At the heart of Temple’s sprinting philosophy was the seemingly contradictory yet commonsensical concept of training hard to run easy. As he explained later, “You see some runners, when they run a hundred, near the end they get tight…when they get to about eighty meters, you can see them saying, ‘Only got twenty yards to go, got to give it everything,’ and that is when they lose. What it takes to be a great sprinter, you’ve got to be relaxed but still moving fast…You have that confidence and even flow. And that’s something easy to say but hard to do.” To teach his Tigerbelles the sensibility of running in a relaxed state, he took them to a hill near the football field at Tennessee State. “I used to have them run up this hill real fast, pumping arms, and then come down the hill dropping the arms and being totally relaxed coming down. And I would tell them, ‘I want you to feel that same way coming down the stretch as you feel coming down that hill. Pump it and move forward going up that hill but feeling that same way relaxed as coming down that hill. Then you will know how it feels to be moving fast and relaxing.’”
In another drill, Temple emphasized moving the knees “up and out, up and out” as another way to develop relaxed movement. First the Tigerbelles would walk the drill slowly, then jog on the balls of their feet for fifteen minutes—always with the same motion of their knees—then start sprinting, but with their arms down to ease the tension from their shoulders. You couldn’t just talk relaxation, Temple believed, you had to practice it, over and over and over, following that same pattern of walking, jogging, sprinting, knees up and out, creating muscle memory. On Sunday mornings back at Tennessee State, he often took his sprinters into the school’s dance studio, where there were large mirrors on the walls, and had them study how their arms popped while they were running. If an arm rose above the nose, it was too high.
Wilma Rudolph sometimes broke that rule, but no one moved faster or with more relaxation once she got going. “Oh, Lord, that skinny little lady, at first we couldn’t understand how she could run so fast with her long legs and flailing arms,” recalled teammate Lucinda Williams. “Bless her heart, she could seem like the laziest person. We would have to stay on her case. We would beat her out of the starting blocks, but by twenty-five yards she’d done passed us.” Tall and fluid in full stride, Rudolph ran with a singular form, at once unorthodox and beautiful. She ran free and easy—as though she were nine years old, flying down the dirt roads of Clarksville, freed at last from the braces she wore during her recovery from childhood polio.
But few were watching Wilma run now. Most American sportswriters were looking elsewhere, their attention focused on the high-jump pit, where John Calvin Thomas was demonstrating how he would soar into history. No athlete, not even Rafer Johnson in the decathlon or Australia’s Herb Elliott in the metric mile, was regarded as more golden than Thomas as the Olympics began. A staff of six experts from Track & Field News, led by Cordner Nelson, the editor, and his brother, Bert Nelson, the publisher, unanimously picked Thomas to win. Sports Illustrated, in its detailed event-by-event assessment on the eve of the Games, wrote of the high jump: “Only question is second place. Thomas is incomparably the best…” In the newspaper tribe, Fred Russell’s assessment echoed conventional wisdom: “It may be improper to use the phrase best bet in amateur athletics, but among the U.S. entries in track and field, the best bet for a first place gold medal is John Thomas.”
In his room at Boston University’s Myles Standish dorm, Thomas kept a calendar with one date circled: September 1, 1960, the day of the high-jump final in Rome. He seemed to be aiming for that moment at least since 9:10 on the evening of January 31, 1959, midway through his freshman year, when he exploded into the record books at the Millrose Games in Madison Square Garden by becoming the first person ever to jump seven feet indoors. Jesse Abramson, covering the meet for the Herald Tribune, wrote that “in this space age” Thomas’s jump was “better than landing a man on the moon”—something that would not happen for another ten years. Track fans in the Garden that night sprang to their feet in a stirring standing ovation, but the least excited person in the arena seemed to be the young athlete himself. “To me it was just another jump,” Thomas explained later. “The size and importance of the meet wasn’t that much to me. I was just jumping. And I was just seventeen. What was big and enormous to spectators was really just new to me.”
