From neck to shin, the process took about an hour and required clippers, an electric shaver, and finally a razor blade as he scraped closer to bare skin. Body shaving was still relatively new then for swimmers, a technique passed along from the Australians, two of whom were his teammates at USC. The conventional wisdom was that removal of hair made you swim faster, but that is not why Larson shaved. “It would rough up the skin; you had more feeling in the water when you were shaved,” he explained later. “In my thinking, it was not the drag of hair through the water, it was the muscle sensation from shaving. You had a better feel for how much effort to put out. And it was exhilarating.”
Larson was all nerves, far from exhilarated, in the minutes before the 100-meter final, even though he had the best times in the qualifying heats the day before and knew that one of the favorites, Jon Henricks of Australia, the defending Olympic champion, had been eliminated in the semifinals, another athlete slowed by intestinal problems. “There was a lot of tension for me. I was sort of like zoned out. The level of competition, the excitement, just made me very nervous,” Larson recalled. “I knew this was it. The big race. We had to warm up and then put our sweats back on. The weather was so hot—even though it was night.”
More than ten thousand fans filled the outdoor stands at Rome’s new aquatic center, the Stadio del Nuoto, on this first Saturday evening of the Olympics, August 27. They had come for the first showdown of men’s swimming between the Yanks and the Aussies, who had dominated four years earlier at Melbourne. Watching from the press section was Gian Paolo Ormezzano, the young Italian journalist who had been saved by the Boy Scouts on his drive down to Rome. Now he was covering his first event at his first Olympics, and his writing was as abundant and evocative as the setting:
“Never have so many people gathered around a swimming pool as on that evening, still sultry with the heat of the afternoon. A magic evening, the swimming pool sandwiched between two walls of spectators…stacked as high as Tamburlaine’s barbarians once stacked so the king, climbing on the hill formed by their bodies, could look into the distance.” After his reference to the mythical Scythian conqueror, Ormezzano plunged delightfully deeper into metaphorical waters, first describing the scene as a pagan cult. “The cult of the new man who is making the water his element, every bit as much as the Earth. And now there is a religious silence. Here come the swimmers from another world, those competing in the final of the 100-metre freestyle. Here’s Larson, that great ham actor, as bald as Yul Brynner [not quite], Larson who adjusts the laces of his costume a hundred thousand times. Here’s Devitt, as grim as Boris Karloff and as huge and fierce as Lon Chaney.”
Devitt was John Devitt of Australia, silver medalist in Melbourne, second fastest in the Rome heats, considered Larson’s toughest competition, along with Brazil’s Manuel dos Santos.
THEY START at 9:10 p.m. A hundred meters, all out, down and back in less than a minute.
“Who is that madman in Lane 6 ahead of everyone else?” Ormezzano wonders. “It’s dos Santos, who jerks through the water, moving forward at a slant, as magnificently as a mad hatter.”
By the turn, Larson and Devitt catch him.
Larson will remember nothing about the first fifty meters.
“I remember, coming off the turn, I told myself to keep my mouth shut, not to take a breath, or I’d get a mouthful from the wave. I was now thinking straight.”
On the home stretch, Ormezzano sees that “Devitt is annihilating the water; if they used a dynamometer we’d find that he’s exerting a phenomenal force, wasted, to some extent. Larson, with powerful, priestlike strokes, is still by his side.”
Dos Santos exerts himself one last time, then starts to fade.
Devitt pulls into the lead by a foot.
At the seventy-five-meter mark, Larson sees a shadow to his left, slightly ahead, and says to himself, “When are you going to start moving?” And he starts moving.
Twenty meters out, Devitt “is now a poor Christ, his arms flaying with frenzy,” Ormezzano writes.
Devitt is in Lane 3. Larson is next to him in Lane 4. The water becomes frothy. Larson worries that he can’t see and that his stroke is off. They are straining furiously to the finish, side by side. Larson pulls so hard that Abramson of the New York Herald Tribune thinks he might drive right through the wall.
