Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  INGRID KRAEMER had also emerged from the rubble of the old war. She was not yet two years old in February 1945, when much of Dresden was destroyed by Allied firebombing. In a massive three-day attack, wave after wave of Avro Lancasters unloaded their incendiary bombs on the civilian population, killing tens of thousands of people and setting the city ablaze in one inescapable ball of fire, an urban hell immortalized by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kraemer’s suburb of Kleinzschachwitz was largely spared, but the film factory where her father worked was leveled. Her earliest memory was going downtown with her mom to pick up her father and walking through “the huge heaps of rubble and debris in the destroyed city.” She saw and felt the aftereffects of the firebombing the rest of her childhood. One of her young friends had gray hair before they entered kindergarten. Ingrid herself was haunted by a persistent nightmare in which she was being chased by airplanes, and no matter how fast she ran, she could not escape. For many years after the war, she was so afraid that she slept in her mother’s bed. Now, fifteen years after the bombs fell, she had risen to world stardom—out of the fire, into the water.

  After winning gold in springboard, her suite at the Olympic Village quickly came to resemble a florist shop, the bathroom so filled with bouquets that she and roommate Gabriele Schoepe could no longer take a bath or shower. A proud German pastry chef at the village cafeteria honored her victory with a special cake soaked in rum (a rich dessert that Ingrid and Gabriele ate on the sly, late at night in their room, away from the watchful eye of trainer Elveline Sibinski, who disliked both the alcohol and the calories). When Ingrid left the village to perform, just the sight of her rounding a corner at the Stadio del Nuoto provoked spontaneous applause from the grandstands. Television, in its Olympic infancy, had not yet discovered the appeal of young female gymnasts—that phenomenon was still a decade away—but in some sense Ingrid Kraemer, flying so gracefully through the air, was a bathing-suited precursor to the agile tumblers.

  Not all divers participated in both springboard and the 10-meter platform event, but it had become accepted in the diving community that a gold medal winner in springboard came into platform with a decided edge among the judges, almost like a boxing champ who had to be knocked out or outpointed decisively to lose a crown. Whether that happened on the afternoon of August 30 was open to debate—as it often is when the winner is determined by subjective judges rather than objective statistical measurements. When the results were in, Kraemer had won, and members of the United States Olympic team left the swimming arena feeling once again that the world had unfairly turned against them, a sour feeling that not even gold medal victories that same day by Carolyn Schuler in the butterfly and Bill Mulliken in the breaststroke could fully erase.

  Unlike the springboard competition, where Kraemer seized an early lead and extended it into an insurmountable point spread, in platform diving she held a razor-thin margin over Pope going into their final dives. Kraemer went first, taking the slow-joe, 29-second ride up the glass-enclosed elevator to the diving tower, pausing to hear a last-second instruction shouted up from her coach, letting her blue-green bathrobe float all the way down to the ground floor “like a parachute,” stepping to the edge of the tower, turning her back to the water, visualizing every movement in her mind’s eye, finding her final foothold, and springing back, whooshing down with two and a half somersaults in 2.1 seconds, and flitting with a quiet snap into the blue pool.

  Pope’s final effort matched Kraemer’s in style, though her legs slapped the water at entry, creating more of a splash. Her dive in any case was ruled slightly less difficult than Kraemer’s and brought in fewer points, leaving Kraemer the winner again. The U.S. diving coach, Sammy Lee, was utterly frustrated by that point. Lee, a former Olympic champion who had won platform gold medals in 1948 and 1952 (and was the first Asian-American gold medalist), felt the judges had oversold Kraemer on her last dive, just as they had under-sold Pope on her double-twisting one-and-a-half somersault. Four of the seven judges were from Eastern bloc countries, and Lee believed they were biased against his divers. Horst Gorlitz, a refugee from East Germany who was in Rome as an Italian coach, said the judges were not only biased but ignorant. “The judges don’t even know the sport,” he said. Paul Zimmerman, covering the event for the Los Angeles Times, talked to a British coach who agreed. “Most of the toughest dives they had to judge are done only in the West, and the judges don’t even know what they are seeing when they saw them.”

