Too often in American sports broadcasts, Shanley asserted, commentators ignored events not directly related to the contest on the field “even when they would be of great interest to an audience.” His case in point was an anti-Castro rally at a recent New York Yankees baseball game that was not shown on camera and went unmentioned by the announcers. In contrast, Shanley wrote, Bud Palmer “demonstrated an intelligent awareness” that the Olympics represented more than just athletic games. “During the opening day parade of competitors, the cameras caught the delegation from Taiwan, with one member of the group carrying a banner proclaiming that the unit was participating ‘Under Protest’ because it had not been designated as representing China. Mr. Palmer noted and explained this significant aspect of the parade. In doing so, he was carrying out a comprehensive job of reporting that might serve as an example to some of his colleagues who cover sports for TV and radio in this country.”
Palmer’s memories of Rome would focus on the technological slowness and heaviness of it all. When he was covering an event, there were no studios to rerecord his play-by-play to make it smoother; it was done once, live, “and, pal, you better get it right because that’s your only chance.” There was no army of production assistants gathering information, setting up appointments, and shepherding Palmer around, just a single director who would meet him at an event. The cameras were ponderous hulks, weighing more than sixty pounds each, and the broadcast sites were strewn with cables as thick as boa constrictors.
But however archaic the CBS production was, it offered U.S. Olympic officials their best evidence for the Larson-versus-Devitt controversy. Max Ritter gathered up several colleagues and headed out to the airport production trailer certain that television tapes would prove him right. The “worthless” judges, he said, were nothing more than “timid unemployed pussy footers” who operated under the double standard of “America versus the World.” Red Smith, the astute columnist, tagged along with Ritter and his crew. “Over and over they ran the pictures,” he reported. “There, they would grunt as the racers turned to the finish.” Every time they watched, they sounded more certain that Larson had won. When the technicians were able to slow the tape, even the ever-dubious Smith climbed aboard, noting that “one…shot in particular seemed so conclusive that at least one unbiased viewer, who hadn’t been satisfied watching the monitor, was convinced Larson had won.”
“Gentlemen,” Ritter declared at the end of the viewing, “does anybody have any doubts?”
None did, though Smith could not resist one last skeptical barb. “Films almost never settle disputes like these,” he wrote. “Generally it turns out that at the crucial moment the cameraman was ogling a blonde.”
Even if the film was indisputable evidence, and the only blond on camera was the peroxided Larson, it mattered not at all. FINA turned down the American appeal.
THERE WERE no events that Sunday, August 28, a day of rest at the Rome Olympics. Going dark on what could have been a profitable viewer-rich weekend day was yet another indication of how little influence television then had in the world of sports. But just to be able to avoid the stifling heat was reason enough for athletes to be thankful for the early break. Temperatures soared into triple digits, and even though safety concerns had prompted Olympic officials to move some Saturday events out of the brutal midday hours, there had been complaints and difficulties at venues all across town. Hours before the Larson race, before the sun went down, a fan sitting on the sunnier side of the swimming pool had taken out a thermometer and registered a temperature of 108. The fencers at the Palazzo dei Congressi had suffered their own peculiar fate: the heat made them sweat so much that they short-circuited their electric jackets, creating chaos with the automatic touch scoring system.
Now at the Olympic Village, in the languid haze of Sunday morning, Denmark’s flag flew at half staff in memory of the fallen cyclist, Knud Enemark Jensen. His grief-stricken cycling teammates had withdrawn from the Olympic Games, but the story was far from over.
News broke that morning that Oluf Jorgensen, the trainer for the Danish cyclists, had told Danish government investigators that he had given Jensen and some other members of the team the drug Roniacol before the race. Roniacol, produced by a Swiss pharmaceutical company, was not an amphetamine but a drug that intensified blood circulation. Used primarily for elderly people who had circulation problems, it was a fast-acting vasodilator that among other side effects could cause flushing and decreased blood pressure. Cyclists might use it to keep their leg muscles at peak strength through a long race, but with that benefit came potential harm to the heart. “I got the prescription from my doctor,” Jorgensen told Boerge Jackson, sports editor of Akfuelt, a Danish government journal, after appearing at a government inquiry. But a doctor for the Danish team said that before the race he was so alarmed by the potentially dangerous combination of Roniacol and the heat of Rome that he had urged the cyclists not to use it. “I cannot figure that they should ignore the instructions I gave them so clearly,” Dr. Gunnar Stenas said.
