That Dave Sime was on his way to Rome at all signified how far along an unlikely comeback track he had traveled. There was a time, in the year leading up to the 1956 Olympics, when he was considered the world’s fastest human. That is what the track writers called him after he had won the indoor sprints at the Millrose Games in New York earlier that year. Big Red could run anything: 60-yard dash, 70-yard dash, 100, 200, low hurdles, high hurdles. He was white lightning, a flash from Fairview, New Jersey, so talented that as a thirteen-year-old he had won the Silver Skates prize for speed skating at Madison Square Garden, making the front page of the New York Daily News—and he didn’t even like to skate. A few years later, he showed enough potential in football to be recruited to play at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi. He might have gone into the services but decided against it when he realized that colorblindness would prevent him from becoming an air corps pilot. Basketball was truly his favorite sport (his father had played for the old New York Celtics), but when it came to selecting a college, he decided on Duke, lured there by baseball coach Ace Parker, who wanted him to play center field.
It was not until he reached Duke that Sime became interested in track. His raw speed far outpaced his technique at first, but he schooled himself in the art of sprinting by reading every book on running at the university library, eventually patterning his style on the stride of a dash great from an earlier era, Ralph Metcalfe. He spent hours thumbing through the pages of a flip book of photographs depicting Metcalfe running, creating the sensation of a moving picture. By the end of his sophomore year, Sime had streaked to national stardom in the track world and was a favorite to win gold in the sprints in ’56, but he hurt his leg before the Olympic Trials and never made it to Melbourne. This disappointment, he said later, was the “best thing that happened” in his life, forcing him to redirect his attention to premed courses. He also concentrated on baseball. During his junior season, Sime led the Atlantic Coast Conference and was named a second-team all-American. He might have abandoned track altogether until a test of his amateurism at once infuriated him and turned him around. After that stellar junior season, he had landed a summer job playing semipro baseball in Pierre, South Dakota, but before the opening game, he received an emergency telephone call from Dan Ferris, the head of the AAU, who had somehow learned of his intentions and whereabouts.
“If you play one game, you will be ineligible for all amateur athletic events in track and field,” Ferris told him.
“So I am stuck,” Sime recalled. “I could have said, ‘Fuck, I’m going to do it,’ and give up my amateur athletics. But I still was pissed that I didn’t get to go to Melbourne. Bobby Morrow, who I beat every time when I was healthy, wins the gold medals, and I’m sitting back home…So now I didn’t know what to do.” Sime was without money, and the Pierre ball club was of no help; it wouldn’t pay him unless he played in the first game. In desperation, he called Eddie Cameron, Duke’s athletic director, who said the NCAA would penalize Duke if he sent money to bring Sime home, but that he could arrange transportation to an AAU track meet in Dayton. Sime flew to Ohio, worked out for a day, did well in the meet, and soon found himself on a national squad touring France—and back on a course that eventually led him toward the race he had always wanted to run, for an Olympic gold medal. Even Ace Parker, his baseball coach, thought it was the right decision. When Sime debated with him whether to try pro ball or keep his Olympic dream alive, Parker said that out of the few billion people in the world, only a handful get a chance to run in the Olympics, and that if he had that one-in-millions chance, he should seize it.
Now Sime, at age twenty-four, was an Olympian with an extra assignment: run for your country, and bag a defector for your country as well. Dave was all for it. He considered himself a patriot. To get a high-profile athlete to switch sides and leave the Soviet Union for America seemed a thrilling thing to do.
The airlift of American athletes from New York to Rome began the same day as Sime’s whirlwind secret round-trip mission to Washington. First to leave were the swimmers and members of the water polo team, along with an advance deputation of coaches and officials. Another planeload departed the next day. As each group assembled at Idlewild and waited for the Pan American props that would haul them on the vibrating, seemingly endless fifteen-and-a-half-hour flights, Arthur Lentz, the press officer, moved through the throng of athletes distributing materials. He had already made Berlitz tutors available to teach them how to say phrases like “Your sister is very beautiful” in Italian. Now he was handing out copies of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and a thirty-three-page booklet on the virtues of American life—all printed in Russian. So much for any pretense of keeping the Olympics free from politics. In the propaganda struggle of cold war superpowers, neither side would disarm unilaterally.
