About halfway through the first in-person news conference of the Los Angeles 2028 coordination commission, Casey Wasserman, head of the LA28 organizing committee, put a pause on Thursday’s proceedings. Someone special had unassumingly taken a seat at the back of the room.
“Anita DeFrantz just walked in,” Wasserman said from the head table. “I would say that none of us would be here without Anita DeFrantz. Someone I’ve known longer than both of us would like to admit. A true inspiration.
“Not only an Olympic hero,” a 1976 bronze medalist in rowing, “but a true American icon for civil rights and the Olympic movement and if you had any doubt that she’s tougher than all of us,” the last few months having seen DeFrantz battling cancer, “she is.
“And we love her. And we look forward,” now Wasserman looking directly at DeFrantz, “to being with you at opening ceremony in 2028. So thank you for being here.”
At Thursday’s LA28 coordination commission meeting with Anita DeFrantz
Now is the time for anyone — everyone — who is deeply associated with the Olympic movement, or even merely has had a brush with it, to say to Anita DeFrantz: thank you.
In Los Angeles, in the years and decades after 1984, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that DeFrantz, in her lead role at what is now called the LA84 Foundation, was — along with Peter Ueberroth, the businessman John Argue, the lawyer, and civic leader Barry Sanders, the LA Times sports editors Bill Dwyre and Randy Harvey and a handful of others — responsible for keeping the Games dream alive until Wasserman and others picked it up in 2015.
In the United States, DeFrantz, a Black woman, way back when, had the temerity to challenge the president of the United States for the right to compete at the 1980 Moscow Games. Did she win? No. Did she stand up for what she believed in? Hell, yes.
Internationally, DeFrantz — beyond serving two terms as an International Olympic Committee vice president, beyond making history in running for the top job — has been a steadfast advocate, fearless, anywhere, everywhere, for girls and women, and especially girls and women of color.
The same goes locally here in Southern California. Fearless in her advocacy for girls and women, especially — what we now call play equity, a mantle that the current director of the LA84 Foundation, Renata Simril, is advancing.
This fearlessness stems from the circumstances of DeFrantz’s childhood — in Indianapolis in the 1950s and 1960s, then one of the most racist places in the entire United States.
Never, not once, has DeFrantz let racism get in the way or get her down.
Always, always, has she believed in this guiding principle — that when the athletes of the world, the women and men, gather together in the Olympic village, they find that there is common humanity, that we are all way more alike than we are different.
Is the Olympic movement perfect? Hardly. Would DeFrantz be the first person to tell you so? Absolutely. Does she nonetheless deserve our thanks for devoting herself to the pursuit of its aspirational ideals? Unequivocally.
The other thing you should know about Anita DeFrantz, as she has been for all the years that Casey Wasserman has known her — and others have, too — is, that she is, in her own way, typically quietly, a fighter.
The cancer that earlier this year seemed so ominous? She said she’s doing much better. She drove herself to that news conference Thursday from where she’s been for several months — not all secrets can be revealed but let’s just say it was a far, far drive, in the usual SoCal traffic.
And to be even more honest, because almost everyone knows someone who has been through cancer — on this Thursday morning, even after that inbound commute, Anita DeFrantz was nonetheless ferociously keen, sharp-witted and funny.
DeFrantz is, after all, vice-chair of the Brisbane 2032 coordination commission. She laughed, and said, “That’s optimistic!”