For so long banned, athlete protests will make a comeback at these Olympic Games.
When play starts at the Tokyo Games on Wednesday, acts of free expression of the kind athletes were long banned from making at the Olympics will take centre stage.
What is common in modern soccer starts a new era for Olympic athletes more than 50 years after the raised black-gloved fists of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico City made them icons and pariahs. Australia's Peter Norman depicted in a statue alongside Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympic gold medallist in the 1,500 meters, has gone even further. He put in play medal ceremonies where protest is denied as it was for Smith and Carlos in 1968. FINA president Husain al-Musallam spoke of the pool deck "remaining a sanctity for sport and nothing else," where there should be "respect for the greater whole, not the individual".
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