In a symmetrical irony, the team entering the stadium behind Rafer Johnson’s Americans was the all-white apartheid delegation from South Africa. Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Hungary (capital U no H), and then in marched the nation that had crushed the Hungarian revolution only four years earlier.
The Soviet flag bearer was Yuri Vlasov, the heavyweight weight lifter, a national hero in a culture that worshipped strength above other physical attributes. If the Soviets were to defeat their American rivals in the overall medal count, the weight lifters would play an essential role. The U.S. had dominated the sport in the 1950s, but now the Russians thought they had the edge with Vlasov, who had just broken American Paul Anderson’s world record, leading the way. “He is a young man, very cultured, very well read,” Pravda boasted of the engineering student. “Vlasov is the best example of the harmonical physical and mental development of Soviet athletes.” That he might have been, but some Americans clucked disapprovingly, calling him a showoff, as he marched into the stadium holding the hammer and sickle stiffly with a single outstretched hand.
Correspondents who choked up at the sight of the American team now transformed themselves into human applause meters to compare crowd reactions. “I suppose I am prejudiced, but I did not think the Russians got half the applause that the crowd gave our contingent,” Maxwell surmised for his Chicago readers. Jesse Abramson, the track-and-field expert for the New York Herald Tribune, agreed: “To be sure, an American ear detected a far warmer greeting and more decibels of applause when the Stars and Stripes appeared in the arena behind the banner Stati Unit America than when the Hammer and Sickle arrived behind the standard Unione Repubbliche Sovietiche Socialiste.” Fitting the applause differential into a cold war context, an AP report noted that Italy had the largest Communist party in Western Europe, yet the greeting its people gave the Soviets was “polite—but nothing more.”
One hears what one wants to hear, as Pravda’s Alexei Dyakov and Vitali Petrusenko, stationed not far from their American colleagues, demonstrated in their description of the same scene. The greeting of the Soviet team was effusive, from their perspective, and laden with deeper meaning. “In the Italian clapping of hands we can hear not only the greeting of Soviet athletes but also the excitement for the last achievements of the Soviet Union in opening the cosmos.” (Only a week earlier, and three years after Sputnik, they had made another important breakthrough in space by launching into orbit a satellite carrying two dogs, a rat, four mice, and a jar of flies in a cabin designed for the future flight of man.) They even found a way to relate the ovation in Stadio Olimpico to the previous day’s welcoming letter from their leader back in Moscow. By their interpretation, the reception given the Soviets reflected “warm approval of the peace-loving politics of our government, which found such a bright expression in the greeting of Comrade Khrushchev to the Olympic youth.”
From the accounts of American observers, it was not the recent space menagerie or Khrushchev that observers were thinking about when the Soviets marched in, but the unexpected flair of their women athletes. The Western stereotype of the typical Russian woman was unflattering, and a Los Angeles Times correspondent repeated that image now by calling them “stalwart.” But most of his colleagues presented a decidedly different picture, lurching from the previous ridicule to outright leering. “Their girls looked like Parisian models in white silk dresses with pleated skirts and a most Parisian cut to their necklines,” reported Abramson. “Most obviously, the more muscular Amazons had been excused from the parade. Even Yves St. Laurent could not have masked the lines of the lady shot-putters from Russia.”
The Associated Press account took the theme even further: “There was a gasp of surprise when the Soviet girls came into the stadium. Shades of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev. Moscow had sent to Rome something that would not suffer comparison with New York’s Rockettes. The Russian gals: (1) Wore red pumps with pointed toes and needle heels two inches tall. (2) Wore billowing white skirts about knee length. (3) A neckline that was not exactly plunging but certainly poised on the diving board ready to jump. (4) They walked as though they had spent ten years of training in the Bolshoi Ballet, sort of floating through the air.”
