HEAD OF THE CHARLES '07: Citius, Altius, Veritas

The Olympic Games are the definitive celebration of athletic excellence, but the quadrennial event has become a nexus of political and social protest as much as a who’s who amongst the world’s best athletes.

The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, held in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, proved the ideal setting for public dissent. And the U.S. Olympic crew, made up entirely of Harry Parker’s varsity eight from Harvard, became the face of the repugnant hippie undercurrent the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wanted to stamp out of the Mexico City Games.

The Crimson’s attempt to qualify for the 1968 Olympics was rocky as well. Parker’s eight secured the U.S. entry with a 0.05-second win over Penn in the Olympic Trials. The Harvard win fulfilled a five year-old promise made by the Olympic eight’s future coxswain, Paul Hoffman ’68, who taped a Mexico travel poster on the Newell Boathouse locker room on his very day as a freshman in 1963.

Hoffman’s ability to stir the Harvard varsity even as a freshman proved quite the augur: he was almost expelled from the 1968 Games the night before the men’s crew final for apparent complicity in the “Black Power” protest U.S. track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos made on the podium. Had Hoffman been booted the night before the final, his crew would have likely elected to forfeit rather than row without him. The IOC eventually cleared him due to lack of evidence, but Hoffman and the Harvard boat finished last in the Grand Final the next day.

Hoffman’s tril the Crimson boat had made its social stance known as early in July—two months before the Games began.

Hoffman and Harvard oarsman Cleve Livingston ’68 met with Harry Edwards, co-founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) with Martin Luther King, Jr., immediately following the Olympic Trials. Edwards eventually traveled to Cambridge and spoke to the entire Harvard team, warning the Crimson eight of the challenges it would face being “white, Harvard, and a team.”

Edwards was right. Stan Wright. a black U.S. track coach was just one of a bevy of critical voices of the Harvard eight, saying, “If Negroes want to demonstrate, I don’t think they need the Harvard crew.”

To fuel the fire, the Harvard oarsmen wrote letters to the other American athletes, disseminating their message and urging the US’s other representatives to evaluate the issue carefully.

While in Mexico City, Hoffman offered OPHR buttons to other American athletes and was recognized as the most ardent OPHR supporter from the Harvard crew. The IOC’s attempt to do away with him—and, effectively, the entire Harvard eight, which would have been without its coxswain—might have failed, but Harvard’s last-place finish both ruined the Crimson’s quest for goal against the world’s best and relieved an International Olympic Committee fed up with the shaggy, revolutionary folk from Cambridge, Mass.

The Harvard varsity returned home without a medal, disappointed by the results on the water and exhausted by the affairs off of it. Their protest proved the final chance for Harvard’s oarsmen to speak up in such a public way: in 1972, the U.S. Olympic committee changed the selection process for the men’s eight, opting to compose a boat based on individual performances rather than the choose fastest university crew in a time trial.

But the mystique and singularity of that 1968 crew, the only Harvard eight ever to row in the Olympics, lives on.