Reflection on Billy Mills

Billy Mills, Lakota Sioux runner, was responsible for one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history. A complete unknown in the track-and-field world, Mills outran a field of international track stars to win the gold medal in the 10,000-meter race in the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo. Mills’ win was the first gold medal by any American in this event, and was a particular source of pride for Native Americans (Winters, K., 2004). Based on this inspirational story, a movie was made in 1983 named “Running Brave”. In the movie, Billy Mills’ internal and external journeys are well presented and we can see how they relate.

As in real life, in the movie, Billy Mills is an American Indian who, as a boy lived on a reservation in Kansas. Since he was little his happiness was to run, he would win some races in high school track meets, but when it came to a famous coach from the University of Kansas, he didn’t want him on his team because: "Indians are quitters”, as his character explained in the movie. Then Billy, whose goal in the future was to compete for a spot in the Olympics, firmly said to the coach he doesn’t quit. It is here where you can see he wanted to prove him and the “white world” wrong. 

The time was late 1950’s, times where racial prejudice against Indians ran high. When the young man enrolls to the university, after accepting the track scholarship the coached offered, people called him "Chief", ignored him and wouldn’t let him join their fraternities. It is here when the real struggle with his internal journey begins. Given his external journey is full of discrimination, humiliation, preconceptions and negative vibes, he can’t let his external world affect his own thoughts of him and what he wants in life.

Billy Mills’ internal journey is full of positivism and self-encouragement. He relies on his own inner sense of pride and the will to achieve to get through this tough time. In the movie there are scenes presenting his father’s support in "flashbacks". There was one when Billy is on the bus on his way to Kansas University and he remembered his father saying “he can go anywhere he wants”, and that he did. These are the thoughts and ideas in his internal journey that help him to be the person he wants no matter what situations are in his external journey. In a letter he writes to his sister he says he tries to understand the “white world”, letting us know he did want to understand the things that happened around him and why it happened.