Muhammad Ali’s 83rd birth anniversary: Why did the legendary boxer throw away his Olympic gold medal

The boxer is said to have thrown his Olympic gold medal to protest against racism. Here is a look at what happened.

What made Ali throw away his medal?

Ali was born Cassius Clay, a black American in Louisville, Kentucky, where racism was rampant. He was initiated into boxing at the age of 12, when a policeman heard his angry outburst at his bike being stolen and invited him to channel that rage in boxing classes.

Within six years, Cassius Clay would go on to win an Olympic gold. The Olympics website says about the 1960 Rome winner, “Much like his painter-musician father Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., whom Ali dubbed ‘the fanciest dancer of Louisville’, the ace boxer could ‘float like a butterfly’. But his dance floor was the boxing ring. The fact that he ‘stung like a bee’ with his rapid punches, made him a nightmare for opponents and a dream to watch for millions of boxing fans all around the world.”

The 18-year-old Ali was understandably overjoyed at winning the gold, telling reporters, “I didn’t take that medal off for 48 hours. I even wore it to bed. I didn’t sleep too good because I had to sleep on my back so that the medal wouldn’t cut me. But I didn’t care, I was Olympic champion.”

However, things would change soon enough. Ali did take off that medal, seemingly for good, until he was presented with a replica at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

The legend goes that when the internationally feted star returned home to Louisville, the town could not see him beyond his colour. Ali was refused service at a restaurant that served only white people, and he then got into a fight with a white motorcycle gang. According to Ali’s own account, incensed by the racism, he threw his medal into the Ohio river.

A report in the Associated Press says, “In his autobiography, ‘The Greatest’, Ali wrote that he tossed his gold medal into the Ohio River after a fight with a white motorcycle gang, which started when he and a friend were refused service at a Louisville restaurant.”

However, it has also been said that this version might not be accurate, and though Ali undoubtedly faced racism, he may simply have lost or misplaced the medal.

As a report in The New York Times says, “…after the Rome Games, few journalists followed Clay home to Louisville, where he was publicly referred to as “the Olympic n*****” and denied service at many downtown restaurants. After one such rejection, the story goes, he hurled his gold medal into the Ohio River. But Clay, and later Ali, gave different accounts of that act, and according to Thomas Hauser, author of the oral history “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times,” Clay had simply lost the medal.”

What is undoubtedly true, however, is that Ali worked all his life for a more equal and fairer world. In 1964, he gave up his identity of Cassius Clay, embracing Islam and calling himself Muhammad Ali.

He refused to serve in the Vietnam War, at the cost of being slapped with a boxing ban which was overturned only when he was 30, by when he had spent his prime years away from the ring.

In 1967, he said, as quoted by the BBC, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”