Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  Realizing that Johnson could not resume his running regimen, Craig Dixon, the assistant track coach at UCLA, proposed that he start lifting weights, a practice that was barely respectable in most sports during that era. Johnson remembered that in high school at Kingsburg two football players had been kicked off the team for lifting. Over at Southern Cal, weight lifting was so discouraged that the discus thrower Rink Babka would slip over to a house in Watts and pump iron with a group of black bodybuilders who used barbells made from water pipes and weights that were coffee cans filled with concrete. But Dixon believed in weight lifting, so Johnson tried it. Week after week he felt himself getting stronger and even more coordinated. As his recovery progressed, and he began preparing for the 1960 Olympics, his results in the three throwing events of the decathlon—shot put, discus, and javelin—improved substantially.

  The positive effect of his weight training became evident to the world at his first decathlon since Moscow, the Olympic Trials at the University of Oregon track in Eugene on July 8 and 9, 1960. The pain from the traffic accident still lingered; he needed two shots of Novocain before the competition. But with the three throwing events putting him over the top, Johnson amassed a record total 8683 points, obliterating both the mark he had established at the 1958 dual meet with his Soviet foe, Vasily Kuznetsov, and Kuznetsov’s subsequent new record set a year later at the second dual meet between the superpowers, this time held in Philadelphia (where Johnson, because of his injury, did not compete). Even then, Johnson was in danger of losing both the Eugene competition and the world record going into the final event, the 1500 meters. His challenger was his UCLA teammate C. K. Yang, who would be representing Taiwan at the Olympics. Because of his ties to the UCLA program, Yang was invited to the U.S. decathlon Trials, just as he had been in 1958 at Palmyra, New Jersey, where he also finished second. Johnson and Yang ran in separate heats of the 1500, with Johnson going first and then having to wait thirty-five minutes before Yang’s run. It was within the realm of possibility that Yang could run a metric mile fast enough to overcome Johnson’s impressive total, but he was slowed by a muscle cramp midway around the second lap.

  In their relationship as teammates and competitors, there was always a tug between the powerful will to win and a deep friendship. At the end in Eugene, Johnson found himself shouting words of encouragement as Yang labored around the track. C.K. finished the race, but far slower than his personal best, leaving the record for Rafer and providing decathlon aficionados with the delicious prospect of an Olympic rematch. Neither decathlete could know then that the memory of Yang’s muscle cramp in the last of the ten grueling events would follow them all the way to the stadium in Rome.

  As Johnson spoke for his teammates at city hall, he was thinking about the rematch. He was “very pleased” that his friend C.K. would be pushing him at the Olympics. And he was looking forward to the chance to make up for his 1956 loss. None of this worried Johnson, but instead filled him with elation, he said later. “I had to be one of the happiest people at city hall that day.”

  That night, after an informal reception at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, three more busloads of athletes set out for Idlewild and the trip across the Atlantic. Every flight had its own profile. Only one plane was a jet, and it carried mostly dignitaries and USOC officials. For years and decades thereafter, the athletes took great delight in reports that some officials got looped on the flight and were let off in Paris. The story, probably apocryphal, accurately delineated the rift between the young competitors and the older men in suits telling them what they could and could not do. A prop DC-7C carrying the cyclists and weight lifters was delayed on the runway for hours while a mechanic scrambled out on the wing and worked on the engine. When the plane finally took off, it was so cramped with bulky athletes jammed into uncomfortable seats that some ended up sleeping in the aisle. In his diary, Jack Simes, a cyclist, wrote: “I get up because I wanted to go visit the head in the back anyway. The whole plane is pretty dark except for the noisy section where there is much activity. As I pass on the way to the head I see, in the middle of it all [four cyclists] mixed in with the big guys. They’re playing cards, and there are beer bottles and money all over the place and lots of laughter. This is the Olympics we’re going to? Up late drinking beer and gambling?”

  The passenger manifest for a plane departing the night of August 15 listed the heavyweight crew and the women’s track team, including eight Tigerbelles and Ed Temple, who had been named the women’s coach. The white rowers and black sprinters played whist and pinochle together on the long flight. There had been no threat from Temple this time to take his team back to Nashville on a Ladd bus if he didn’t get the job; everyone had come to realize how vital his program was to the U.S. hopes.