The report linking Jensen’s death to a drug created sensational headlines in Denmark and around the world. “Danish sports have been dragged down into the mud by criminal cheaters in cycling,” lamented the Ekstra Bladet in Copenhagen. But it did not come as a total shock to other athletes. “There had been rumors about the Europeans; that was why they were so good, because they were taking stuff,” recalled Bob Tetzlaff, a member of the U.S. cycling team. His teammate Allen Bell said that doping for a competitive advantage was becoming part of the athletic discussion in 1960. “A doctor cyclist friend of mine said every drug has a side effect and that a lot do worse on them than off them. When I raced, I used to take cough syrup that had caffeine and sugar. Is that dope? It’s like someone drinking a few Cokes. The drug use was more common among the Europeans. It came down to they could be rich if they won.”
If some Danes were doped before the race, were they the only ones doing it? Not according to a later account from Yuri Vlasov, the Soviet heavyweight weight lifter who had strode onto the Olympic stage at the Opening Ceremony carrying the hammer and sickle in one outstretched hand. “With my own ears in 1959, I heard our senior cycling coach tell the sports minister Romanov that if we didn’t have [psychotropic amphetamines], we could expect no victories. Romanov replied that ‘the matter could be resolved positively.’ Our team received the first packet of tablets before the 1960 Games in Rome.”
Vlasov’s outing of the cyclists comes with its own context: some weight lifters themselves were said to be using another form of doping in Rome, trying out Dianabol, an anabolic steroid. Amphetamines were the primary concern when it came to drugs and athletes in that era. Steroids were being introduced but were still in an experimental stage where doctors, trainers, and athletes were unclear about the effects, positive or negative.
Suspicions of doping haunted Olympic history. In the modern Games, indications of doping had stretched back several decades, although Olympic officials had been slow to find effective means to limit the practice or monitor athletes. According to a detailed study of IOC minutes undertaken by Wolf Lyberg, former secretary-general of Sweden’s Olympic committee, the first mention of doping came during an IOC session in Warsaw in 1937. None other than Lord Burghley, the former world champion hurdler and future marquess, reported on “the practice, the means, and the effects of doping,” inspired by concerns that some competitors had used stimulants at the 1936 Berlin Games. In response to Lord Burghley’s report, the IOC at its annual session in 1958, in Cairo, adopted its first drug-related resolution: “The use of drugs or artificial stimulants of any kind cannot be too strongly denounced, and anyone receiving or administering dope or artificial stimulants should be excluded from participating in amateur sports or the Olympic Games.”
More than two decades later, in advance of Rome, Avery Brundage went public with his concerns. Medical advisers to the IOC, led by Dr. Ludwig Prokop of Austria, had been warning Brundage since the
1952 Helsinki Games that there had been “obvious signs of the reckless use of medicinal substances.” At an IOC session in San Francisco in February 1960, according to the official minutes, “Brundage called the attention of…members to the use being made of amphetamine sulphates (in pill form) in some sporting disciplines. He stressed the gravity of the problem. The president points out that a product called Amphetamine Sulfate (a so-called pep pill) was nothing else but doping.” In response to Brundage’s statement, the IOC considered conducting scientific research on the impact and testing of drugs but did not get around to it before the Rome Olympics.
