Inspiring Stories
Rafer Johnson: The First Black Torchbearer to Light the Cauldron
Decathlon gold in Rome, a night at the Ambassador Hotel, and the 1984 flame
March 8, 20264 min read
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July 28, 1984
The torch entered the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the hands of Gina Hemphill, granddaughter of Jesse Owens. She circled the track and passed the flame to a 49-year-old decathlete in white: Rafer Johnson.
Johnson climbed a steep flight of stadium steps with the torch held high. At the top he raised the flame to the crowd, then touched it to a tube that carried fire up through the Olympic rings and into the cauldron above the peristyle.
He was the first Black athlete in Olympic history to light the cauldron. Los Angeles had watched him compete, organize and serve for decades.
From Hillsboro to Westwood
Johnson was born on August 18, 1934, in Hillsboro, Texas. When he was nine, his family moved to Kingsburg, California, a small farm town in the San Joaquin Valley, where he excelled at football, basketball, baseball and track.
At UCLA he ran his first decathlon as a sophomore and played basketball for John Wooden. He was also elected student body president.
By the mid 1950s he was the best all-around athlete in the world, trading the decathlon world record back and forth with the Soviet star Vasily Kuznetsov in a Cold War rivalry that ran for years.
Melbourne, Rome, and a Duel Between Friends
At the 1956 Melbourne Games, Johnson took silver in the decathlon behind fellow American Milt Campbell. Four years later in Rome, he was chosen to carry the American flag at the opening ceremony, the first Black athlete to lead the United States team into an Olympic stadium.
His closest rival in the decathlon was his own UCLA training partner, C.K. Yang of Taiwan. The two trained side by side under the same coach and arrived in Rome as the two best all-around athletes in the world. After two days, the gold came down to the final event, the 1500 meters. Johnson, never a distance runner, stayed glued to Yang's shoulder the entire race and held on to win the decathlon by 58 points. The two friends leaned on each other at the finish, spent.
He retired from competition as Olympic champion, and he and Yang stayed close.
The Night at the Ambassador
In June 1968 he was working on Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, walking near the senator through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, when Sirhan Sirhan opened fire. Johnson, along with football star Rosey Grier and writer George Plimpton, helped tackle and disarm the shooter in the chaos.
The next year he helped found the California Special Olympics, and he spent much of the rest of his life building opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities. The Olympic thread ran through his family too: his daughter, Jenny Johnson Jordan, competed in beach volleyball for the United States at the Sydney Games in 2000.
He died in Los Angeles on December 2, 2020. The tributes mentioned the cauldron and dwelt longer on his service.
Why the Cauldron Mattered
Los Angeles chose him to light the cauldron 24 years after he carried the flag in Rome. His climb up those steps became the defining image of the 1984 relay that changed everything, and twelve years later Atlanta gave the same honor to Muhammad Ali.
In 2028 the flame comes back to Johnson's city, which is also mine. Thousands of torchbearers will carry it, and I hope many of them are people who, like Johnson, spent their lives helping others. If you know someone like that, nominate them.