The booklet, published by a CIA front called Freedom Fund Inc., noted, among other things, that there were nearly a million people from the Soviet Union now living in America, and that here even the Communist Party could run a candidate for president. Another section discussed common misperceptions of the U.S., one being that only the privileged class benefited from the capitalist system. In emptying his supply of three hundred booklets, Lentz told the athletes that they should pass along their copies to members of the Soviet team at the Olympic Village in Rome.
TO IGOR Ter-Ovanesyan, not quite twenty-two, who had made the Soviet team in the broad jump for the second straight Olympics, competing against athletes from the United States remained an intimidating prospect. Igor was the Soviet version of a gym rat, a lifelong product of the state-run athletic system. His father, an Armenian-born discus thrower, and his mother, a Ukrainian volleyball player, had met at the Kiev State Institute of Physical Education, and both taught there while he was growing up. Although he did not turn to track and field until he was fifteen, Ter-Ovanesyan showed uncommon early talent, breaking the broad-jump record for his age group in his first competition. From then on, his idols were not Soviets but Americans who dominated track and field, starting with the great Jesse Owens, who set the Olympic long-jump record at the 1936 Games in Berlin and a world record a year before at an event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a remarkable leap that was still unmatched a quarter century later. “They were like gods for me, the American jumpers,” Igor said later. First at Melbourne and then at the historic dual meets in Moscow in 1958 and Philadelphia in 1959, he had felt psychologically overmatched by the U.S. athletes and struggled to overcome an inferiority complex.
But the Western world, and all things American, intrigued him. Bored and lonely during a track tour in Sweden in 1958, he picked up an old English textbook and studied it at night in his Stockholm hotel room. Back in Kiev, he began tuning in Voice of America broadcasts and listened to “everything that wasn’t jammed.” On every trip to a European capital, he bought American jazz records, books, magazines, as many totems of Western culture as he could find, and smuggled them home in his suitcase. “Did you ever see Louis Armstrong?” he once asked the sportswriter Dick Schaap. “He is wonderful. He is the best. I collect all his records.” Schaap found it hard to believe that Igor—who “looked like an Ivy Leaguer and acted like a beatnik”—could be a Russian. But though Ter-Ovanesyan was flirting with what seemed new and unfettered, there remained much about the West that he did not understand, and he still felt a deep imprint of love and loyalty for his fatherland.
Nineteen-sixty had been a difficult year in Soviet relations with the West. Tension seemed to be building month by month, starting in May, when an American U-2 reconnaissance plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet airspace. That was followed by Premier Khrushchev’s staged walkout from a four-powers summit meeting in Paris, the cancellation of a future visit to Russia by President Eisenhower, a Soviet promise to defend socialist Cuba with missiles if need be, surrogate battles in Africa and Asia, more pressure over the status of West Berlin, and now, on the eve of th
e Olympics, a public show trial, in Moscow, where Powers faced espionage charges.
From the Soviet perspective, all of life was an ideological test, and in this context Ter-Ovanesyan was reminded again and again of the political importance of his mission. With his teammates, he was taken on a pilgrimage to Lenin’s Tomb. They walked in silence in a slow, somber circle around the mausoleum, a ritual meant to instill a deeper sense of camaraderie and patriotism. He attended daily meetings of the Komsomol, the young people’s branch of the Communist Party. He listened to rambling lectures on the role he and his teammates would play in building friendships with athletes from around the world.