  The fleetest of his sprinters now was Wilma Rudolph, who had missed the 1958 trip to Moscow because of her pregnancy. Yolanda, her daughter, now two, was back living with her parents in Clarksville. Rudolph, known to her friends as Skeeter, a nickname her high school basketball coach had given her because she was “always buzzing around like a mosquito” on the court, seemed to be nearing her ultimate performance level just in time for Rome. Earlier that summer, when she had first put up a world-class time in the 100 at the AAU nationals in Corpus Christi, Texas, Temple could not believe it. The official time down on the field precisely matched his own stopwatch up in the stands, but it was so good he thought something must have been wrong. Maybe the cinder track was a few yards short. “I said, ‘People, this child’s running a little too fast. I mean, something’s the matter with the track or something.’” Then Rudolph ran her best-ever time in the 200, and a week later the same thing happened at the Olympic Trials. Skeeter was on the move.

  Still, Temple was not overly confident. He wanted his runners to think they would win gold, but kept lower expectations to himself. On the flight to Rome, he was thinking, “Just get to the finals. If only we can get Wilma and maybe another Tigerbelle to the finals. That would mean they were among the best six in the world. Then, maybe by some miracle, they could get a third place. Just get up on the stand.” A bronze medal would get a Tigerbelle to the podium.

  The third plane carried the Olympic boxing team, including an obstreperous eighteen-year-old light heavyweight from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay. In retrospect, it is not surprising that the memories of many who took that flight focus on Clay, who was still four years away from renaming himself Muhammad Ali. His personality would not change, only the size of his audience and his larger meaning. In Manhattan that week, the Olympic long jumper Bo Roberson, who had been an all-round sports star at Cornell University when the journalist Dick Schaap was a student there, introduced the kid boxer to the young sports editor of Newsweek, and they hung out together one day and night, in Harlem and back at the delegation hotel. “I’ll be the greatest of all time,” Clay repeatedly told Schaap, who would never forget those improbable words. They were nothing new to Clay’s Olympic teammates, who had heard Clay boast so much that they often tuned him out. But on the plane to Rome, what made him stick out was an unusual fusion of confidence and fear. He was certain about what would happen in the ring in Rome, just not certain he would get there. His fear of flying was so strong that it took the persuasion of all his teammates to get him to board the plane.

  Jerry Armstrong, a bantamweight from Idaho State College, said “Cassius was scared to death. We said, ‘Well, you can either fly or stay home.’” The boxers were seated up near the cockpit, which did nothing to soothe Clay’s apprehension. Over and over again, he repeated his mantra, “If God wanted us to fly, he would give us wings.” To which Wilbert McClure, a light middleweight from the University of Toledo, would respond, “Well, we’re flying, and we ain’t got no wings, so how do you explain that?” Nikos Spanakos, a featherweight from Brooklyn, who boxed collegiately at the College of Idaho, remembered that Clay was screaming the entire flight. “So the coach gave us a sleeping pill to knock us all out, and Cassius was
able to overcome the sleeping pill and was still screaming.” In this case, screaming meant talking. By McClure’s account, Clay spent several hours “talking about who would win gold medals and dada-dada-dada, and he had good ideas and picked the guys who were going to win.” He based his predictions on who “had the Olympic style and were furthering the Olympic image.” There was some method to the madness of this kid yapping his way across the Atlantic, McClure decided. Not for the last time, he was talking and boasting to overcome his own fears.

  THE ETHIOPIANS came early to Rome, leaving heavy thunder-clouds behind as they departed Addis Ababa. There were twelve men on their Olympic team: six runners and six cyclists. After coming down from the mountain altitudes, the runners had trained in the final weeks on dusty grounds near an air base at Debre Zeit, south of the capital city. They were coached there by a Swede named Onni Niskanen, director of athletics in the government of Haile Selassie, or H.I.M., as the reverential local newspapers referred to His Imperial Majesty. Three days before the Olympians left Addis Ababa, they had been ushered inside the gates of the imperial palace for the first time for an audience with the emperor. It had taken more than coaching skills for Niskanen to get to this moment. The Olympic team had been underfunded, lacking money for training or to pay for the stay in Rome, until His Imperial Majesty was persuaded that his nation’s distance runners could bring him honor—perhaps even a medal. “You have all recorded good results in the athletic competition of the armed forces this year,” Haile Selassie told them. “The question is whether such victory will continue as well as it has so far. You, athletes, are the ones to answer that question.”

