12-09-2019
01:30
1968
It’s about this time of year that the media begins to fill with reviews of the past twelve months. But what if we were to turn the clock back half a century… to 1968.
Some years somehow resonate across the ages. They go beyond four simple digits to evoke an era and define a generation.
1066…
1789…
1914…
Fifty years on, 1968 surely also falls into that category.
Student protests in Paris…
The Prague Spring and it’s brutal suppression by the Soviet Union…
The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy…
Man’s first flight to the moon…
And the iconic Mexico City Olympic Games…
A Games which brought together sport, politics and protest in a way which still seems striking resonant some fifty years later…
A spirit of protest which is of course immortalised in Tommy Smith and John Carlos’ podium salute. 
On the field, the Mexico Games of ‘68 also witnessed some of the defining sporting moments of the age…
Jim Hines becoming the first man to break the 10 second barrier for 100m, still the benchmark of world class sprinting…
And Bob Beamon’s incredible 8.90m long jump – a feat so remarkably far in advance of anything achieved before that it has attracted its own adjective…
Oh, and 1968 also produced this too…