Their performance in Rome, Igor was told, would reflect the triumph of a new socialist society where sports was an essential part of the culture. A send-off column from one of the writers he respected at Pravda read in part: “Our sportsmen represent the new socialistic order where mental health and moral purity are harmonically tied with physical development. Sports and physical development are the habit of the nation. They are the source of the good spirit, happiness, hard work, and long lives of the Soviet people.” It was the same for writers as it was for athletes, Ter-Ovanesyan thought. Just as there was pressure on him to reach certain standards during his training regimen in order not to be regarded negatively by his coaches, so in their sphere his sportswriter friends had to deal with expectations from officials monitoring them and what they published.
Pravda accounts said there were 24 million active athletes in the Soviet Union and that there would be 30 million by the end of the year. From those tens of millions, 299 were selected for the Olympic team that assembled in Moscow and started leaving for Rome on the same mid-August day that the American delegation began departing from New York. The Soviet athletes included blacksmiths, builders, doctors, lawyers, engineers, fishermen, printers, miners, farmers, scientists, and students, but most were connected to the military. In preparing them for Rome, their official handlers placed an emphasis on how best to impress the rest of the world. This meant, among other things, overcoming prevailing Russian stereotypes.
At Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne in 1956, the world press had written disparagingly of the poor dress and general unattractiveness of many of the Soviet women athletes. If the characterization reflected the prevailing sexist attitude of sportswriters, it nonetheless mirrored an unpleasant portrait of grim Soviet life that Kremlin officials desperately wanted to erase. From the time the first planeload of Russian athletes marched through the airport in Rome, the physical appearance of both the men and women was noted by foreign journalists. Readers from Paris to London to San Francisco were informed that the Soviet women came off the plane wearing sharp beige suits, hosiery, high-heeled brown pumps—and lipstick.
Whatever their dress, the Soviets arrived in Rome with instructions to exude an outward confidence. The doubts that nagged at Ter-Ovanesyan and many of his teammates were smothered by a constant publicity drumbeat of inevitable socialist victory. Since the 1958 dual meet in Moscow, Gavriel Korobkov, the Soviet coach, had been maintaining a meticulous scrapbook detailing the accomplishments of U.S. track-and-field athletes, and knew precisely their best times in the sprints and distances and heights in the jumps. Korobkov was a realist, not prone to political rhetoric, but he was also a clever strategist. If the Americans had the superior athletes, he also believed that they had some of the most fragile ones and that he might be able to find ways to make them crack under pressure. While the Soviets were still far below world standards in swimming, dominated by the U.S. and Australia, if they could battle the Americans to a draw in track and field, they thought they could take enough medals in various other sports—from weight lifting to cycling to gymnastics to canoeing—to win the overall point total and gain world bragging rights over the Americans.
When a bus carrying the first Soviets from the airport pulled up to the Olympic Village, an Italian journalist rushed over and asked if there were any celebrities on board. “As many as you would like,” came a half-joking translated reply. “Take down names of all of us and then after the Games we’ll reconfirm.”
That day in Washington, a memorandum reached the desk of President Eisenhower from his Committee on Information Activities Abroad. “The Communists are now putting more emphasis on propaganda through deeds than through words,” the memo stated. This revised approach reflected “an understanding that Sputnik, the Soviet ICBM, the Bolshoi Ballet, or a Soviet victory at the Olympics has more propaganda value than mere words.” More precisely, the Soviets viewed the Olympics as an extraordinary opportunity to weave words and action together.
MORE THAN half of the U.S. contingent of 305 athletes were still in New York on Monday, August 15, when Mayor Robert Wagner feted them at a send-off rally at city hall. Along with a military color guard and a stairwell of politicians urging the young men and women to win for their country, retired five-star general Omar Bradley was there, a visage from the past, stirring echoes of a time when young Americans swept through Europe as liberators. The Second World War was a mere fifteen years gone, and its aftereffects were still evident and relevant in Italy, yet it seemed as remote as the Roman Empire to many of the U.S. athletes, whose lives had been shaped by a relentlessly forward-looking postwar culture. Some of the female swimmers were not even born when the war ended.
