Olympics Cassius Clay
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Started by metmike - Aug. 3, 2021, 12:25 a.m.

The day Ali threw away his Olympic gold into the Ohio River

https://www.tbsnews.net/sports/day-ali-threw-away-his-olympic-gold-ohio-river-70489


Cassius Clay's Lost Olympic Medal - August 2005

                                                                                       

Question

                                          

Did Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) throw his gold medal into the Ohio River or is that                        story a myth?                     

                                          

-- Pete Ganger, Muskegon, Mich.

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2005/august.htm

Comments
By metmike - Aug. 3, 2021, 12:28 a.m.
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Why Muhammad Ali received a second Olympic gold medal in 1996

https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/05/04/muhammad-ali-olympic-gold-medal-boxing/

In one of the last medal ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Muhammad Ali received a gold to replace the one that had been lost decades earlier.

Ali, then 54 and barely able to speak due to Parkinson’s, was given the medal by IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch at halftime of the men’s basketball final between the U.S. and Yugoslavia.

“Thank you very, very much for this,” Ali reportedly told Samaranch before posing for photos with each basketball team, whispering something to Charles Barkley.

At the 1960 Rome Games, Ali, then Cassius Clay, earned light heavyweight gold at age 18.

In his autobiography, “The Greatest,” first published in 1975, Ali wrote that he threw his gold medal over the Jefferson County Bridge in his native Louisville and into the Ohio River in disgust.

It happened minutes after Ali and a friend fought a man from a motorcycle gang who wanted to steal it. Before that, they had been refused service at a Louisville restaurant.

“And I felt no pain and no regret,” Ali wrote of the medal toss. “Only relief, and a new strength.”

That specific story came to be apocryphal, though Ali no doubt faced racism. By the Centennial Games, it was believed the medal had simply been lost. A tragedy, given how much it clearly meant to him.

“I can still see him strutting around the [Athletes’] Village with his gold medal on,” Wilma Rudolph, who swept the 100m, 200m and 4x100m sprints in Rome, said, according to Sports Illustrated in 1992. “He slept with it. He went to the cafeteria with it. He never took it off. No one else cherished it the way he did. His peers loved him. Everybody wanted to see him. Everybody wanted to be near him. Everybody wanted to talk to him. And he talked all the time. I always hung in the background, not knowing what he was going to say.”

By mcfarm - Aug. 3, 2021, 7:48 a.m.
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I have watched and studied Ali his entire public life. Yes he was full of "bluster". Maybe even more than Trump. He told stories but who cared if they were fact, it was Ali. He held the crowd in the palm of his hand. When it was time to be serious {giving up everything for his beliefs} he proved he could do that as well. So who knows about the medal? Most likely it was just lost but unlike thin shallow people like Obama, Ali was 99% a real man with real convictions who had a smile that would warm any heart.

By metmike - Aug. 3, 2021, 9:44 p.m.
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Very well said mcfarm!

My wife was watching the movie Ali a month ago.

After the Ali-Foreman rope a dope fight scene, I couldn't wait to play the real fight for her and give her the round by round analysis of how the fight was going.

She wasn't expressed. Takes something that loves boxing to appreciate the genius of Ali winning that fight over somebody that had far more superior power and youth and overall ability than the aging Ali.

One of my favorite aspects of that fight was related to the crowd/spectators worshiping Ali everywhere he went.

When Foreman would land punches or have the upper hand, you didn't hear much from the crowd but as soon as Ali would land a punch.........they came alive cheering...... and this continued after every punch.