SThey called him “Slavery Avery, the man with a disc in the place where a heart should be”. No, not the management of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which decided a few days ago to remove the bust of Avery Brundage from the museum foyer. The man, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952 to 1972, had a sense of art, and the works he collected and then donated gave rise to the museum near the town hall of the city on the Pacific.
Director Jay Xu said that the full extent of Brundage’s racist behavior had only become clear in 2016, and now the image of the patron who “advocated racist and anti-Semitic worldviews” had to disappear. You want to face the history of your own house.
Back to Slavery Avery, the man with the disc instead of the heart: this is how the journalists from “Sports Illustrated” described him on January 30, 1956. In fact, Brundage made no secret of his worldview, not because of his enthusiasm for the games of the Nazis in 1936, not afterwards. And the IOC? It was only in 2018 that he produced a documentary film on the exclusion of South Africa from the South African apartheid state in 1968 – without mentioning which side his President Brundage was on. The racist casts his long shadow to this day.
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