  It had been twenty-five years since the Fascist legions of Benito Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, devastating the civilian population with bombing raids and poison gas. In 1936 Il Duce’s troops occupied a mountain village in Debre Birhan, forcing out Wudinesh Beneberu and her family, including her four-year-old son, Abebe Bikila. The next year, the Italians seized the Axum Obelisk, one of Ethiopia’s cherished religious and archeological treasures, and shipped the seventy-eight-foot monument of antiquity back to Rome, where it was stationed prominently along a main thoroughfare as a reminder of colonial European supremacy. Now Il Duce was long dead, and H.I.M. remained, and Abebe Bikila, just turned twenty-eight, a private in Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard, was landing in Rome with the modest delegation of Ethiopian Olympians, preparing to run a marathon route that would lead him past his nation’s stolen obelisk. The experts of distance running had never heard of him. In the materials being prepared for the world press, his name was transposed as Bikila Abebe.

  The small teams from Burma and Romania were already in Rome when Abebe Bikila and his Ethiopians arrived. They were so anxious to enjoy the city, and this gathering of peers from around the world, and to train away from their homelands, that they settled into the Olympic Village more than two weeks before the Opening Ceremony. The Japanese were next to join them, then the Ghanaians, Sudanese, and Indonesians. The world order was transmuting in 1960, with nations being born, regressing, progressing—and out of all that, an unprecedented eighty-three National Olympic Committees were sending a record total of 5,338 athletes to Rome. None was from the world’s most populous nation, the People’s Republic of China, which officially withdrew from the Olympic Movement in 1958 and had isolated itself from international athletic competition for most of the fifties. The main reason the Communist Chinese were not in Rome was because of their opposition to the Olympic community’s recognition of another team that was already there, a 45-athlete delegation led by decathlete C. K. Yang from Taiwan, which the Communist Chinese considered a rightful part of their territory. Ten hours of fog had delayed the team’s takeoff from Taipei, and it still seemed shrouded in a fog of war over what it rightfully should be called, Taiwan or the Republic of China. Nonetheless, the first cable from team officials in Rome back to the island was a request for two thousand more China Olympic pins to distribute.

  Suriname came with the smallest possible number of athletes (a solitary Siegfried Esajas, an 800-meter runner allegedly destined to oversleep and miss his one and only heat), and Germany with the largest contingent, 321. The Germans also most obviously embodied the internal tension of the Olympic movement: political and apolitical, united and divided.

  Since the end of World War II, Germany had been a riven domain, with the western sector of the country and West Berlin reconstructing a democratic government under the supervision of the U.S., England, and France, while the eastern sector and East Berlin were in the Soviet orbit. Now the chief of mission for the German Olympic delegation was Gerhard Stoeck of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the deputy chief was Manfred Ewald from the German Democratic Republic. West and East, two political systems, contested borders and checkpoints, but one supposed unified team. Stoeck and Ewald arrived in advance of their athletes and spent considerable time together trying to figure out how they could survive. While their relationship played out in a larger political theater, it had the intimate awkwardness of parents from a nasty divorce showing up at their child’s wedding and being forced to sleep in the same hotel room. There had been no athletes from East Germany, or the Soviet zone, at the Helsinki Olympics, and only 37 in Melbourne, where they had trained and lived separately from their Western counterparts. This time, with 141 Eastern athletes on the team, Stoeck and Ewald agreed that they would live and train together, or at least within the same areas, and that overt politics would be taboo.