The circled date on his calendar was uncharacteristic of Thomas, who was known for his deadpan personality. He would never get too excited, nothing seemed like a big deal to him, for better or worse. This steady attitude no doubt helped him recover from the trauma that came a few weeks after his record leap, when he was working on campus between semesters and got his left foot stuck in the crack between a rising elevator and an approaching floor. The injury, which likely would have been worse had he not been wearing foam-padded desert boots, sent him into Massachusetts Memorial Hospital for several operations over eight weeks. There were three severe tears in his toe joints, and so much tissue was ripped away that a few weeks after putting the leg in a cast, doctors decided to perform a skin graft, taking skin from his left thigh. During the recovery, the patient in the bed next to Thomas happened to be Herb Gallagher, athletic director at a nearby rival, Northeastern University, who marveled at his unflappable attitude. “I’ll overcome this,” Thomas told Gallagher. “It’s only a temporary setback.”
Within six months, Thomas was jumping again, and by midsummer 1960 he was better than ever. At the Olympic Trials at Palo Alto, he established a new outdoor world record of 7 feet 33/4 inches, a mark that reverberated around the world. There was nothing innovative about Thomas’s technique. He used the traditional straddle roll of that era—seven long strides, a shorter eighth, gather, kick, lift, relax, roll—approaching the bar from the left at a 37-degree angle. But he took full advantage of his lean, dexterous, six-foot-five frame and his uncommon ability to kick his lead right leg straight up into what was called a six o’clock position after takeoff. Not long after Thomas’s stunning performance at the Trials, the athletic department at Boston U. received a call from Moscow. An English-speaking correspondent from Sovietsky Sport wanted to know the secret of how this young black American could jump so high. Thomas talked to the writer for fifteen minutes but revealed nothing more than that he practiced a lot and had good coaching.
Now, at the joint practice in Rome, he had something more to show the Russians. As a trio of Soviet jumpers approached, all carrying cameras, Thomas was getting into position to make a try at the warm-up height of 6 feet 8 inches. With a silent upward nod of his head, he instructed a U.S. coach to move the bar to seven feet. He cleared the height casually, nonchalantly.
Zamechatelno! the Russians gasped in unison. Wonderful!
Thomas brushed himself off and quickly set himself to clear the height a second time, again with ease. “John is giving them a little psychological handicap to worry about,” Bud Winter said softly to a gaggle of American reporters standing nearby. If nothing else, the press corps bought into the gambit. A UPI account declared that “the Russian athletes left the sun-baked stadium sadder but wiser and more convinced than ever that this will be a Stars and Stripes Olympiad.” Shirley Povich made the high-jump pit drama the centerpiece of his “This Morning” column in the Washington Post, playing off the superpower space race. “The Americans put a man into space yesterday, not very high, only seven feet. But it was important because the Russians may have walked into a propaganda defeat five days before the battle would be joined in Olympic track and field,” he wrote. In getting such a close look at Thomas, Povich concluded, “the Russians learned of the futility of any attempt to close the gap in the high jump.”
SMALL VICTORIES, even if psychological or ephemeral, were always welcome in the cold war between the Soviets and Americans. Every day, in ways important and irrelevant, the relationship was defined by who had the perceived edge. While John Thomas was provoking whispers of zamechatelno at the practice field in Rome, another Bostonian,
John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, campaigned in Detroit, telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviets in military strength and scientific prowess despite “rosy assurances” to the contrary from his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon. “The missile lag looms larger and larger ahead,” Kennedy claimed, arguing that it would take a sharp increase in defense spending, as well as the vigor of a new generation, to close the perceived gap.
