*Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, just after her landmark win in the 100-meter hurdles during the Tokyo Olympics. Photo by Michael Kappler/dpa/Alamy Live News*

Jasmine Camacho-Quinn challenges assumptions and clears hurdles in the complicated story behind Puerto Rico’s independent Olympic tradition

Rich Tenorio
@rbtenorio

There were 10 hurdles to clear, covering 100 meters of the track in Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium. But Puerto Rican Olympic competitor Jasmine Camacho-Quinn finally hit the finish line first and made history at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

She won the women’s 100-meter hurdles in a new Olympic record.

It is the second gold medal for Puerto Rico in its Olympic history after Monica Puig’s in tennis in 2016, a chance to say “¡Wepa!” while listening to “La Borinqueña” (the official anthem of Puerto Rico), while reflecting on a new chapter in the island’s complex history of participation in the Olympic Games.

It is a narrative of a place that is not a nation, but still a territory of the United States, yet competes as an independent team, apart from the U.S. Its latest sports star, Camacho-Quinn, was not born on the island but is the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother, and thus eligible to compete. And, just as in the race itself, there are hurdles in this narrative: Camacho-Quinn had to push back against social media that questioned her Puerto Rican credentials.

Nonetheless, Camacho-Quinn made history as the first Afro-Puerto Rican to win a gold medal, a positive story amid the island’s sometimes uneasy racial dynamics. Although Puerto Rico has fielded Olympic teams for over 70 years, the future of its participation is intertwined with its larger destiny — whether it becomes one of the United States’ states, an independent nation, or maintains the status quo.

*Jasmine Camacho-Quinn moves to the lead in the finals of the 100-meter hurdles in the Tokyo Olympics. Photo by Andrew Boyers/Reuters*

Puerto Rico’s participation in the Olympics “is a complex story that is rich and is closely associated with issues of identity, nationality and culture,” said Cesar Torres, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology, Sports Studies & Physical Education at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Torres is also co-editor of Olimpismo: The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean. “Through this participation, Puerto Rico has attempted to show that it possesses a unique identity relative to its Hispanic heritage, being part of Latin America, while politically being associated with the U.S.”

Currently, for Puerto Rico, “the Olympic movement has the best of both worlds,” added Antonio Sotomayor, a professor and librarian at the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois-Champaign, author of the 2016 book The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico, and co-editor of Olimpismo. The Olympics provide “a platform, a very powerful platform, to showcase the nation,” which can help reframe Puerto Rico’s relationship to the U.S.

The victory also validated an insistence on Puerto Rican sports independence that dates back to before World War II.

Such reframing occurs when Puerto Rico prevails over the U.S. at the Olympics.

Camacho-Quinn outran U.S. competitor Kendra Harrison, who won the silver medal. In 2004, although the Puerto Rican men’s basketball team did not win a medal, it did defeat its U.S. counterpart, the legendary “Dream Team.”

Sotomayor noted that after it took control of the island in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. “went and taught sports to its colonial subjects,” who showed a century later that they had mastered the American-invented sport of basketball.

“For Puerto Ricans, it meant the world,” he said.

Pre-war Puerto Rican teams had competed in the Central American and Caribbean games. But leading up to the planned Olympic games of 1940 and ‘44 — they were postponed by global conflict — the island’s independent participation faced opposition.

“Originally, the U.S. State Department said, ‘no, you cannot participate, you are not your own country, you have to participate with the U.S. team,’” Sotomayor explained.

He credited the subsequent change of heart to a contentious figure in Olympic history: Avery Brundage had a long, controversial involvement with the games, first as head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and then as head of the International Olympic Committee.

Brundage was an “unexpected defender” of Puerto Rico, according to Sotomayor: “He said, ‘no, Puerto Rico has been participating at the Central American and Caribbean games, they have their own participation in the Olympic tradition.’”

*A poster for the PBS/American Experience documentary about Puerto Rico’s sports icon.*

Other factors came into play: “We have, also, this international diplomatic context. The world has just finished the Second World War … The Olympic movement is in need of more teams, more countries joining, so the movement can continue to grow.” And, Sotomayor noted, “the U.S. is not going to look good if it denies participation.”

Torres said that “the impetus for recognition [by the International Olympic Committee] had to do with showing that Puerto Rico was different than the U.S. — associated, but different. There was a nationalist motivation, the aspiration was to be recognized as its own country with differing and unique characteristics.”

In 1948, Puerto Rico sent its first-ever independent delegation to the Olympics, a team that earned the island’s first medal, a bronze, by boxer Juan Evangelista Venegas. Venegas was an Afro-Puerto Rican whom Sotomayor said is a largely forgotten sports figure.

Sotomayor wondered whether the obscurity surrounding Venegas’s achievement is due to the fact that it took place when Puerto Rico was “still in the 1940s, when there was no major civil rights movement, still in the context of World War II and colonization.” He added, “I find it so interesting that an achievement like Venegas’ is not remembered — the first-ever Olympic medal by an Afro-Puerto Rican — knowing that Puerto Rico has its racial problems, like many other [places].”

He contrasted the relative lack of awareness of Venegas with the acclaim for a later star, Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente —“the national sports hero, a national hero … maybe because it was later on, in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” He noted that the latest Puerto Rican sports standout, Camacho-Quinn, also Afro-Puerto Rican, adds to the narrative as the first Afro-Puerto Rican to win gold and the second woman to do so, after Puig.

*Puerto Rico’s tennis star Monica Puig won gold in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Photo by Leonard Zhukovsky via Shutterstock*

For Camacho-Quinn, “It’s a confluence of being a woman, being an Afro-Puerto Rican, and being from the diaspora,” Sotomayor said, adding that this challenges a preconception of Puerto Rican athletes: “It’s not based on being a white man from the island, Spanish-speaking.”

“It’s the power of what she did,” he added. “She challenged models that were set up.”

After Camacho-Quinn’s victory, NBC News ran a story quoting her mother, Milagros Camacho, about the hurdler joining Puerto Rico’s Olympic team in 2016: “In the end, you were born in the United States, but if you want to run for Puerto Rico, it’s up to you and no one is going to take it away from you. The next day she called me and told me she was going to run for Puerto Rico.”

“Puerto Ricans can fluidly come to the U.S., they can become citizens of the U.S.,” Torres said. “She represents that experience of Puerto Ricans in the continent, being, in many cases, a second-generation or third- or fourth-generation Puerto Rican. She manifests how those roots are kept, how those roots are developed and understood.”

To what extent this fluidity will continue at the Olympics for Puerto Rico depends on the island’s political future.

Torres said that if Puerto Rico becomes an independent state, it could keep its Olympic recognition — then he clarified that it would keep its recognition. He added, “If it becomes the 51st state of the U.S., perhaps it will also keep its national Olympic committee.”

Sotomayor noted a potential consequence if Puerto Rico joins the current U.S. states: “If Puerto Rico, as a state, has an Olympic team, why not [one in] Texas [or] California? They have good local athletes.” He predicted a “cascade of problems” on the Olympic level should Puerto Rico become a U.S. state.

Maybe the status quo is the best option, at least for Olympic participation. There’s a special joy when Puerto Rico beats the U.S.

“You can see the qualitative euphoria from winning gold,” Sotomayor said. “It’s a major positive boost to a country that has experienced so many hardships, traumas, and crises over the past few years.”

---

Rich Tenorio is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in international, national, regional and local media outlets. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a cartoonist.