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Salute - Peter Norman, Tommie Smith, Payton Jordan, Matt Norman

Threat advisory: Guarded - General risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

The games we never saw...

The black power salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics was an iconic moment in the US civil rights movement. What part in this did the white Australian who ran second, Peter Norman, play and what price did he pay for standing up for his beliefs?

Theatrical propaganda posters

Target demographic movie keyword propaganda

Film Australia documentary sport politics Olympics Black Power raised fist salute civil rights controversy

Persons of interest

Peter Norman .... Himself
Tommie Smith .... Himself
Payton Jordan .... Himself
Larry Questad .... Himself
John Carlos .... Himself
Bob Steiner .... Himself
Cleve Livingston .... Himself
Ray Weinberg .... Himself
George Williams .... Himself
Paul Hoffman .... Himself
Willie Wyte .... Herself
Cordiner Nelson .... Himself
Wyomia Tyus .... Herself
Matt Norman .... Screenwriter
Matt Norman .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Salute official movie site
Salute film production notes
Salute QuickTime movie trailers
Awards and film festivals:

Studios and distributors:

Paramount Pictures

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Bureaucrats will have their revenge.

It doesn't matter who you are or how good you are or what you've done for your country, if you get on the wrong side of a bureaucrat then your track & field days are numbered; the pen is mightier than the sward.

So, even though Peter Norman is an Aussie legend he made the mistake of confusing the rights of human beings to live as free human beings with the rights of sports administrators to treat human beings as something less than sport. Sure, there's no racism on the race track but there's a whole lot of racism involved in actually getting there. What Peter did was to ignore the law of sport (Keep politics out of ~) because he's a good person. What the administrators did was ignore the law of reality (Administration is politics) and use their power for a political end.

What Matt Norman did was assemble new and past interviews with the athletes involved and put across the human side of the argument, the one that doesn't try to divorce sport and the Olympics from reality. After all, North and South Korea are allowed to march under one flag even though they're separate countries. If that ain't politics I don't know what is. Salute is an effective documentary (I had a little sniffle in the dark at the end of it) although it could be cut down by a good 10 minutes without losing any of its impact.

The Australia, documentary, sport movie Salute is directed by Matt Norman and stars Peter Norman, Tommie Smith, Payton Jordan.

Government security censorship classification

PG (Civil rights themes)

Surveillance time

92 minutes (1:32 hours)

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 17 July 2008