The 1968 Mexico City Olympics opened on October 12 as the first Games held in Latin America and, at 7,350 feet, the highest ever attempted; ten days earlier, Mexican soldiers had killed hundreds of student protesters two miles from the stadium.

The International Olympic Committee spent five years being told its choice of host city might kill people. On October 12, 1968, at 83,700-seat Estadio Olímpico Universitario, the Games of the XIX Olympiad opened anyway.

Mexico City sits 7,350 feet above sea level, more than a mile higher than any city that had hosted a Summer Olympics before it. Physiologists warned that the thin air could be dangerous for endurance athletes. Nobody warned the IOC about the other thing that would define the fortnight: ten days before the opening ceremony, in a plaza two miles from the stadium, the Mexican government had opened fire on its own citizens.

Why did the Olympic torch cross the Atlantic by ship?

The route was not the usual sprint from Olympia to the host city. Organizers built the 1968 relay around a different story entirely: Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage.

The flame was lit at Olympia, Greece, on August 23 and carried by ship to Genoa, Italy, where a ceremony marked Columbus's birthplace. From there it traveled overland through Barcelona and Madrid to Palos de la Frontera, the small Spanish port Columbus had sailed from. The Spanish government supplied a ship, the Princesa, to carry it across the ocean; on September 29 the flame reached San Salvador in the Bahamas, the island where Columbus first made landfall. It was, organizers noted, the first time an Olympic flame had touched the Western Hemisphere.

A Mexican destroyer, the ARM Durango, carried it on to Veracruz on October 6. Seventeen swimmers relayed it ashore, and runners carried it the rest of the way to Mexico City: roughly 8,460 miles in all (about 13,620 kilometers), from a sanctuary in Greece to a stadium ringed by volcanic hills.

The final runner was Enriqueta Basilio, a 20-year-old Mexican hurdler, who climbed the stadium's steps and lit the cauldron in front of a full house. No woman had ever lit an Olympic flame before her.

What happened ten days before the opening ceremony?

On October 2, roughly 10,000 students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute gathered at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district to protest a government crackdown on the student movement. Army troops and police surrounded the square. Then gunfire opened from the surrounding apartment blocks.

For decades the government's account held that protesters had fired first. Declassified documents tell a different story. Researcher Kate Doyle, working with the National Security Archive, traced the initial shots to a unit created specifically to guard the Olympics: the Olympia Battalion, plainclothes soldiers wearing white gloves so they could recognize one another in a crowd. A later Mexican government investigation concluded that snipers loyal to the president's own security detail fired first, apparently to provoke the army into a full assault.

Nobody agrees on how many died. The U.S. government's contemporaneous count, since declassified, put the toll at 44; human rights researchers and eyewitnesses have put it at 300 to 400. More than a thousand people were injured, and 1,345 were arrested. The Mexican government has never produced a definitive figure, and probably never will.

The Games opened ten days later, on schedule, a short walk from where it happened.

Why was the altitude such a gamble?

The concern that had followed Mexico City since it won the bid in 1963 turned out to be justified, just not evenly. Thinner air offers less resistance, which helps a sprinter or a jumper and does nothing for a distance runner who needs oxygen for twenty minutes rather than ten seconds. Every men's world record from 100 to 400 meters fell that October, and so did the long jump record: on October 18, Bob Beamon jumped 29 feet 2½ inches, beating the existing mark by nearly two feet. The distance was so far past anything on record that the stadium's optical measuring rail could not reach it; officials finished the job with a steel tape.

Two days later, Oregon's Dick Fosbury won high jump gold by going over the bar backward, headfirst, a technique nobody had used at an Olympics before. The "Fosbury Flop" made every earlier high jump style obsolete within a decade.

The Games' other lasting image came from a medal stand, not a track. On October 16, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during the American anthem after the 200-meter final, a silent protest against racial injustice in the United States. IOC president Avery Brundage called it a domestic political statement with no place at the Olympics and had both men expelled from the Olympic Village within 48 hours.

What the record book leaves out

None of that appears in most quick summaries of Mexico City 1968, which tend to stop at "first Games in Latin America, first at altitude" and move on. That framing is not wrong; it is just incomplete in a way that matters. The altitude produced a run of records that still show up in trivia nights. The massacre produced a body count the country's own government has spent more than five decades declining to finalize.

Both are part of the same ten days, in the same city, under the same organizing committee. The government that ordered the crackdown at Tlatelolco is the same one that, ten days later, presented Mexico City to the world through Lance Wyman's psychedelic "Mexico 68" logo and a stadium full of color. The historian Elaine Carey has argued that timing explains the crackdown's ferocity: the student movement embarrassed a government trying, at that exact moment, to present a modern and unified Mexico to the rest of the world.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission finally opened a formal investigation into Tlatelolco in 2001, more than three decades after the shooting stopped. It found evidence of state responsibility but closed without a single conviction; the statute of limitations, and the deaths of most of the officials involved, had already settled the matter the courts never did. What is left is a plaza in Mexico City with a monument, and a Games remembered mostly for a long jump. The question the country keeps returning to, every time an anniversary comes around, is whether a government can host the world's biggest party and put down its own citizens in the same ten days without one becoming the explanation for the other.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1968 Summer Olympics"
• Wikipedia, "1968 Summer Olympics torch relay"
• Wikipedia, "Tlatelolco massacre"
• National Security Archive, Kate Doyle's research on the Tlatelolco massacre declassified documents
• Remezcla, "Did You Know the First Woman Ever to Light the Olympic Flame Was Latina?"
• History.com, "Fosbury Flops to an Olympic High Jump Record"
• Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2005)