Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  From the other side came conservative press reports and confidential memos detailing similarly nefarious plots hatched by the Communists. Catholic infiltrators at party meetings had reported that nine months before the Games were to begin, thousands of left-wing activists had gathered in Rome to “launch a mass propaganda drive around the Olympics” that would “give sports a rational, modern, nonreligious character shaped by socialist aims.” According to files compiled by the American embassy in Rome, the Italian Communist Party then set up “commissions for propaganda related to the Olympics so they can make successful use of the Games in Rome.” The party was said to have spent 300 million lire “training activists and printing and distributing leaflets and pamphlets.” Activists had been assigned to take foreign athletes on tours of “the ugly side of capitalism” in the Rome slums and suburbs, pay special attention to Asian and African athletes, and make sure that Olympians from the Soviet zone of East Germany did not have “excessive fraternization” with their West German teammates.

  On that last goal, separating the socialist German athletes from their capitalist teammates, the early results were unclear. The West German press corps, two hundred strong, had been invited to lunch that very day by Bonn’s ambassador to Italy at a restaurant atop a hill called Monte Mario. From that lofty perch, a writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, they savored “the wonderful view on the part of Rome which includes the Olympic Village, the great stadium, and the swimming pools.” The luncheon conversation seemed as idyllic as the vista. Chef de Mission Gerhard Stoeck told the reporters that he was getting along well with functionaries of the Soviet zone and that the athletes from the two parts of Germany seemed to be mixing even better. “He said that a small-scale reunification was presently being performed in the Olympic Village and at the [practice] venues, which should be taken as an example.”

  AUGUST 24, the eve of the Olympics, had been a full day for Avery Brundage. He had started the morning at breakfast with two American generals, veterans of the Italian campaign in World War II, then granted interviews to reporters from India and the Voice of America before lunching with the visiting president of Israel. In early evening, Brundage had been at the front of the Olympic delegation at St. Peter’s, and later made his way over to watch the Olympic torch arrive at the Capitoline steps after its long journey from Greece. Then he capped off his night by attending a four-hour performance of Aida staged outdoors at the ancient Baths of Caracalla, replete with live horses and camels and free beer served before the final act.

  Between all that, in early afternoon, he and the IOC Executive Board had met again at the Hotel Excelsior to hear the case against South Africa. In London that day, the Roman Catholic bishop of Durban, South Africa, was speaking out against his country’s apartheid, calling it “the failure of white South African Christians to apply their basic rules of behavior to the community in which they lived.” His country’s tragedy, the bishop said, represented “the almost perfect example of the immovable object of white supremacy and the irresistible force of African nationalism.”

  Brundage and his executive board were not yet ready to acknowledge that South Africa had broken the nondiscrimination clause of the Olympic Charter, even after granting an audience to the Reverend Michael Scott, representing the Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport, who had come to Rome to make the case against South Africa’s participation. The myth of white supremacy, Scott argued, was “taught and practiced in schools and universities and even in many churches. And it extends to the practice of athletics and games, which must be carried on in separation or apartheid. Under these circumstances, competition under equal conditions becomes impossible.” He asked Brundage and the others to imagine what it would be like if the United States Olympic team did not allow Negroes. How would this change world records? How could the South African regime claim that no people of color were good enough to qualify? “The integrity of the whole Olympic Games system of world records is being undermined as long as this absurdity is tolerated of an African country not allowing Africans to represent it…This blemish on the ethic of the Olympic Games should be removed here at Rome once and for all.”

  After hearing Scott, Brundage and his committee called on Reginald Honey, the South African representative on the IOC who had been in the room when Scott made his case. When the meeting ended, IOC chancellor Otto Mayer issued a short statement on Games of the XVII Olympiad stationery. It was the belief of the IOC, Mayer asserted, that “the South African Olympic Committee had made every reasonable effort…to ensure that no competitor of requisite caliber was excluded from the South African team.” The battle against apartheid was deferred, though not stopped.

  As Brundage went through his evening rounds, he was given new figures about his vast and growing empire: The Rome Olympics would host a record number of countries and athletes. More than four and a half million tickets were being sold, twice as many as Melbourne. All appeared ready for the start of competition. At venues around Rome, and from Lake Albano, southeast of the city, all the way down to the Bay of Naples, the apparatus of the Olympic enterprise was counted and set in place.

  Here is but a small, random sample of what was needed: 12 pole vault uprights, 100 competition hurdles, 384 training hurdles, 40 competition discuses, 165 ash javelins, 40 competition hammers, 138 shots for putting, 96 starting blocks, 110 writing frames for judges, 100 wooden folding chairs, 130 relay batons, 3 mobile luminous indicator boards, 4 special starter pistols, 1,000 metallic torches to fuel the marathon course, 3,000 black competitor numbers on white background for men, 1,500 yellow competitor numbers on black background for women, 300 white competitor numbers on black background for marathon, 110 official basketballs, 60 training balls, 6 backboards, 9 basketball nets, 570 boxing gloves, 580 elastic bandages, 27 speed balls, 47 jump ropes, 4 brass megaphones for rowing, 40 bicycle carrier frames, 318 plastic armlets for cycling, 2 horse slaughter pistols, 100 cockades for horses, 20 electrified blades for sabers, 150 mats for fencing, 480 field hockey balls, 100 sawdust pillows for shooting lines, 60,000 targets for small-bore rifles, 50 water polo balls, 153 water polo caps, 262 weights, 39 steel bars for weights, 40 wrestling whistles, 60 protest flags for Finn Class yachting, 400 floating smoke signals, 340 baskets holding 7,200 pigeons, and a fleet of 288 Fiats, 142 buses, 76 Lambretta motor scooters, and 100 Vespas.

