Politics & Power Quote by Brent Musburger

Musburger’s line tries to sound like neutral sportsmanship, but it’s doing something sharper: policing the boundary between acceptable spectacle and unacceptable dissent. The giveaway is the opening clause, “Smith and Carlos aside” - a name-check that pretends to grant an exception while quietly containing it. By treating the 1968 Black Power salute as a footnote, he reframes one of the Olympics’ most enduring images of moral courage as an isolated breach, not a precedent. It’s rhetorical quarantine.

The phrase “I object” carries the authority of the broadcast booth: the familiar, paternal voice of American sports media declaring what belongs on camera. “Using the Olympic awards stand” is especially telling. The podium becomes property, a stage supposedly reserved for gratitude and national pride, not grievance. That’s the cultural bargain Musburger is defending: athletes may perform excellence, but the meanings of that excellence - racial, national, political - should be managed by institutions and commentators, not by the competitors themselves.

The irony, of course, is that the Olympics are already politics in pageantry drag. Flags rise, anthems play, medal counts turn into proxy wars, and hosts launder national reputations in real time. Complaining about “a political statement” isn’t a plea for purity; it’s a preference for which politics get to appear as “normal.” Musburger’s intent reads as protective: preserve the feel-good broadcast product. The subtext is older and sturdier: protest is welcome only once it’s safely historical, once it can be applauded without demanding anything from the present.