After Knud Enemark Jensen died, his body was taken to the Instituto di Medicina Legale, where three Italian doctors conducted the autopsy. It is perhaps fitting, given the disputatious history of drugs and sports since then, that the Jensen case became shrouded in mystery and uncertainty once the autopsy began. Although the corpse was at the institute for four days before Jensen was embalmed and sent back to Copenhagen for burial, weeks and then months dragged on with no reports from the examiners. With increasing frustration, Brundage and his aides sent one missive after another to officials in Denmark and Rome seeking answers, fearing that they were being stonewalled. Finally, seven months after the fact, on March 25, 1961, an announcement came that defied expectations. The final autopsy report ruled that Jensen died from heatstroke. It said there were no signs of drugs in his system. The full autopsy report itself was not released, was never made public, and subsequently seemed to disappear from official files. Only a partial postmortem report, translated into Danish, was sent to the Danish Public Health Board and police officials in Copenhagen, who expressed satisfaction with the findings.
Decades later, Danish journalist Lars Bogeskov reexamined the case and tracked down one of the doctors, Alvaro Marchiori, who told him, “But of course I remember the investigation of the cyclist who died during the hundred-kilometer race. Because it was the first time at our institute that we had a doping case. And I remember we found traces of several things—among them amphetamine.”
The irony is that by then, indeed since the immediate aftermath of the fatality in Rome, the established Olympic history of the Jensen case ignored the Italian autopsy finding and accepted as fact that he died from doping. Marchiori’s apparent acknowledgment of this late in his life only reinforced conventional wisdom. Dr. Prokop, a key scientific voice for the IOC in that era, became convinced that Jensen’s death was drug related and began citing the case as the impetus for all anti-doping measures that were to follow. The IOC created a medical committee in 1961, issued the first specific list of banned substances (including amphetamines) in 1967, began testing athletes in 1968, and added anabolic steroids to the list in 1976. Imperfect and controversial as it was, a system evolved over the decades for testing Olympic athletes for banned substances they put into their bodies to gain a competitive edge—and that system all traces back to the moment in the hot August sun when Knud Enemark Jensen wobbled on his bike and collapsed to the cement on the Viale Cristoforo Colombo.
AMERICAN DIPLOMATS had been frustrated for days by the seeming propaganda coup the Soviets gained when newspapers around the world reported on the message of peace and friendship that Premier Khrushchev sent to the Olympians in Rome. Now, on the first weekend of the Games, they were upset again. President Eisenhower had written his own letter of greeting, at last, and the White House wanted it to be delivered by Norman C. Armitage, a former Olympic fencer who had carried the U.S. flag at the games in Helsinki and Melbourne. But where was Armitage? U.S. embassy officials in Rome desperately tried to answer that question, with no luck. “In spite of intense and continuous efforts through all available channels, Embassy has been unable so far to locate Armitage,” a cable to the State Department reported. It was decided finally to release Eisenhower’s statement through Brundage and the IOC.
The message began much like Comrade Khrushchev’s, with stilted wording that seemed like it had been translated from Latin. “It is with great pleasure that I, as president of the United States of America, take this occasion to express to the International Olympic Committee and men and women athletes from all parts of the Earth who will participate…the sincere and warm wishes of the people of the United States for a most outstanding and successful running of the Seventeenth Olympic Games at Rome, Italy…” With its emphasis on respect and peaceful competition, Eisenhower continued, the Olympics “will be an example worthy of admiration and emulation by a world weary with the tensions of international strife and misunderstanding.” He concluded with the expressed hope that those who witnessed the events in Rome would “return to their homelands renewed in the experience of fair play, richer in their understanding of other peoples, and with new and inspired insights into the full meaning of the brotherhood of man.”
Even though it was released on Sunday, a day of rest at the Olympics, the attention of the press was elsewhere: on the dispute over the Larson decision and the stunning news about Jensen, or looking ahead to the start of track-and-field events later in the week. The American press corps was more than ready to choke up with tears of pride for the Stars and Stripes and Rafer Johnson and his teammates as they marched in the parade of nations at the Opening Ceremony, but unlike their counterparts at Pravda and Izvestia, they felt no pressure to report on a boilerplate message from Ike. His letter was virtually ignored.
