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A Brush With Greatness: The Puma Shoe That Upended the 1968 Olympics

(Kohjiro Kinno)

For much of 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were just two college sprinters; Echo Summit was just an anonymous patch of California forest; and the so-called “brush shoe” was just an unproven idea in some German cobbler’s imagination. That all changed on Sept. 12.

In the preceding weeks, U.S. Olympic officials had descended upon a remote, wooded peak near Lake Tahoe and carved a massive crop circle into the untouched timberland, laying down a rubberized, all-weather track amid the 200-foot pines. Echo Summit’s elevation, 7,382 feet, was almost identical to that of Mexico City, host of the upcoming Summer Games, and so here the USOC would hold its trials.