To "Look Smart" and Run Fast: Jamaican Track Athletes and the Navigation of Competing Loyalties at the 1948 Olympic Games

At the 1948 London Games, Jamaica made its Olympic debut. Although not an independent nation, the International Olympic Committee approved Jamaica’s National Olympic Committee application, allowing the island to compete in the Games as an independent entity. In a postwar moment that presaged the possibility for greater self-governance for colonized places, participation in the preeminent international athletic festival provided an opportunity for the island to promote and perform a national identity. As the Games were held in London, the opportunity was all the more potent, and potentially more fraught.

Yet, the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA), controlled by officials sympathetic to the anti-colonialist but not anti-imperialist ideology of the island’s emerging nationalist class, strategically had its Olympians, specifically its track and field athletes, perform both Jamaicanness and Britishness. On and off the track, the JOA ensured the prim and proper presentation of the athletes in order to communicate Jamaican class and capacity, while, at the same time, reinforcing a commitment to the cultural traditions and values of Great Britain. The praise for Jamaica’s Olympians in the Jamaican, British, American, and African American presses indicates the success of this symbolism. The multiracial and mixed-gender cohort of track athletes signaled the island’s readiness for autonomy without raising concerns about racial difference. They seemed, quite cleverly, to have navigated competing loyalties.

However, because the JOA always made sure that its athletes abided by traditional racial, gender, and class expectations, Jamaica’s Olympians not only reinforced the relevance of these expectations but also emphasized the perceived importance of the adherence to them in the island’s coming quest for greater self-governance. Jamaica’s inaugural Olympic experience thus introduces and illuminates the role of identity politics in structuring the possibilities and limitations of the island’s managed, cooperative path to decolonization, federation, and independence.