At least one American observer in Rome was now seized with a fear that the Soviets were also winning the propaganda war at the Olympics. This was a mysterious character named John V. Grombach, who went by the nickname Frenchy but preferred to be addressed as General Grombach. A 1924 West Point graduate from Louisiana, Grombach had boxed at the academy and fancied himself a world-class athletic figure and renaissance man, though he was also a first-class hustler. He had his fingers in boxing, as an official and promoter in New York state; in television, as a would-be producer who sought unsuccessfully to acquire TV rights to the Rome Games; in fencing, as a member of the sport’s international federation; in the modern pentathlon, as an adviser to the U.S. Olympic Committee; in the military, as a retired U.S. Army Reserve brigadier general; and in publishing, as the author of a perfunctory history of the Olympics, a book he persuaded the State Department to buy in bulk and distribute at embassies around the world in the year leading up to Rome.
At the same time, Frenchy was a spook. He had served in military intelligence during World War II and went on to run a secret intelligence branch within the State Department known as the Pond, which operated various business fronts in postwar Europe. In keeping with being a spy, he alternately exaggerated his activities and covered them up. He made many enemies within the shadowy world of American espionage, notably CIA chief Allen Dulles, and had a tendency to assume that those who opposed him were Communist sympathizers. He had a habit of leaking information to Senate and House investigators about people inside the government that he considered security risks.
By the time of the Rome Olympics, Grombach’s days as a government spy were over, his Pond long since having lost a power struggle with the Central Intelligence Agency, but he was still working various angles of intrigue as a private investigator and writer. He came to Rome with a writing gig as a columnist for the Rome Daily American, an English-language daily partially funded by the CIA, and took it as his mission to expose traitorous misdeeds at the highest levels of the International Olympic Committee. In his first column, appearing on this first full day of Olympic events under the aptly spookish sig “Olympic Lights & Shadows,” Grombach unleashed his fury at the IOC’s decision to force the anticommunist Republic of China to march under the name of Taiwan or Formosa at the Opening Ceremony the day before. “Unfortunately, this seems to fit the oft-repeated pattern of our abandonment of friends and allies and the U.S. taxpayer,” he wrote. “The Republic of China is recognized by forty-five nations including the U.S. and Italy. It is the ally and friend of the U.S. and has been financially supported as such, yet the IOC is allowed to bar its athletes from properly representing their country.”
Who to blame for this outrage? Grombach had no love lost for Avery Brundage, the president, who had ignored his efforts to gain the television rights, but his primary target was the IOC’s vice president, the Marquess of Exeter, the former Olympic hurdles champ who along with being a lord was also a lifelong conservative and Tory member of the British parliament. It was the marquess, Grombach noted, who “was the prime mover in favor of the USSR motion” to force the name change on the Republic of China. There had to be a nefarious reason for this, and Grombach went into investigative overdrive to sniff it out. First he spread a rumor that IOC leaders had struck a private deal—with the Soviets in on it as well—that Brundage could keep the presidency in 1960 if he would support the Marquess of Exeter for the post in 1964. Then, as Grombach recorded later, he came across “frequent and repeated rumors [in Rome] that the Marquess of Exeter, a very rich and powerful industrialist, was actively engaged and/or his companies were actively engaged in trade with Communist countries and specifically Red China” in the fields of “metals, electronics, and automotive parts.” Here was the sort of connection that met Frenchy’s conspiratorial imagination. He quickly made plans to stop in London on his way home in September, where he could hire a private investigator to compile a dossier on the British lord.
That night, his affinity for boxing took Grombach out to the glistening new Palazzo dello Sport for the first head-to-head cold war match in Rome between boxers from the U.S. and Soviet Union. It was American featherweight Nikos Spanakos versus Russia’s Boris Nikanorov.
Left alone in the dressing room before the match, Spanakos, a tough, smart collegiate boxer from Brooklyn, ruminated about the larger context of the competition. Thoughts about politics or geography are usually the furthest things from an athlete’s mind, but Spanakos could not shut them out. He thought about the cold war with the Soviets and how his boxing match against the Russian was an emblematic proxy battle. “I remember saying to myself, ‘You know, I’m the champion of America, and he’s the champion of Russia, and geographically that’s a lot larger piece of land, so he should be better,’” Spanakos recalled later. “And then I laughed at myself and said, ‘This is funny.’ One of the funny thoughts that came through my head to entertain myself.”