In the meantime, the Soviets staged another set-piece tableau to impress their Italian hosts and the people back home. On Sunday afternoon, just as the Eisenhower letter was being released, a busload of Russian Olympians ventured out to one of Rome’s working-class suburbs for an evening of eating, drinking, and politicking with comrades from the heavily Communist Italian labor movement. More than two hundred workers and their families welcomed the athletes in a small courtyard teeming with wine and food on picnic tables covered by red-and-white checkered tablecloths. An elderly workman from the neighborhood glass factory greeted the visitors. “Our countries are far apart, but now we are here together, and we can feel our closeness,” he said. There was no escaping the Khrushchev letter, not even here, at least as Pravda quoted an old glass blower: “Khrushchev sends warm regards to sportsmen who met in our city. Send to him, the leading fighter for peace, our warm working-class regards. We are wishing success to your sportsmen and to our brother Soviet workmen.”
By Pravda’s account, the full complement of Soviet athletes would have attended the proletarian courtyard festival if only there had been enough buses to carry them. One athlete not there was Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, who had accepted an invitation to leave the village and go out to eat with Dave Sime and his wife, Betty, at the Scoglio di Frisio, a restaurant on Via Merulana.
At dinner, the conversation slowly turned toward the future. Here’s the deal, Ter-Ovanesyan said. In the Soviet Union, he was taken care of; he had an apartment, a car, a teaching slot at the sports university. “And they give me a lot if I win a medal here,” he said.
Sime said he did not know what the United States could offer, except freedom, maybe set him up as a track star out in sunny California, out near the film stars and beautiful people and fast cars. But there was another American in Rome, Sime said, who wanted to talk to Igor. Sime did not mention who this was, but the implication was obvious. It would be a government operative trying to close a defection deal. In fact, Sime barely knew the operative—had met him only once, briefly, and thought he was “kind of slimy; I wouldn’t trust that sonofabitch as far as I could throw him”—reservations that he would not pass along to Ter-Ovanesyan. It was a CIA agent who called himself by the fictitious name Mr. Wolf. In an earlier encounter in Rome, Mr. Wolf had urged Sime to put pressure on Ter-Ovanesyan and arrange a meeting.
During their dinner at the Roman restaurant, Ter-Ovanesyan agreed to talk to the other American, but only on one condition: that Sime and his wife were also there. He was frightened, he would say later, but found it all “very interesting.”
The courtshi
p of Igor was a small scene in the cold war drama unfolding in Rome. While the Soviets presented a public image as messengers of brotherhood and peace, when it came to the athletic competition they seized every opportunity to try to rattle the Americans with psychological gamesmanship. That weekend, as the track-and-field events appeared on the horizon, a Soviet athletic planning official, Grigori Kukushkin, told the Western news agency UPI that the Americans were superior in many events only because they had “so many Negroes on the team.”
This was not, in itself, an unusual notion. The black press in the U.S. had been pounding away at the same argument. The Cleveland Call & Post, in its pre-Olympic issue, listed all the black stars on the American team—John Thomas, Charles Dumas, Rafer Johnson, Ray Norton, Les Carney, Ralph Boston, Lee Calhoun, Hayes Jones, Willie May, Wilma Rudolph, Barbara Jones, Lucinda Williams, Joe Faust [not quite; he was a white high jumper], Oscar Robertson, Walt Bellamy, and Bob Boozer—and concluded: “Without doubt, but for the Negro athlete and his outstanding performances, this nation would have little or no chance in the games to be presented before the eyes of the world.”
But any statement related to race was sensitive in the context of the Olympics and the cold war. As the Eisenhower administration tried to make the argument for Western values around the world, it was confronted by the hypocrisy of race relations in the United States. “The central focus of foreign nations on American racial issues centered on the plight of African Americans,” a State Department report noted that summer. “Awareness of progress based upon successful desegregation was increasing, but high-profile incidents of racial strife and struggle overshadowed reports of progress. The emotional impact, coupled with sensationalistic press accounts, continued to dominate international discussions of race. The issue weakens the U.S.’s moral position as champion of freedom and democracy and reinforces doubts about the nation’s interest in the welfare of others, particularly people of color.”
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