He&#x27;s doing a good thing, and that should be lauded, but it can&#x27;t make him the biggest hero on the podium.<p>It&#x27;s an obvious oversimplification, but it be useful to think of measuring the good you do in the world in terms of game points.<p>Basically, if you&#x27;re benefiting unfairly from a system since birth, you&#x27;ve started off with negative points.  You owe the world something to balance off what you&#x27;ve gotten &quot;for free&quot; (really, at others&#x27; cost).<p>If you hate the system, you recognize the unfairness, and you actively fight against it, you can certainly move into positive points, but you&#x27;re not <i>starting off</i> the same as people who grew up with the short end of the stick.<p>So when (for example) the vast majority of the white Australians at the time seemed perfectly happy with the awful system in place, and Peter Norman wasn&#x27;t, and actually made this statement in a very public way, that was 10 minutes of serious bravery (and then many years of paying for it, afterwards -- which he surely knew was coming).<p>Also to his credit -- see the quote above about the statue.  He pretty clearly wasn&#x27;t putting himself in the position of &quot;greatest hero on this podium&quot; either; but rather probably shamed that more of his countrymen weren&#x27;t even taking the smallest steps in the same direction.<p>-- edit -- I&#x27;m not saying he&#x27;s &quot;not a hero&quot;; I think it&#x27;s awesome what he did, and I&#x27;m not at all sure I&#x27;d have had the courage.  I&#x27;m just adding some context to why saying he was &quot;the biggest hero on the podium&quot; rubs me the wrong way (and it would have rubbed him the wrong way as well).