IN THAT ERA, before the introduction of automatic touch pads at the finish wall, competitive swimmers were taught to finish with a big splash. Larson glided the last foot or so, his arm outstretched, and touched underwater, while Devitt made the splash. Or as Ormezzano, with his flourish, described the finish: “As calm as a satiated Roman, Larson slams his hand on the edge of the pool, while Devitt strikes the mosaic furiously, tearing his flesh.”
By the account of Arthur Daley in the New York Times, they “finished no further apart than the width of a flattened sardine.” But Larson was certain that he touched at least six inches ahead. There were three timers leaning over his lane, and three leaning over Devitt’s, and from their reaction he believed he had won. So did most people in and around the pool. Photographers rushed over to snap his picture.
“At the end of the race, I thought I was second,” Devitt said later, “so I congratulated Lance Larson, climbed out of the pool, and tried not to think about it.”
“It all happened so fast,” Larson remembered. “I won the race. I threw up my arms and was congratulated by all the other swimmers. I took a victory lap, swam down to the other end and back [a lazy backstroke down and a happy butterfly back], and finally got out of the pool. I was drying off. Guys were running around—and an American official came up to me and said there was a problem.”
The three officials hovering over Larson in Lane 4 clocked his time at 55.0, 55.1, and 55.1. According to the rules, if two of the times agree, that is the accepted time. So by the timers, Larson swam the 100 meters in 55.1 seconds.
The three timers over Devitt in Lane 3 clocked his time at 55.2, 55.2, and 55.2. No doubt in that case—the Omega watches showed he swam the 100 meters in 55.2 seconds, one-tenth of a second slower than Larson. Backing up those times, a contraption known as the three-tape finish recorder also listed Larson as the winner; the operator of the device had already congratulated U.S. officials.
So what was the problem? The rules for Olympic competitions were set by the international federations for each event, in this case the Fédération Internationale de Natation, and FINA competitions were decided not by timers or mechanical devices but by judges. While the timers were stationed behind the finish line, leaning over the end wall to observe the finish from a virtually vertical angle, the judges were stationed at either side of the pool, farther away, focusing on the finish from a horizontal angle. There were twenty-four judges in all, twelve on each side seated on four rows of bleachers. Of that group, three were assigned to study each of the eight finishes, so there were three first-place judges, three second-place judges, and on down to three eighth-place judges.
When their results for the hundred were compiled, two of the three first-place judges ruled that Devitt in Lane 3 finished first. One of the first-place judges said that Larson in Lane 4 finished first.
But the second-place judges came up with a different reading. Two of the second-place judges determined that Devitt in Lane 3 finished second, while one of the second-place judges said that Larson finished second.
Of those six judges, then, three had Devitt finishing first, three second; and three had Larson finishing first, three second. But after examining the judging results, the chief judge, Hans Runströmmer of Germany, who was not among the twenty-four judges but was standing several yards from the finish line when the race ended, declared Devitt the winner.
The results were posted on the big electronic scoreboard for the crowd to see: 1—Devitt, 2—Larson, 3—dos Santos. The posted times for Devitt and Larson were identical, 55.2.
Larson was shattered. How could they post his time at 55.2 when the timers had him at
55.1—and one timer even had him at 55 flat? It was a matter of illogical logic. Officials could not give him a better time than Devitt if they had declared Devitt the winner.
They rushed the awards ceremony. Devitt was in a daze as he walked over to the victory pedestal. He shook hands warmly with Larson, who had to stand one rung down from Devitt and listen to “God Save the Queen” as the flags were raised. Although he was praised for his good sportsmanship, a photograph caught Larson with a look of disbelief. “I was not feeling so good,” he said later. “I felt sick to my stomach, like somebody had just told me my family was wiped out on the freeway.”
R. Max Ritter, the U.S. representative on FINA, was equally distraught. Ritter, then seventy-four, was the grand old man of international swimming. A two-time Olympian himself in 1908 and 1912, he was the only remaining founding father of FINA, one of eight men who had established the group and its rules. Now he was confused by his federation’s ruling in the first event in Rome. “When I heard the result announced over the loudspeaker, I immediately rushed to the judges’ table unbelievingly, as the timers and the finish recorder had clearly indicated first place for Larson,” Ritter recalled later. “I wanted to see the judges’ cards myself but found that these had been impounded by the FINA secretary and my access to them had been barred.”
