, as hundreds of students would be gunned down in the streets by their own government in what became known as the Massacre at Tlatelolco.1
In the wake of the October 2 massacre, the Mexican government worked overtime to suppress coverage in their own (largely government-friendly) media. A British sports reporter, however, happened to have witnessed the massacre. Rodda was in Mexico City to cover the Olympics, set to begin in a few days. But that night, he was out on the streets covering the demonstration and documenting the atrocity. His reporting in The Guardian would be the only English writeup of the Massacre to appear the next day, and it is largely thanks to his work that the Mexican government was not more successful in making the whole event disappear in the fog of history.2
From the 1968 games’ closing ceremony, Sergio V. Rodriguez / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Despite years of efforts by Mexican activists, no one would ever be held responsible for the Massacre (though the PRI would see its power erode over the ensuing decades). While many understandably blamed Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, others have suggested that the attack was the brainchild of his interior minister, Luis Echeverría, or his generals.3
But a few years ago, John Rodda again entered the narrative, and suggested the main villain was not a member of the Mexican government at all. Rather, it was the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the time, Avery Brundage.
OC President Avery Brundage, February 1968, Ron Kroon / Anefo / CC0
Described as a callous and cruel man, Brundage helped steer the Olympics for decades.4 He is largely responsible for bringing the Games to Hitler’s Germany in 1936, and would later gain infamy for declaring “The Games must go on” after the 1972 Munich attack. But due to a lack of concrete evidence, sportswriters and historians have largely given him a pass for the massacre that occurred mere miles away from his precious Olympics in 1968. Signs of his involvement always seemed to be based more in rumor than substance.
That is, until 2008. In his address to an audience of a hundred-odd scholars, Rodda dropped what should have been a bombshell. Rodda revealed that in the late 90s, he had helped longtime Olympic official Arthur Takač write his memoir.5 During the course of their partnership, Takač told Rodda that he had been Brundage’s personal aide in Mexico City.6 In the course of fulfilling those duties, Takač disclosed to Rodda that he had personally carried a message from Brundage to President Díaz Ordaz in the days before the massacre, threatening to pull the Games out of Mexico if the protests were not quelled immediately. Brundage knew the Mexican government saw the Olympics as key to raising Mexico’s standing among the nations of the world, and would not allow such a thing to pass.
This is no conspiracy theory. This is a respected reporter at a mainstream publication quoting an Olympic official by name, citing evidence that the IOC president pressured the Mexican president into crushing a protest which resulted in killing hundreds of people. This is a man who found a piece of information so, as he deemed it, “critical,” that he held on to life long enough so that he could finally share it with the world.7
Unfortunately, Rodda’s audience did not realize the explosiveness of what they were hearing. Whether this is because there were no sport reporters or historians present, or simply because the disclosure came twenty minutes into a half hour speech, is unknown. We also don’t know why Rodda waited until this point to speak out. But for whatever reason, when he did, Rodda’s final disclosure did not receive the notice it should have. The speech went largely ignored by both scholars and the popular press, and to this day, the Olympics continue to avoid reckoning with its responsibility for the Massacre at Tlatelolco.
Memorial in Plaza de las Tres Culturas, honoring the victims of the Tlatelolco Massacre, Ralf Roletschek [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html) or FAL
- Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
- John Rodda, “Trapped at gunpoint in middle of fighting,” The Guardian, Oct. 3, 1968.
- Ryan Murtha, “‘When the Guns Boom’: The 1968 Olympics and the Massacre at Tlatelolco” (MA thesis, University of Texas, 2018).
- Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff, “Racist IOC President Avery Brundage Loses His Place of Honor,” The Nation, June 25, 2020.
- Arthur Takač, Sixty Olympic Years (Switzerland: Courvoisier-Attinger SA, 1998).
- John Rodda, “‘Prensa, Prensa’: A Journalist’s Reflections on Mexico ‘68,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29 (March 2010): 11–22.
- Rodda died shortly after giving his speech.
