Role Models

[peggygee]

Just a few for now

[Kabuki]

Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

They voiced their opinions during the 1968 Olympics without words. I wish people in the states would stand up and fight for real change. The Civil Rights movement in the 60's changed the world.

Karen Duffy.

90's MTV VJ. Duffy was leading a relatively carefree youth in the heyday of her modeling career, partying with movie star friends such as George Clooney, when in 1995 she was diagnosed with the relatively rare disease sarcoidosis. In her case, this affected her brain (neurosarcoidosis), leaving her partially paralyzed. She has so far battled it with a sense of humor, as is evident from her 2000 autobiography Model Patient: My Life As an Incurable Wise-Ass. She has explained, "I tried to write a book not for sick people, but for people with a sick sense of humor ... [this] is not a typical book about illness."

After the diagnosis she continued to model for Revlon.

Her book is hilarious and she is a fighter.

Frida Kahlo. A Mexican painter living with polio, and a survivor of a brutal bus accident. She managed to create through the pain that her own body and life threw at her. How can you complain about life when she was actually impaled through her vagina?

On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.

Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.

I could go on and on...

[freak]

[ozma]

[dc_guy_75]

For me, Jimmy Smits, Plaxico, and Quadaffi.

[alpha2117]

Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

They voiced their opinions during the 1968 Olympics without words. I wish people in the states would stand up and fight for real change. The Civil Rights movement in the 60's changed the world.

A lot of people dont realise the part Peter Norman played in Mexico 1968.

The gold and bronze medalists in the 200m at the 1968 Olympics were Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, respectively. On the medal podium, during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner", Smith and Carlos famously joined in a Black Power salute.

What is less known is that Norman, a white Australian, donned a badge on the podium in support of their cause, the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). On the way out to the medal ceremony, Norman saw the badge being worn by Paul Hoffman, a white member of the US Rowing Team, and asked him if he could wear it.[citation needed] It was also Norman who suggested that Smith and Carlos share the black gloves used in their salute, after Carlos left his gloves in the Olympic Village.[5] This is the reason for Tommie Smith raising his right fist, while John Carlos raised his left. Asked about his support of Smith and Carlos' cause by the world's press, Norman said he opposed his country's government's White Australia policy.

Australia's Olympic authorities reprimanded him and the Australian media ostracised him. Despite Norman running qualifying times for both the 100m and 200m during 1971/72 the Australian Olympic track team did not send him, or any other sprinters, to the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the first ever modern Olympics where no Australian sprinters participated.