Here was a Soviet variation of Ed Temple’s directive to his Tigerbelles at Tennessee State that he wanted “foxes, not oxes.” By some accounts, the Soviet transformation was in part in response to a plea from Temple’s track-and-field sidekick, Frances Kaszubski, the women’s team manager, who had once instructed her Russian counterpart, Zoya Romanova, to “send us dolls” when the Soviets first brought a team to the U.S. in 1959 for a dual track meet. For Temple and Kaszubski, the emphasis on appearance was part of a larger effort to gain respect for women athletes and lift them out of the old unfeminine stereotypes. For the Soviets, it seemed part of a concerted public relations offensive in the cold war. A. J. Liebling, always with a fresh take on things, saw it as another sign of the Westernization of the postwar world: “The Russian women were a great deal smarter-looking than they had been at Helsinki, and the men were more relaxed. When they marched in 1952, their faces were set; they had never before competed in the Games, and were not sure how they would do. Now they were confident and were having a good time…We are not getting to look more like the Russians. The Russians are getting to look more like us.”
Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam. Finally, as the bookend to the Greeks, here came the Italians, looking molto bello in their light blue jackets, white slacks, and white hats. The other delegations had quotas for how many could march, but the hosts entered in full force, nearly three hundred strong, and the roar for the home team was deafening. Livio Berruti, the fleet sprinter from Torino, felt overwhelmed by a spirit of equality and fraternity. As he marched around the stadium, warmed by the shimmering rays of the early evening sun, Berruti said later, it seemed as though all of Europe was walking with him, out of the shadows, away from the past.
6
HEAT
FRIDAY morning was infernally hot in Rome. It was already ninety-three degrees in the shade, where there was shade, by nine o’clock when teams lined up for time-trial road cycling, the first medal event of the Olympics. Leaving every two minutes from a standing start, four-man cycling squads headed out from Viale Oceano Pacifico near the Velodromo for the long ride up and back along Viale Cristoforo Colombo, three laps covering 100 kilometers, or 62.14 miles. Fittingly for the inaugural event, the home Italians were favored, followed by the Germans and Russians, who were moving up fast in the cycling world. The Americans, although not considered medal contenders, were better than many of the event’s three dozen teams; if all went smoothly, they could finish in the top third.
The prospect of that was uncertain. One of the U.S. cyclists, Bob Tetzlaff, weakened with inflamed tonsils, had received a shot of penicillin in Rome and was bedridden for most of the thirty-six hours before the race. No sooner had he and his teammates, Bill Freund, Michael Hiltner, and Wesley Chowen, reached the starting line than they discovered a flat tire on one of the bikes. They changed it quickly enough and were off chasing the Swiss and the Poles, who were at about their talent level.
Racing bikes of that era seem like ancient relics in retrospect. They were ordinary ten-speeds, far from the sophisticated twenty-speeds of the twenty-first century. Commonly made of steel, rather than a lighter frame, they weighed as much as twenty-two pounds—seven pounds more than models of later decades. The brakes were less subtle. If you wanted a responsive bike, you had to go with light tires, which produced more flats. And the seats were an uncomfortable leather. But the machine was virtually the same everywhere; the difference was in the endurance and skill of the rider.
The Danes were among the better teams; not up with the Italians, but competitive with Holland and Sweden in a tier just below. Earlier in the year, they had tied the East Germans at this same hundred klicks, and more recently Knud Enemark Jensen had won the individual Nordic champ
ionship. Jensen now was part of his country’s time-trial quartet, along with Jorgen B. Jorgensen, Vagn Bangsborg, and Niels Baunsof. With coach Preben Zerland Jensen and a photo-journalist from the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet trailing closely in the escort car, they set off into the coruscating morning swelter. A photograph capturing their start showed them wearing visors but no protection for the backs of their necks.
After a strong first lap, Jorgensen was overcome by sunstroke and was forced to drop out just as his team had started its second lap. Three of four cyclists are required to finish, so his teammates cycled on while Jorgensen, conscious but woozy, was taken by ambulance to a hospital in central Rome. The course layout along Cristoforo Colombo offered little shade, and by now the temperature on the road was well over a hundred degrees. As they reached a short rise in the course, Jensen and Bangsborg “felt stiffness in their legs,” according to the account of Lars Bogeskov, writing in the Danish newspaper Politiken. “Only Niels Baunsof felt strong at that point. He told the other two to get behind him and catch his draft. At a sharp curve near the turning point, a spectator shouted that the Danes were only ten seconds from a bronze medal.” With a strong final push, they might catch the Dutch, who were just ahead. They had reached a flat section of the course by then, and Baunsof continued to set the pace for his fatigued partners.