Spanakos got off to a fast start, and the boisterous Italian crowd started shouting “Ni-ko-las! Ni-ko-las!” Through the first two rounds, he was landing more punches, but the judges penalized him for blows below the belt. They were unintentional, by Spanakos’s account. He was five-three, and Nikanorov was five-nine. “I didn’t hit him below the belt, I was just weaving down there because he was tall and I was short,” he said later. Described by Red Smith as “a game, stumpy, busy little guy who fights from a knee-sprung crouch,” the American entered the third and final round thinking he might win. Italian boxing fans were a breed apart from observers at other venues: louder, rougher, more demonstrative, political, and fickle, capable of turning on an athlete or referee at a moment’s notice, full-throated choristers and piercing whistlers. They did not seem inclined to root for the Americans, but on this night they adopted little Ni-ko-las Spanakos and cheered him on. In a final flurry, both boxers received warnings for head butting, but Spanakos, the aggressor, could not land a knockout punch.
In a unanimous decision that surprised many writers up in the press section, Nikanorov was declared the winner. The Los Angeles Times said the decision was “loudly booed.” The United Press wire service account described a “mixture of cheers and boos.” In Pravda, the correspondent claimed that the “clever” Russian had “instantly underlined his mastery” and that his victory “was greeted with warm applause.” Spanakos was devastated by the defeat. He was the first American to lose to a Soviet, and he felt that he had let down his side in the proxy war. “I swallowed it reluctantly,” he said. “Like I was being ordered to swallow poison.”
7
QUICKER THAN THE EYE
NOT much had gone as planned for Lance Larson before he swam the 100-meter freestyle in Rome. To start with, the event was not his best, but he had failed to qualify in his preferred stroke, the butterfly, at the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials at Brennan Pools in Detroit, where the water was too cold and he tired in the final lap. Further, Jeff Farrell, who had burned up the 100 free all year, was supposed to be the American favorite, but he was hospitalized for an untimely emergency appendectomy six days before the Trials. In an unforgettable act of courage, Farrell bolted out of his recovery room at Henry Ford Hospital, declaring that he had to earn his Olympic slot like anyone else. Swimming through pain, a five-inch surgical scar covered in tape, he lifted the spirits of the entire U.S. squad by willing his way onto the relay team, but he narrowly lost a qualifying spot in the hundred, leaving Larson as America’s best hope for gold.
Soon after arriving in Rome, Larson ate s
ome unwashed fruit that gave him dysentery. He had felt sluggish already from fighting the flu before the team left New York, the same virus that had slowed sprinter Dave Sime and many others. Now he had dropped to 166 pounds, down from his normal 174. At practice, everything about the ornate Italian pool bothered him. He thought the water level was six inches too low, creating a wave that rolled off the side wall. No one wore goggles then, and the backwash irritated his eyes. Several swimmers complained that the pool should have had gutters at the ends to allow water to slop over, but officials at FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation, the world amateur swimming federation) brushed off the criticism, declaring the venue perfect. Anticipating a furious pace from the favored Australians, Larson tried quickening his stroke, but that threw off his breathing, which he could not get right until two days before the heats, when his college coach at Southern Cal, Peter Daland, not on the Olympic staff, was called in to help.
As a surfer who rode the waves at Huntington Beach, just outside Los Angeles, before he took up competitive swimming at El Monte High, Larson was the quintessential West Coast blond before it became a stereotype. He was the first of the great male swimmers to peroxide his hair, and in that small way helped shape the national imagination about the sun-worshipping Southern California youth culture of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. Lance Larson—even the name itself conjured up a Hollywood beach movie. He began using peroxide after worrying that his hair was turning greenish from pool chlorine. “It burned the hell out of my scalp,” he said later, but it was a price worth paying for cool white-streaked hair. Along with bleaching his top, Larson had another pre-race ritual that he went through on the eve of the 100-meter freestyle in Rome: a full body shave.
Rome 1960 Page 13