Salute is due for its cinematic release later this week, a timely debut for a film that focuses on the theme of human rights at an Olympic games.

 

Matt Norman’s documentary of his uncle’s silver-medal performance in the 1968 Mexico Olympics is a compelling and emotive story of a proud Australian and an even prouder humanist. The fact that Peter Norman’s time of 20 seconds-flat in the final of the 200m has never been beaten since, is a testament to what a brilliant athlete he was. However this feat can’t help but feel secondary to the film’s main focus of that iconic image of two black athletes, fists raised, giving the Black Power salute whilst standing on the podium after receiving their medals – with a slightly-out-of-focus white guy in the foreground.

 

 

The film runs at a conversational pace between the key players in that incident: the gold and bronze medallists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Norman, the silver medallist. It’s a warm and laconic story of an Australian who sacrificed everything for his simple belief in the equality of man.  

 

Inevitably you come away from the film with a sincere sympathy for each of the athletes. Yet as an Australian, perhaps more so for Norman who died in 2006 before the film was completed.

 

The film discusses the humanitarian issues that contextualised the raising of those black-gloved fists; issues like the Vietnam War, the race-riots across the United States, the Civil Rights movement and also the brutal murder of supposedly thousands of students at a demonstration in Mexico City, just days before the games began. With the benefit/curse of hindsight however, the actions of the athletes need little justification (though it did prompt the memory of Cathy Freeman’s treatment in 1994 after running her victory lap draped in the Aboriginal Flag).

 

 

 

The real surprise of this film though, is your discovery (if you’re an unlearned Aussie like me) of an Australian who lived in obscurity at home while being lauded and idolised abroad. In 2000, when many of Australia’s Olympic heroes were dusted off and pulled down off the shelf to serve in some official capacity at the Sydney games, Peter Norman was excluded. When the US team discovered Peter wouldn’t be attending, they immediately flew him in, arranged accommodation and decided that he would be a guest of honour at Michael Johnson’s birthday!

 

Salute is a story at once humiliating and uplifting to witness as an Australian. Humiliating that we can’t get our act together and recognise a person who was at the centre of one of the biggest statements in sporting history and uplifting to know that we can produce a person of such value and staunch conviction who wasn’t a soldier of war.