  Everything set to go, except the Italian official in charge of those preparations. Virgilio Tommasi, director of technical services for the organizing committee, had been working on the multitude of details needed to stage the Olympics for four years, setting the schedule, securing equipment, finding judges and timekeepers, drawing up regulations, worrying about the weather, making sure every nation had the correct flag and anthem. It was a demanding job that had Tommasi working long hours seven days a week, and on the day before the Opening Ceremony, it became too much for him. As he was driving along Viale Tiziano on his way to his office at the Foro Italico, he lost consciousness, and his car plowed into a tree. His son, Rino Tommasi, a young reporter and boxing promoter who would go on to become a world-renowned tennis writer, was stunned to receive the call saying that his father, having broken several ribs, was being treated at the hospital, where he would remain for the duration of the Games.

  Reaching the Olympics along the roads to Rome also proved challenging for the young Italian journalist Gian Paolo Ormezzano. Later honored as the dean of Italian sportswriters, and an Olympics expert for decades thereafter, Ormezzano was a cub reporter for Tuttosport in 1960. Like many Italians, he had spent that August on vacation but broke off his holiday in Rimini on the Adriatic Sea to cover his first Olympics. There were no superhighways in Italy then, and he followed the Appenino, a major north-south road, as he drove down to Rome. Exhausted and trying to save money, he pulled to the shoulder and slept in his car. When he awoke, he got out to relieve himself, a gust of wind blew the door shut, and to his dismay he found himself locked out. Here he was bound fo
r his first big assignment, and he might not make it. The prospect of missing his first deadline overwhelmed Ormezzano so much that he broke into tears. No traffic at that predawn hour, no telephones in sight. What could he do?

  Out of the morning mist came a busload of Boy Scouts, also on their way to the Olympics. Using a piece of wire on a window that was slightly open, they quickly unlocked his car, and the young writer was back on the road in the scouting caravan, reaching Rome on time, he would say, in the company of angels.

  5

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  BY the time the gates to Stadio Olimpico opened at three on the afternoon of August 25, thousands of athletes and officials from eighty-three delegations had begun the milelong march to get there from the village. Afghans, Bulgarians, Cubans, Danes, Ethiopians, Finns, and on and on, they moved as a human ribbon of exuberant color, crossing the Tiber over the Ponte Milvio and flowing down to the Foro Italico, where they crowded onto the infield grass of the compact Stadio dei Marmi. There, under a blistering summer sun, the temperature soaring toward triple digits, they waited for the start of the Parade of Nations opening the Games of the XVII Olympiad.

  Mild complaints were whispered among women on the U.S. team about the impractical burden of their parade uniforms: blue blazers, white wool pleated skirts, red leather pumps, white berets, white stretch gloves, nylon hosiery, and big red purses they had to carry over their right shoulders. They were delighted to be there, but couldn’t someone have planned the outfits with a Mediterranean summer in mind? Most of the Americans had no Olympic experience and knew nothing about marching in formation. It was left to Bo Roberson, the broad jumper from Cornell, a veteran of Army ROTC, to take on the role of drill sergeant in the staging area, at the last minute putting his teammates through the hup-two-three-four paces, hoping they would not embarrass themselves when the world was watching.

  The great white bowl of the main stadium filled slowly, but by four o’clock nearly eighty thousand people were inside. In the prime seats at midfield, there was a sudden buzz, and binoculars from above and to the sides focused on a particular row. It was not the queen of Greece who caused the flurry, nor Prince Albert of Belgium, Prince Axel and Princess Margaretha of Denmark, Prince Harald of Norway, or Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein. They seemed Old World; only a reigning monarch in the postwar popular culture could provoke such intense murmuring—movie star Elizabeth Taylor was arriving with singer Eddie Fisher, her husband. When Taylor’s entrance caught the attention of the vast cadre of journalists in the press area, they characteristically began a round of double-entendre jokes. It’s Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. A great deal of the same. Liz may have set a new record in neckline plunging at Olympic events.