Five miles farther, Jensen shouted, “I’m dizzy!” but kept pedaling. Soon he slowed considerably and was about to tumble, his bike wobbling, when Baunsof grabbed his jersey and kept him upright. Bangsborg came up to steady him from the other side. The photographer in the escort car started snapping pictures, capturing the dramatic struggle of cyclist No. 127. Fearing the heat would claim a second victim and force the Danes from the race, Bangsborg reached over and sprayed Jensen with water. Only teammates could assist one another on the course; help from outside meant automatic elimination. For a moment, it appeared that Jensen had regained his equilibrium. Baunsof, still holding his jersey, asked whether Jensen was OK, and he nodded yes. But Jensen was never good with heat, his brother Paol would say later. He hated to go south, preferring the Scandinavian weather. Anything over eighty degrees, and he suffered. Seconds after Baunsof let go, Jensen fainted, his skull crashing hard into the burning asphalt. He was wearing a light sun cap, not a helmet. He had lost consciousness.
A quarter mile back, the team had passed an ambulance. The escort car now swerved around and sped for help. Minutes later, an emergency medical team lifted the fallen rider onto a gurney and slid it into the back of an ambulance. At that moment, a pack of cyclists from other teams rushed past, including the Americans. Their memories were nothing more than a flash of surprise, something wrong, then gone in an instant, their concentration returning to the struggle ahead. Bob Tetzlaff remembered seeing an ambulance and noticing that the Danish team had stopped at the side of the road. “They were being attended to. I thought at the time maybe they had touched wheels,” he said later. “We had no inkling what happened. There were three laps on the course, so we went by them only that once. For sure we weren’t going to catch them any other way.”
The ambulance took Jensen to a military tent near the finish line. Baunsof and Bangsborg rode behind, completing the race even though their team had been disqualified. Bangsborg was also dizzy, and vomited at the finish. Baunsof, distraught, kept riding until he reached the Olympic Village. Jensen never regained consciousness, and by three-thirty that afternoon he was dead. The wire services reported that he was at a hospital, but in fact he died inside the military tent, which did not have the equipment of a hospital and was overheated, more stifling than the outdoor sun. Prince Axel, the royal highness of Denmark and a member of the IOC, was on his way to the bedside when his countryman died.
Heatstroke seemed the apparent cause, but with the world watching, Italian officials realized the need for a medical inquest. In the cycling world that year, rumors had swirled about racers using amphetamines. Jensen was the first Olympic athlete in modern times to die on the same day he competed. Francisco Lazoro, of Portugal, collapsed during the 1912 marathon and died the next day. What happened to Jensen? The day’s grief was accompanied by a nagging unease, a sense that the tragedy was still unfolding. It was a most inauspicious way to start the Games.
AT A SUN-BAKED stadium near the village, at about the same time that Knud Enemark Jensen was keeling onto the asphalt on the other side of the city, the American and Soviet track-and-field teams held an unusual joint practice. When Gavriel Korobkov, coach of the Soviets, suggested that his athletes join their U.S. counterparts that day on the practice field, the Americans readily agreed. It was described as “a friendly gesture reciprocated with equal friendliness.” As with most dealings between the superpowers, precisely where collegiality stopped and angling for an edge began was hard to delineate. For decades a keen student of American methods and techniques, Korobkov was always eager for a closer look at the opposition, and the Americans, in turn, seemed to think that a sneak preview of their extraordinary talent might prove psychologically intimidating to the Russians before the official start of the track-and-field competition at Stadio Olimpico, which was still five days away.