  Those frustrations were also shared by American fans in the stadium, who booed, catcalled, and whistled on several occasions when good dives were downgraded. Unlike the springboard, where Pope accepted that she had been beaten, this time she felt that the gold had been taken from her unfairly. “I believed that platform really belonged to me before, during, and after. I have all the films to prove it,” she said later.

  Was it really another proxy battle in the cold war? Perhaps, but with an unusual twist. When Kraemer was competing to make the unified team, she felt that the West German press was “very unfriendly” to her; at least one journalist, by her account, cursed her because of politics. But now the West Germans were embracing her as a German first, one of their own. The Western newspapers covered her events with obvious national pride, as though there were no separation between East and West. Accounts in Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung raised no questions about the judging and described the final dives in a way that left no doubt that Kraemer had again outperformed her competition. German fans, who dominated the Stadio del Nuoto audience during her events, cheered long and loud for her every effort. Yet the warmth the West Germans showed Kraemer infuriated the East Germans, who thought the other side was trying to steal her show and diminish the ideological implications of her triumph. Kraemer’s victory was no accident, East Germany’s Neues Deutschland proclaimed. Rather, she owed her success to her “joyful life in the socialism of the German Democratic Republic.” The paper also complained that for all the copy Kraemer got in the Western press, it was never mentioned that her father was an official in the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the Socialist Unity Party) and that the young diver herself was a member of the socialist mass youth organization.

  The behavior of the West German fans seemed even more irritating to East German observers. “Young people…from Bonn unfolded the flag of the Bonn unpeaceful government when Ingrid’s triumph had become clear,” Neues Deutschland complained. “They wanted to pretend to the Romans and all the guests that this woman came from the Adenauer state. But people there know that Ingrid comes from Dresden and was raised in the German Democratic Republic. She stars in Rome under the flag of the overall German team and yet she remains for everyone the Ingrid from the GDR.” Cease and desist, the East German paper demanded. “Roll in your flags, renounce the telegrams of your politicians, don’t disturb the Olympic peace in Rome.”

  9

  TRACK & FIELD NEWS

  RIDING a streetcar from the YMCA hotel in central Rome out to the Stadio Olimpico, Cordner Nelson was worried about pickpockets, so he stuffed his wallet in his track bag and squeezed the bag tightly at his feet. Nelson was accompanied by his wife, three teenage daughters, and younger brother Bert early on the Wednesday morning of August 31—a moment the family had been anticipating for four years. At nine o’clock, with the staging of the first heats in the men’s 100-meter dash, plus preliminary rounds in the women’s high jump and men’s shot put, the track-and-field competition at the 1960 Olympics would begin. Citius, altius, fortius. Here were the events at the heart of the games: the running, jumping, and throwing competitions that were called the “queen of athletics” by the Russians and meant at least that much to the Nelsons of Southern California, for whom track and field was work and play, if not religion.

  Cord, as editor of Track & Field News, and Bert, as publisher, had devoted their lives to the sport for nearly three decades, since their father took them to the 1932 Olympic Games in L
os Angeles for Cord’s fourteenth birthday. Months before that event, Cord began jotting down times and distances, compiling note cards on various athletes who would come to L.A. to compete. For the rest of his days he would remember the long ride into the city from his small hometown out near Riverside, California, the roaring crowds at the sun-splashed Memorial Coliseum, the electric tension of the 200-meter dash. The scene thrilled him and set him on a path that brought him to Rome as a walking encyclopedia of track-and-field statistics. His magazine office, an eight-by-twelve room in the basement of his home in Stockton, was so stuffed with filing cabinets—five against each wall—that he could barely move, but there was very little down there that he didn’t also carry in his head. Bert was the same way, having never witnessed a track meet that he didn’t enjoy. “Watching the games is an all-day job for a nut,” he explained before leaving for Rome.