Rafer Johnson was designated to speak for his teammates at city hall. “It is the goal of each of us to win a gold medal. Naturally, that’s not possible for all. But we do hope to do the best job possible of representing our country.” Simple words, even prosaic, but with Johnson, as a person and as a decathlete, the whole often was greater than the parts. He sounded self-assured yet humble. No one looked sharper in the U.S. Olympic team’s travel dress uniform—McGregor-Doniger olive green sports coat, Hagger slacks, Van Heusen beige knit shirt. He had a firm grasp of the occasion and his surroundings, once flawlessly calling out the name of each of the dozens of teammates who stood at his side. Team officials could not help noticing. It was Rafer Johnson’s off-the-field performance in New York, along with his stature as a gold medal favorite in the decathlon, that convinced them that he should be the U.S. captain and the first black athlete to carry the American flag when the delegation marched into the stadium at the Opening Ceremony in Rome. There could be no more valuable figure in the propaganda war with the Soviets, who wasted no opportunity to denounce the racial inequities of the United States.
Beneath his composed exterior, Johnson was a jumble of emotions: joy, pride, anticipation, gratitude, determination, and some anger. He refused to feel manipulated, yet he could not escape the burden of carrying other people’s expectations and dealing with their contradictory demands. He was aware, he later said, of the irony of representing a nation that treated people of his color like second-class citizens, but he also felt that he could advance the cause most effectively by doing what he did best, which was to excel at his sport and comport himself with dignity.
The same U.S. amateur officials who wanted him to be the symbol of the American team had just upset him with what he viewed as a capricious restriction. While working out on the track at UCLA earlier that year, Johnson had encountered Kirk Douglas, one of many Hollywood actors who occasionally ran there. As they chatted and jogged around the oval, Douglas told Johnson that he was getting ready to do a film called Spartacus about a slave revolt in ancient Rome. Stanley Kubrick would be directing. There were many character roles for athletic types. “Why don’t you come and read for it?” Douglas asked. Johnson immediately took to the idea. His track days were nearing an end; no matter what happened at the Olympics, he had told himself, that was it, no more decathlons. He had always enjoyed acting; nothing noteworthy, but the junior and senior plays back in high school in Kingsburg, and some community theater. And what better way to break in than with a film that takes place in Rome, of all places? Following Douglas’s advice, Johnson read for a part and got it. He was to play Draba, a rebellious Roman slave from Afri
ca who was killed in the ring and had his body hung in chains upside down as a gruesome warning to others.
Before accepting the role, Johnson called the AAU to make sure he was not violating amateur rules. He talked with Dan Ferris, the same official who had kept Dave Sime from playing semipro baseball in South Dakota. But this case seemed different. What did acting have to do with sports? Weren’t amateur athletes allowed outside jobs? Ferris said no, not in this instance. According to the AAU’s interpretation, acting in Spartacus would make him a pro. Johnson was stunned and issued another appeal to Ferris later. If you take the part, Ferris insisted this time, forget about getting on the plane with your teammates and competing in Rome. He had consulted with other AAU officials, and they agreed. Johnson was being hired not because he knew how to act, they said, but because he was a famous athlete. From their perspective, that was no different than if he were paid for a track meet. For the moment, Johnson could empathize with Draba; overlords were threatening to hang him upside down in chains as a warning to others. But in his mind the choice was not close. The Spartacus role went to Woody Strode, a black actor and former UCLA athlete himself, and Johnson stayed with the Olympics. After all the obstacles he had overcome since the disappointment of Melbourne, nothing could divert him on his path to redemption.
There had been some unexpected twists since Johnson’s moment of exhilaration two years earlier at the historic dual meet in Moscow, when he had set a new world decathlon record and been hoisted onto the shoulders of appreciative Russian fans. On a late spring morning less than a year later, as Rafer and his brother Jimmy, a star football player at UCLA, were driving back from Los Angeles to Kingsburg for the high school graduation of their sister Erma, they got in a traffic accident near Bakersfield that left Rafer with a bruised spinal cord, a pulled hamstring, and spasms in his lower back. No serious accident is a blessing, but this one, he believed, ended up helping him in ways that he could not have foreseen.
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