Though weak from strep throat, Dave Sime left his sickbed and went to the combined practice along with his roommate, distance runner Jim Beatty. They were quite a pair, Sime too fatigued to undergo his usual regimen of sprints, and Beatty tenderly testing a sprained ligament in his left foot, realizing that the injury likely ruined his medal hopes. At the track, Sime approached the broad-jump area and renewed a discussion with Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. “We kind of bonded,” Sime said later. “He was very Westernized. Very American. Spoke English. Looked very American. Crew cut. And I said, ‘You know, we’d like to talk to you.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to talk to you.’” Ter-Ovanesyan, who had already had a conversation with Al Cantello, the javelin thrower, very quickly felt “a close relationship” with Sime. When the American suggested that they should leave the village and go out for dinner some night, he readily agreed.
Across the warm-up field, the world’s three best decathletes found themselves together in a gathering that defied political imperatives. By any name—Taiwan, Formosa, or the Republic of China—the Soviets refused to acknowledge C. K. Yang’s government, their hostility so strong that Russian correspondents wrote as though Taiwanese athletes were not in Rome and did not exist. Yet now here came Vasily Kuznetsov, the Soviet decathlete, with a hearty greeting for Yang, who had come to the practice with his friend and UCLA teammate, Rafer Johnson. “You are very good,” Kuznetsov said to Yang, giving him the universal sign of approval: thumbs-up. Johnson had brought a movie camera along to record the scene and handed it to a coach, Bud Winter. “I congratulate you on your record,” Kuznetsov said to Johnson, who had obliterated the world mark at the Olympic Trials. “Well, maybe you can improve on it,” Johnson replied graciously, as Winter recorded the scene.
But the balance of power had changed since Johnson and Kuznetsov last faced each other at the 1958 dual meet in Moscow. While the Russian snatched the world record briefly and was named the top European athlete of 1959, he came to Rome seeming overmatched by Johnson and Yang even if fully healthy, which he was not. Johnson respected Kuznetsov but now looked upon Yang as his prime competitor. Track experts had virtually awarded the gold medal to Johnson before they left for Rome, and Rafer himself had been quoted as saying that C.K. would finish second. Privately, he was “nowhere near as cocky as that statement suggests.” After working out together almost daily for three years, Johnson and Yang knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses intimately, as did Ducky Drake, the coach they shared. Drake, who had not been appointed to the U.S. coaching staff, was now in Rome as the official coach for the Taiwanese, but he showed no obvious partiality between his two great decathletes, devoting equal time and attention to each. It had come down to a two-man competition, he told them—one would win gold, the other silver.
As respected as Johnson was b
y then, his fame in the U.S. could not compare with Yang’s status in his island homeland. The frenzy with which the Taiwanese public greeted any news of C.K.’s Roman adventure goes a long way toward explaining his Olympic committee’s ultimate decision to stay in the competition even though that meant not marching under the Republic of China banner. In this case, athletic success trumped political defeat. The China Daily News was holding a contest offering bicycles, sewing machines, wristwatches, and fountain pens to entrants who were asked to guess where Yang would place and his scores for each of the ten decathlon events. Taiwan radio already had begun special afternoon and evening broadcasts focused almost entirely on Yang’s daily training regimen and his prospects as their only medal hope. C.K. started to feel the pressure. When he arrived in Rome, he thought his countrymen might be satisfied if he placed “fourth or sixth or something like that—then the expectations increased.”
With so many stars unlimbering in the practice area, scant attention was paid to Ed Temple and his Tigerbelles. The European press knew next to nothing about them, and American track experts went to Rome predicting that the Australians, led by their “Golden Girl,” Betty Cuthbert, who had sprinted to three golds at Melbourne, would dominate again, with the Russians and Germans also in the mix. Doubts about the Tigerbelles persisted. When Frances Kaszubski, the team manager, attended a meeting where officials set the heats for the women’s dashes, she could not convince her international colleagues of the accuracy of the world-class sprint times Wilma Rudolph had clocked in the months before the Olympics, so Rudolph was seeded lower than she should have been. Temple was upset when his friend Big K broke the news, realizing this meant that Skeeter’s early heats would have more fast runners, making her road to the final more difficult. His task in Rome was to get his women into peak running form without making the strain counterproductive.
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