Ritter demanded to see the FINA secretary, Bertyl Salfors of Sweden, but was told that he was busy with the medals ceremony. Finally, when the ceremony ended, Ritter was granted access to the judges’ cards. First they showed him only the first-place cards, which had two votes for Devitt, one for Larson. “I demanded to see the judges’ cards for second. Most reluctantly, the chief judge placed those cards on the table, which revealed two votes for Devitt for second and one for Larson as second. When I pointed out to the chief judge that this indicated a tie—and that under the rules he would have to submit this tie to a referee, he hesitated and consulted with the FINA secretary, and came back and said that as chief judge he had a vote, and he voted for Devitt; therefore it was not a tie but a clear majority for Devitt.”
Ritter, who had helped write the rules, knew of nothing in the rule book that gave Chief Judge Runströmmer a vote. In fact, Ritter had been the chief judge himself at the 1948 Olympics in London and the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki and had never voted.
But the gold medal was already hanging around John Devitt’s neck. In the press section, Abramson typed out his opening paragraph for readers in New York: “The hand that is supposed to be quicker than the eye gave the Olympic 100-meter freestyle swimming title to blond Lance Larson of the U.S., but he did not receive the gold medal in the first rhubarb of the Rome Olympics…”
Disappointed American officials decided they would have to regroup and plan an appeal. Larson was still feeling empty when he left the pool area and encountered Peter Daland, his college coach. Daland talked tough but had a soft heart. Now he put his arm around the young swimmer and offered the consoling words of a coach. “You shouldn’t have made it so close,” he said.
WHEN U.S. officials began preparing their appeal of the swimming decision, they turned first to the Olympic studios of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which amounted to a large trailer stationed out at Ciampino Airport. In a later era, the dramatic finish between Larson and Devitt would have been shown over and over again in super-slow-motion replay to the point where millions of viewers would have become judges. But in 1960, not only was there no replay, there was no live television coverage of the Olympics in the United States. The fact that CBS had been able to show the race on its late-night Olympics broadcast hours after the fact, between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty that night, was considered in itself a technological wonder. This was still the dawn of the satellite age. By coincidence, an experimental U.S. communications satellite known as Echo I had just been launched into Earth orbit that month and passed over Rome in the evening sky so low and large that it was visible to the eye. But Echo I could only passively reflect radio waves back to Earth; the days of satellites beaming live transmissions from halfway around the world were coming but not quite there. Still, the fact that the Olympics were on television at all, even if delayed, was a breakthrough. These were the first Summer Olympics where broadcast rights were sold commercially and events were televised daily back in the States.
Avery Brundage and the International Olympic Committee had discussed the issue of selling commercial rights since before the Melbourne Games, but they had been so slow and uncertain in handling the issue that by 1960 they had essentially lost control. For the Rome coverage, the Organizing Committee of the XVII Olympiad, run by Italians, not the IOC, made separate deals with CBS, Eurovision, and the Japanese network NHK. Only after endless begging and cajoling was the IOC able to muster a 5 percent cut of the deals. Although Brundage and his cohorts traveled first class and behaved like nobility, which many of them were, in fact, the IOC itself was always haggling for money, like cash-poor upper-class heirs surviving in a threadbare lordly mansion.
The contract with CBS News (there was no CBS Sports then) was negotiated for the Italian organizers through an American ad agency, the Gardner Advertising Corporation, and signed in June 1959 in New York. According to the contract, the base price for exclusive American rights was $420,000, with options for further coverage that lifted the total package to $600,000. At the time, this was thought to be a considerable sum for an athletic event staged on the other side of the Atlantic. In the deal, the Italians said CBS could broadcast up to twenty hours of programming from August 25 to September 11, which averaged about an hour and fifteen minutes per day. The network could cover any event where cameras were stationed (most of the cameras were run by the Italian broadcasting network, RAI) with one exception: it could not show the four-hour opera staged at the Baths of Caracalla.