  When the Nelsons reached the stadium that morning, the brothers sat with the rest of the family and nearly two hundred other track nuts who had signed up for the special T&FN Olympic tour. Cord made a point of staying away from the press section. He might have been one of the world’s leading track authorities, but he was too emotionally attached to maintain a journalist’s remove. That lesson was brought home to him at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki when he hollered at a U.S. steeplechase runner to slow down before burning out too quickly, an impulsive act that shattered the no-cheering rule in the press box and drew disapproving looks from his colleagues. As Cord and his brood settled into their seats, they began discussing the Nelson Competition, a prefiguring of the fantasy leagues that would preoccupy sports fans in baseball and football many decades later. From depth charts listing the performances of the top fifty athletes in an event, each family member drafted a roster of projected medal winners. A few outsiders joined this speculative competition, including the inimitable McWhirter twins from England, Ross and Norris, authors of the Guinness Book of Records and track statisticians on the side.

  The media scene in Rome provided barely a hint of what was to come in future Olympics. These were the first commercially televised Summer Games, but studio host Jim McKay was back in the CBS editing room in New York banging out scripts on his little portable typewriter just like anyone else, not yet a household name. Print still ruled, with sports editors and big-city columnists ranking at the top of the press hierarchy. Most of the tribe arrived in Rome after their own grand tours of Europe. Cord Nelson and his family sailed over on the SS Rotterdam. Red Smith ventured across France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, driving through the Alps and down into Italy in a Peugeot sedan that Herald Trib readers would come to know as “Little Becky Trueheart.” Fred Russell sent pictures back to the Nashville Banner of him posing as a French boulevardier, a Spanish bullfighter, and a Swiss yodeler. Art Rosenbaum, sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, led a monthlong tour of wealthy lawyers and doctors.

  Shirley Povich of the Washington Post brought along his wife, Ethyl, and his own aide-de-camp, St. Albans prep school sophomore Donald Graham, son of Katharine Graham and the newspaper’s publisher, Philip Graham, who had promised each of his children “one big treat for the summer.” While sister Lally, fascinated by politics, accompanied their father to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where the elder Graham played a behind-the-scenes role in getting Lyndon Johnson on the ticket with JFK, Don, who loved sports, came down to Rome after spending six weeks at a boarding school in Switzerland learning French and German. “As a fifteen-year-old sports fan, I was in heaven,” he said later. Along with fetching whatever Povich needed, his job was to take notes at events that his boss couldn’t make.

  Officially accredited by the Italian organizers and wearing a press badge that could get him into any venue, young Graham spent the first several days at the Stadio del Nuoto (catching a close-hand look at Lance Larson the day after his loss, when he seemed fully composed again), then moved over to the Stadio Olimpico for the start of track and field. When he arrived that first morning, he was surprised to see “lots and lots of empty seats” in the press section. There were 1,239 credentialed journalists in Rome and places for all of them inside the Stadio Olimpico, either at press tables or reserved seats, but many never showed up after the Opening Ceremony, and those who did generally stayed away until the final of an event.

  It was a movable feast of observing, writing, eating, drinking, and joking among the U.S. sportswriters, who tended to roam in a pack from event to event, though each writer had his own inimitable style. Red Smith was the acknowledged wit and wordsmith, “a bottomless well of sprightly comment” who “has been all over this city trying to find some Romulus-Remus wolf milk,” noted Fred Russell. Not quite two dozen American newspapers sent correspondents to Rome, often a solitary sports editor who could afford to send himself. The wire services, Associated Press and United Press International, dominated the press corps with eighteen journalists each. Then came the contingent from Sports Illustrated, including Robert Creamer, who served as the on-scene editor; Tex Maule, who wrote most of the track-and-field stories; and world-class sports photographers John G. Zimmerman, George Silk, Robert Riger, and Jerry Cooke. With several colleagues, they sublet an apartment at the Palazzo Lance-lotti, a medieval building situated in the heart of old Rome, not far from the Piazza Navona, with high ceilings and grand windows that pushed open onto an interior courtyard. It was, Creamer would recall, a great place to throw a party, which they did—a memorable event where a gregarious Soviet photographer, a friend of the SI shooters, did his part to ease cold war tensions by berating the Germans (“Bang! Bang!” he said, explaining that the Nazis had killed his father in World War II), on his way to getting “drunk as a skunk” and urinating into the elegant courtyard below.

