Quotes of the Day

Peter Norman was the other guy in one of the most famous images of the 20th century. As The Star-Spangled Banner rang out during presentations for the 200-m sprint at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the Australian silver medalist gazed at the flag rising in his honor. Behind him, history was being made. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the occasion to protest their country's treatment of African Americans, each raising a gloved fist in the Black Power salute, a gesture of solidarity and defiance. Bowing to pressure from the International Olympic Committee, U.S. authorities sent the pair home to a firestorm of controversy.

The message of a new documentary, Salute, is that Norman was not merely a bystander in all this but a principled participant. The film's heartbeat is the gratitude, seemingly profound, that Smith and Carlos feel for the Australian. "I would die for him," Smith says in a 2004 interview. It's all very touching — and perhaps misleading. Speaking to TIME, writer-director Matt Norman, Peter's nephew, makes clear that not all his feelings about Smith and Carlos permeate his film. Salute is essentially a straightforward, if astute and moving, retelling of a well-documented event, so Norman's comments are puzzling. On several levels, he says, he is disappointed and disenchanted with the American legends.

Before getting to that, however, Matt Norman wants us to know that his uncle was a fine sprinter: the 20.06 sec. he clocked in the final is still the fastest time in which any Australian has covered the distance. Norman had stunned almost everyone by separating Smith and Carlos, but his unforgettable October evening had just begun.

Beneath the stadium, a few minutes before the medal ceremony, the Americans told Norman their plan. To their surprise, he backed them. They didn't know that the Melburnian, raised in the Salvation Army, was a Christian who didn't so much loathe racial prejudice as not understand how it could exist. When Carlos revealed he'd left his gloves at the village, it was Norman who suggested that the Americans share Smith's pair. Norman was never going to raise his own fist, but did wear a badge that said "Olympic Project for Human Rights", an organization that had threatened a black boycott of the '68 Games.

Norman couldn't see Smith and Carlos during the presentations but knew they'd executed the salute from the silence that fell over the stadium. His support for them continued in front of the media afterward, and right up to his sudden death, aged 64, in 2006. If a trifle amateurish in style, Salute works as a fascinating dissection of a morally complex episode. Smith and Carlos acknowledge that while they had each other as a "shield," there was no one to protect Norman, who paid for his actions. Though a likely 200-m finalist at the Munich Games four years later, he wasn't sent. Nor was he invited to Sydney in 2000. While most Australians had forgotten him, black U.S. athletes hadn't. A group of them flew him to Sydney and treated him as a hero. Footage of his funeral shows Smith and Carlos carrying his casket.

While the film leaves one impression, Matt Norman leaves another. He spent, he says, a small fortune bringing Smith and Carlos to Melbourne for the funeral. He'd phoned them within minutes of his uncle's death, he says, and both were distraught. Carlos would have attended the funeral "no matter what," but Smith played hard ball, Norman recalls, first rejecting an economy-class ticket, then insisting his wife accompany him, also at Norman's expense. "The fact is, I've kept it nice and quiet," Norman says, "because I didn't want to embarrass them."

The question is, why? In your own film, why leave an impression of Smith and Carlos that doesn't reflect your view of the truth? Norman says he wanted to honor Peter, who considered Smith and Carlos his best mates. But in person, he seems angry on his uncle's behalf. In his view, his uncle is being edited out of history, and Smith and Carlos haven't done enough to stop it. In 2005, a statue of the scene on the Mexico City dais was erected at the Americans' alma mater, San José State University, California — without Norman's figure on the second-place dais, which someone had decided would be a good place to deliver speeches and pose for photos. "If [Smith or Carlos] had said, 'Hang on a second, you're missing Peter,' it wouldn't have happened," Norman says. "They knew about this statue . . . I found it humiliating."

While Matt Norman says he loves and respects Smith and Carlos, "they don't seem to stand up for anything but themselves. I think they still comment on injustices, but they don't put any weight behind it. If I had done something that made me such a massive part of history, I would want to make it my life. I haven't seen any extra demonstration or extra effort going into solving human and civil rights issues in other countries." The inside story of the salute is gripping; behind the scenes of Salute is quite a tale, too.

• Daniel Williams