For its Olympic coverage, CBS News assembled a special production, reporting, and announcing crew totaling about fifty people, most working from the home office in New York. The small team on the scene in Rome was led by executive producer Peter Molnar and three on-air correspondents: Bud Palmer, a former pro basketball player for the New York Knickerbockers who had a distinctive, electric-smooth announcing voice; Bob Richards, known as the “Vaulting Vicar,” who was both a past Olympian gold medalist pole vaulter and an ordained minister in Long Beach, California; and Gil Stratton, the CBS sports director at KNXT in Los Angeles. The studio host, stationed in New York, was Jim McKay, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter who had moved to Manhattan to host a daytime television drama called The Verdict Is Yours, which featured fictitious cases but real defense lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, with McKay as the courthouse reporter host.
Over ensuing decades, McKay would become the face and voice of the Olympics, but this was his first, and he wasn’t even there.
After deciding each morning which events to emphasize, a task made harder by their lack of control of most cameras, Molnar and his production crew in Rome mixed microwave feeds of action from various Olympic venues with play-by-play and analysis from the three American commentators. They had three videotape editing machines and film kinescopes in the trailer to put together packages that were sent back to New York along with raw footage of late-breaking events that could not be edited in time. The job was at once technically complicated (they needed a converter to transpose the Italian picture, painted at 625 lines a second, into the standard U.S. picture of 525 lines), and stunningly archaic.
How did the tapes get to New York? They were sent by commercial jet on regularly scheduled transatlantic Alitalia Airlines flights from Ciampino to Idlewild and from there relayed to McKay’s crew at a studio at Grand Central Station. The process was as reliable as most air service, which is to say uncertain, depending on such variables as air traffic control, summer thunderstorms, and headwinds. The average flight took nine and a half hours, but Rome’s time zone was five hours ahead of New York, a difference that served to CBS’s great advantage. If all went right, it was possible for a tape f
rom an event in the morning to make one of the evening shows, occasionally in the prime-time 8:30-to-9:00 time slot but more often on a fifteen-minute or half-hour wrap-up before midnight.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, television coverage of the Olympics would become such a vast enterprise that the NBC network deployed an army of more than three thousand technicians, producers, directors, researchers, announcers, and reporters to cover the Games. With that in mind, consider Jim McKay’s description of what it was like when it all began, after he left his day job at The Verdict Is Yours and headed over to the CBS studio to bring viewers the 1960 Rome Olympics.
“What would happen is that I was in New York, and I would be in the tape room waiting for tapes to come in from Rome, and in those days the baggage compartments on airplanes were not heated, and things would freeze,” McKay recalled. “I can remember sometimes holding the tape against my body to get body heat to loosen things up. I would stand there, and it was a paste-and-scissors deal. Literally it was razor blades to edit. And I would write my own stuff to go along with it. I did just about all that stuff myself. We didn’t have writers. To get information on an athlete, I would go to the Encyclopedia Britannica or that sort of thing. There wasn’t this stream of information that people are inundated with nowadays. The room I was in was next to the announcer studio, with technical equipment and fairly dim light. And I would stand at the counter and write. The only time I sat down was when I went on the air. I was right in there with the machines.”
Critics offered mixed reviews, as usual. John Crosby, whose column ran in the Boston Globe, complained that CBS devoted airtime to the “boring” sports of swimming and cycling in the first days and added that he was “not altogether happy about Jim McKay’s commentaries, which have a sort of gee-whiz boyishness to them that gets on the nerves and are quite foreign to the CBS tradition of cool professionalism.” But in the Baltimore Sun, Donald Kirkley called the broadcasts “efficient, effective, and consistently interesting.” The Olympics were being handled like a political convention, with “skill and good judgment,” Kirkley wrote, saying of McKay: “Quietly, with occasional touches of humor, and engagingly, Mr. McKay is doing very well with his biggest assignment to date.” In the New York Times, John P. Shanley called McKay a “capable” anchorman and had special praise for Bud Palmer’s performance at the Stadio Olimpico during the Opening Ceremony.
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