  Aside from the private parties, the surest place to find scribblers from all over the world each night was on the top four blocks of the Via Veneto district around the Hotel Excelsior, where the sidewalks, as described by A. J. Liebling, were so crowded that “a fair-sized man vainly trying to thread his way…has to reverse engines and back out, like a steamship on the upper reaches of a tropical river.” The outdoor café tables, Liebling added, were “occupied by visitors to the Games, gasping like stranded sea robins and staring at one another in search of the stigmata of celebrity.” One night Liebling pried himself away from the crowd and piled into a taxi. He asked the driver to take him to a showing of La Dolce Vita, the Federico Fellini film that had opened earlier that year. He ended up at a cinema in the far reaches of Rome, but Liebling thought the trip was worth it. He saw the movie not so much as a lens into the sweet-sour lives of decadent Italians but more as a new way of looking at modern America. “The actors, an international bunch, speak in their own languages—a novelty Fellini may have picked up from La Grande Illusion,” Liebling wrote. “What pleased me was that English, usually with an American accent, has displaced French as the language that, spoken in an Italian film, symbolizes worldly wickedness. Instead of ‘Ooh-la-la!’ the bad girl now says something like ‘I’ve got news for you.’ This marks a change in the Anglo-Saxon place in the international imagination, which is often more important than actuality.”

  Most foreign correspondents were not exactly living the sweet life during their Olympic stay in Rome. They found housing in inexpensive dormitory-style rooms at the Domus Mariae and Domus Pacis, old church-related residence hotels near the Vatican that also served as press centers. Much like the Olympic Village itself, these quarters brought the world together in all its linguistic diversity, housing correspondents from sixty-three nations—from Gian Paolo Ormezzano, the young Italian writer for Tuttosport, to Erdogan Aripinar of Turkey’s Cumhuriyet Gazetesi; from Federico La Rosa of Peru’s La Prensa to Sven Johansson of Dagens Nyheter in Sweden. To handle this polyglot crowd, the press centers provided a babel of Olivetti desk typewriters: 170 Italian, 140 standard English, 85 German, 60 French, 35 Swedish, 30 Russian, 25 Norwegian, 20 Spanish, 10 Portuguese, 5 Turkish, 5 Hungarian
, 5 Dutch, 3 Polish, 2 Romanian, 2 Yugoslav, and 1 Bulgarian.

  For the transport of journalists from one venue to another, there were motor scooters, bubble helicopters at the ready, along with sixty little Fiat 500 cars with Italian sailors behind the wheel. Ormezzano, after having locked himself out of his own car on the trip down from holiday in Rimini, was delighted to have a chauffeur in Rome. Olympic authorities even provided a separate car and driver for his mother on the day she came down to visit. All went well until Ormezzano’s sailor carried the notion of Olympian liberty a bit far. “The driver liked to use the car to go dancing in the evening,” Ormezzano recalled. “But he was found out when he left his uniform in the car while he went to dance, and it was stolen. He was confined to barracks and only allowed out to drive me. I had to telephone the man’s superior when we were finished in the evening, and he had twenty minutes to return to post.”

  DAVE SIME arrived at the stadium that morning “as weak as a kitten.” During his time in Rome, he had been more successful with his off-the-books assignment, making friendly contact with Soviet athlete Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, than with his athletic mission, preparing for the 100-meter dash. Still recovering from that ill-advised romp in the bracing Swiss river, he had barely trained since arriving in the village, at least not in the all-out method he preferred. Sime believed that he improved not by subtly refining technique or slowly rounding into form, but by running and then running some more, one dash after another until, even though he was exhausted, his limbs felt looser and ready for the tension of the main event.