  One distraction replaced by another: a local semistreaker wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts jumped the fence and raced merrily around the oval, dissolving into the throng before the slow-moving security men could nab him. No doubt the Comtesse de Morelos, head of the Olympic fashion police, was horrified by his American-tourist sartorial selection. There was another half hour of anticipation. Then, to the sardonic bemusement of a correspondent from the Times of London, a ceremonial band “broke into what was recognized by both British and Italians as a Fascist marching song” to signal the start of the Parade of Nations. The oval track, a rich shade of dark Roman red, offered a vibrant contrast to the green infield and cerulean sky. Carrying the flag for the Greeks was Prince Constantine, a future king and current Dragon Class Olympic yachtsman, who before the fortnight was over would seize a gold medal in the Bay of Naples and receive a congratulatory embrace in the shower from a fully clothed, yacht-cavorting billionaire countryman, Aristotle Onassis.

  In line after Greece, honored at the front as the ancient progenitor of the Olympic idea, competitors marched onto the track in alphabetical order based on the Italian spelling of their countries. The Australians, their men outfitted in green jackets, gray trousers, and green hats, were the largest of the first wave of delegations, though more than half of their two hundred athletes—including all swimmers, boxers, and cyclists—remained in the village. Earlier that day, team officials had issued an edict that anyone competing in the first week of the Games should not participate in the Opening Ceremony. The heat and the long march might sap their energy, it was explained. Whatever the reasoning, the order did not sit well with many Aussie athletes, individualists who bristled at the “petty tyranny” of their bureaucratic minders. In the sort of antiestablishment rebelliousness more commonly associated with later years of the sixties decade, those left behind staged a mock ceremony back at the village, the men noisily parading around bare chested with ties drooping from their necks.

  Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Bermuda (more of those dreaded shorts, mustard color), Brazil, Bulgaria (a notably gregarious Iron Curtain contingent, smiling and waving miniature flags, the women in jonquil-colored frocks), Canada (the most sensibly dressed, in short sleeves, without coats), Czechoslovakia, Ceylon. Every team with its own story.

  Chile once had planned to send eighty athletes to Rome, but only eight made the trip. The ribbony South American country was still recovering, three months later, from one of the twentieth century’s most devastating earthquakes, 9.5 magnitude, and a ferocious tsunami that washed over much of its coastline near Valparaiso. France subsidized travel expenses for three Chilean athletes, other European nations chipped in to fund the rest, and the IOC defrayed all other costs for the team.

  Cuba marched in with a dozen athletes—no beards. Nineteen months after Fidel Castro seized power on the island, his athletes were moving noticeably into the orbit of the Soviets, much as his government was doing. In the village, the Russians had sent a contingent to attend the hoisting of the Cuban flag, and reporters from Pravda and Izvestia were making daily references to Soviet camaraderie with athletes from Cuba and other nascent socialist and anticolonialist governments around the world. As the Cuban Olympians marched into the stadium in Rome, their political delegates were about to walk out of a special meeting of the Organization of American States in San Jose, Costa Rica. An emergency session of the OAS had been convened in an unsuccessful effort to ease growing tension between Castro’s Cuba and the United States.

  This was more than two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis and eight months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, yet the issues debated in Costa Rica on the same day the Olympics opened in Italy foreshadowed all the difficulties to come. The Eisenhower administration, alarmed by Soviet intrusion into the Western hemisphere, demanded at the OAS conference that the Cubans summarily reject and renounce a recent Kremlin promise to provide Castro with military aid, including missiles. The Cubans refused, calling the Soviets their friends. At the same time, they accused the U.S. of plotting to overthrow the Castro regime, a charge the Americans roundly denied.

  Next came Denmark, dressed in scarlet jackets and white slacks, minus the team cyclists who would compete in the first gold medal event of the Olympics the next morning. And now Abebe Bikila and the Ethiopians. Most of them had been alive when Mussolini had last invaded their country. As A. J. Liebling described for readers of The New Yorker, “A dozen or so straight, tall, thin men marched past the reviewing stand, and their standard bearer lowered their flag, with its green, yellow, and red stripes, in salute.” Liebling could only wonder what they were thinking about. “They were received with polite applause,” he determined from his seat in the press section.

  Fiji came with five men, the flag bearer draped in a burlap skirt. Scattered applause for the Philippines (spelled with an F in Italian) and the blue-clad Finns, and now in marched Taiwan, or Formosa, or so the placard said.

  The key political fight of the Olympics was being decided at last. Only hours earlier, the American embassy in Rome had received one last call from the Republic of China’s ambassador, who was still hoping that his nation might avoid being called Taiwan or Formosa at the Olympics. “He expressed great appreciation for the efforts made at t
he American embassy, and he had certain suggestions regarding attentions that might be paid to Mr. Avery Brundage,” a State Department memorandum said of the ambassador later that day, not detailing precisely what those “attentions” to the IOC president might entail.

  When the embassy’s duty officer “asked whether it was necessary to march in the opening parade in order to compete in events,” the ambassador replied that he was not sure. The athletes themselves did not want to march, he said, but the delegation’s Olympic officials thought they should. To the end, the U.S. was pushing its ally to take the strongest possible political stand. It might be better not to march “even though this risk could prevent later participation,” the American embassy official advised, arguing that “the Opening Ceremony would focus attention on names of competing teams, and, second, if the designation was accepted without resistance, it would hurt future battles on that issue.”