  Years of intense negotiations, ten rounds’ worth, concluded near midnight August 9 at a session in Dortmund, Germany, at the Hotel Westfalenhalle, the two sides finally agreeing on the composition of the unified team and its accepted symbols. It was a merger of athletic necessity, not political choice, forced upon them by officials from the International Olympic Committee who had ruled that the Germans would compete as one team or not at all. Their Italian hosts had placed the German men in block 30 of the Olympic Village, not far from Piazza Grecia, a square outlined by flagpoles. When the team flag was hoisted there, it was the traditional German red, black, and gold, but replacing politically tinged emblems preferred by East or West were the five Olympic rings. And instead of a national anthem, the music played at the flag raising—as it would at any future medal ceremony where a German athlete won—was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  Ewald, at age thirty-six, had moved from one ideological extreme to another in his young life. Born in Podejuch, Germany, later part of Poland, he had been a Hitler Youth and was trained at an elite Nazi school. He fought in World War II as a teenager and near the end of the war was taken prisoner by the Soviets on the Eastern front. Returning to what became the Soviet zone of East Germany, he joined the Communist Party and rose through the ranks of sports and politics. It was part of the daily rhetoric of East Germany to denounce West German leaders as former Nazis, but Ewald seemed to get a pass on that account. Now, in Rome, when two reporters from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading newspaper in West Germany, visited him at the German quarters in the Olympic Village, they noted “the most polite way” he assessed the odd situation. The team was comprised of “equal partners from East and West, with equal rights and duties,” he told the visiting journalists. He had even instructed athletes from his eastern side to avoid wearing blue GDR sweatshirts and instead don the black-and-white unified team outfits when they stepped outside their rooms. “He went on for fifteen minutes enthusiastically painting a beautiful picture,” they observed.

  At the end, they asked why a plaque on his door happened to say “Team Leader of the GDR.” Ewald claimed that he had just noticed it and would have it swiftly replaced.

  If ostensibly unified in Rome, the German squads arrived separately. The Easterners made much of an elderly gentleman they brought along with them. Carl Galle, eighty-seven, the oldest living German Olympian, was an East Berliner who had run the metric mile at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. The Olympi
c fire had burned inside him ever since, Galle said, and he followed the Games wherever he could. The Olympics, or at least the prospect of a Roman holiday punctuated by drinking songs and orchestrated stadium cheers, also inspired a horde of West Germans to caravan down to Italy by the thousands. Karlheinz Vogel, a writer for the Frankfurt paper, got stuck in horrible traffic near the Italian border and characteristically berated the inefficiency of the Italians. “In Bale, German and Swiss customs waved people through like traffic police,” Vogel noted. “In Chiasso, the Swiss customs could hardly be seen. But the Italians at the border force people to leave their cars, fill out forms, put stamps in travel documents, and do not care if the line of cars is getting longer and longer.”

  A traffic jam at the Italian border sounded preferable to what the large and confident Australian delegation endured on its trip to Rome. First there was hydraulic trouble in one of the jets, causing a twenty-four-hour delay after refueling in Bahrain. With another stop in Cairo, it took the two hundred Aussie athletes and their handlers two and a half days to reach their destination. They were exhausted upon arrival, and the blast-furnace heat of late-summer Rome, now soaring over ninety degrees, did not help their adjustment. A pack of journalists waited for them at the airport, eager to hear the latest in the relationship between Herb Elliott, the world’s greatest miler, and his eccentric coach, Percy Cerutty. “There never was a rift,” Cerutty claimed when asked if Elliott had soured on him. Then, in his pugnacious style, he added: “And I’ll flatten anyone who says there is.”

  While Cerutty, known for his special diets and sand dune training, was the personal guru of Elliott and other distance runners, he was not part of the official Australian coaching team and had to scramble for credentials and housing in Rome. The regal Elliott himself was granted special privileges, allowed to spend most of his time with his wife and baby outside the Olympic Village gates. Cerutty, always frugal if not broke, talked his way into lodging in a dorm with the cyclists. But he was summarily expelled after a few days because he had transformed the suite into a boisterous day-and-night runners’ salon, taking in disciples from around the world who solicited his wisdom. Disarray was the early watchword for the unfortunate Australians; soon after they arrived, many of their world-class swimmers came down with conjunctivitis, which they attributed to the chlorine and the blistering sun.