Lee Evans, the Olympic medalist who denounced US racism at the 1968 Mexico Games

Lee Evans, the United States Olympic 400-meter champion, died on May 19 at the age of 74, according to the United States Athletics Federation (USA Track and Field). Neither the place where he died nor the causes are known. However, the newspaper

from San José (California), the city where Evans grew up, quoted his friends as saying that the athlete had died in Nigeria after suffering a stroke. Evans worked at a sports center run by a Nigerian soccer star, According to Odegbami. The San José newspaper reported in Odegbami's mouth that the Olympian collapsed while dining with him and other friends.

Evans won the 400 meters at the 1968 Mexico Olympics with a staggering 43.86 seconds, becoming the first athlete to drop below 44 seconds in that event. That world record stood for 20 years. But it was much more than a simple mark what happened that summer in Mexico, where the Olympic Games lost their innocence. Being a celebration that praised the sport, the Games had lived until then oblivious to the conflicts of the world. For the first time in history, the Olympics served as a loudspeaker to denounce the racism in the United States to the world.

The sixties was a tumultuous decade in the United States after the assassinations of a president -John F. Kennedy-, of a senator -Bobby Kennedy-, with protests against the Vietnam War in the background and race riots that set the cities on fire. country demanding civil rights for blacks. The gesture that Evans then made had a huge impact and was captured in a photograph, becoming a symbol for history.

Evans was about to give up running the final of the 400 meters after his compatriots Tommie Smith and John Carlos were expelled from the Games for protesting on the podium raising a defiant clenched fist, a representative greeting of Black Power. Evans, along with fellow medalists Larry James and Ron Freeman, took the podium to hang the gold medal around his neck sporting a black beret in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. With that fist raised to the sky, the inequality and racial oppression suffered by blacks in the United States was denounced. Mexico was experiencing its own tragedy in 1968 with the so-called Tlatelolco massacre. On October 2 of that year, a brutal coup against university students changed the country forever.More than 50 years after that massacre, it remains unknown exactly how many people were killed or injured.

Born on February 24, 1947 in Madera (California), Evans was the eldest of the seven children of the Dayton and Pearlie Mae Evans couple. In 1962, the family was forced to move to San José to pick cotton in the San Joaquin Valley. During his high school years, Evans developed into a powerful runner, never suffering a defeat in that period of his studies.

Evans rose to national fame as part of the legendary San Jose State University sprinter program. The runner won the first of his five national 400-meter titles in 1966 and was also champion in that same category at the 1967 Pan American Games. When he retired, the Olympic runner led athletic programs in Cameroon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, reaching to train athletes from 18 other countries (besides Nigeria). Between 2000 and 2008 he was an assistant athletic coach at the University of Washington. It was in 2008 that he returned to Nigeria to stay there.

Evans had two marriages.

His son Keith was born from the first.

The second was with a Liberian refugee named Princess, with whom he planned to build a school near Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

Evans was in California in 2011 raising money for that project when he learned that he had a brain tumor, which ended up being benign and removed.

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