But Sime sensed that he had barely lost, and Hary that he had barely won. So had the German fans. Their chants grew louder. “Ja! Ja! Ja! Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Hah-ree!” German flags waved in every corner of the stadium. The photographers also sensed the ending, snapping shot after shot of Hary as he retraced his steps back to the starting line, this time walking slowly, feeling strange and alone, allowing only the slightest bent smile to cross his face.
Radford, finishing third, assured of bronze, walked away alone, brokenhearted. Norton and Budd, finishing last and second to last, had watched Sime’s desperate splatter and rushed over to him. From the press section, Neil Allen took note as “Norton and Budd lifted Sime off the track, their black bodies like pillars on either side of his tall white frame as they walked him onto the grass.”
Sime was less concerned about minor track burns on his arms and legs than the fragile mental state of his teammate, Norton, who had been hyped to win and finished an ignominious last. “I’m sorry,” Sime said to Norton. “I’m really and truly sorry.”
“And I knew what he meant,” Norton said later. “He just meant that I wasn’t up to par, and it wasn’t there for me, and when he gave me a hug—we hugged each other—I told him, I say, ‘Hey, that’s the way it goes.’ He said, ‘You gave your best shot.’ I said, ‘That’s all you can do.’ It was a very touching moment.”
The official results finally flashed on the electronic scoreboard: Hary first, Sime second, Radford third. The photographs showed Hary breaking the tape an inch ahead of Sime, even though the times for both men were the same: 10.2 seconds, tying the Olympic record. “The young man throws up both arms and finally gives the ten thousand German fans the longed-for pose of victory,” reported the Die Welt correspondent. “They are screaming, stamping, shouting, and roaring wild chants. They let him know how much they owe him…We begin to feel a bit sorry for this young man. They will featherbed him. They will flatter him and schmooze him. They will celebrate him like a gladiator. We begin to worry about him.”
For the medals ceremony, Avery Brundage came down from the stands to do the honors. Armin Hary, No. 263, was on the top rung. Dave Sime, No. 397, stood on the second rung, appearing crestfallen as the silver medal was placed around his neck. He could barely look at Hary, who reached down from above to shake his hand. Sime thought he could have won. If only he had been in a lane next to Hary, he would have had a better sense of when to make that final lean, he believed. No excuses, he lost, but it was so close that his knee was the first body part across the line. However, the chest is what counts, and Hary’s chest beat his. Sime would replay that final moment for the rest of his life and watch it on film over and over. Every time he watched, as he got older, it seemed that he came closer and closer. But Hary always won. The German flag, with its black, red, and yellow horizontal stripes decorated with the five Olympic rings of East-West compromise, rose above the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack as the band played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Two people unconnected to the race noticed something strange about the world’s fastest man as he soaked in applause atop the podium, a gold medal dangling at his neck. They were Adi Dassler, owner of the German shoe company Adidas, and his brother Rudolf, who ran a competing shoe company, Puma. For the race itself, Adi Dassler had been shocked to see Hary come out wearing Puma shoes. Hary always wore the three-stripe Adidas cleats, according to their secret agreement. Now on the medal stand, it was Rudolf Dassler’s turn to be surprised. Hary had changed and was wearing Adidas. Werner von Moltke, a Puma official, later told the Dutch writer Barbara Smit that Hary’s choice of Puma for the race “was at least partly motivated by a thick brown envelope.” In going back to Adidas for the medal ceremony, Smit wrote in her revealing book on the shoe industry, Pitch Invasion, “Hary was apparently trying to get paid by both sides.” Hary later conceded that was precisely what he was doing, and explained that he had turned away from Adidas when Adi Dassler rejected his request for a job as an Adidas agent and an advance of ten thousand pairs of shoes that he could market.
Brundage, the unmerciful king of amateurism, knew none of this. In fact, his reaction to the results was private gloating about Ray Norton’s poor showing. Word had reached him that the American sprinter had agreed to sign a professional contract with the San Francisco 49ers football team when the Olympics were done. This was an affront to Brundage’s strict standards of amateurism. He felt it was only fitting for the sinner to finish last.
Norton had left the scene before the ceremony. Out of sight, in the darkness of the tunnel leading from the stadium, he fell into the consoling embrace of Wilma Rudolph, who had better luck on the track that day, winning two preliminary heats in the women’s 100. They walked back to the village together and talked into the night.
IN THE Boston area that morning, readers of the Globe had awakened to a headline that read “It’s Thomas Day in Rome; John Seeks New Mark.” By early that evening, across the ocean in the gloaming of Stadio Olimpico, John Thomas, the sensational nineteen-year-old high jumper from Cambridge Rindge Tech and Boston University, seemed to carry the day’s last best hopes for his country. For Americans accustomed to dominating Olympic track and field, it was stunning to hear that the dash men had been beaten by a German in the 100. The red, white, and blue had bombed out even worse in the 800 meters, failing to place a runner in the final won in record time by Peter Snell of New Zealand, the first gold medalist half-miler not from the U.S. since 1932. And now three Soviets were challenging Thomas jump for jump in the late going of a contest everyone expected him to win easily.
The high-jump competition was an all-day affair. It started at nine that morning with thirty-two jumpers, and by lunch the field had narrowed to seventeen who had cleared 6-63/4. American Joe Faust, with a sore lower back, was the first one out in the afternoon. After clearing only the relatively low height of 6-8, Charles Dumas, the gold medalist at Melbourne, was gone, and when Stig Pettersson of Sweden could not rise above 6-111/2, it was down to Thomas, in his blue USA vest, and the three Soviets: Viktor Bolshov, Valeriy Brumel, and Robert Shavlakadze.
“This is a sensation!” a correspondent for Izvestia reported when the competition narrowed to the final four. “You can hear sports commentators yelling into their microphones. They didn’t expect this turn of events.” The brick-red running track was deserted, done for the day, all other distractions gone, only high jumping left. The September sky darkened over the Tiber as floodlights brightened the high-jump pit with an eerie glow.
Six days earlier, when the U.S. and Soviet teams held a joint practice, Thomas impressed all observers, including American journalists and the Soviet jumpers, by nonchalantly directing his coach to skip a few heights and move the bar up to seven feet, which he then cleared easily. Zamechatelno, the Soviets said then. Wonderful. More than wonderful—the sportswriters considered the move psychologically devastating. Just by witnessing that scene, they believed, the Russians would realize they had no chance. Now, with the height at 6-111/2, a height the three Soviets had already cleared, Thomas tried the same tactic. He passed, saying he would jump again at the next height, 7 feet and 1/4 inch. “Was it gamesmanship?” Jess Abramson of the Herald Tribune wondered from the press box. Thomas had surpassed seven feet more than any athlete in history, thirty-seven times, while Bolshov alone among the Soviets had ever cleared the magic height. Jerry Nason of the Boston Globe, who knew Thomas best, noted that he commonly passed. During the morning competitions that day, Thomas had disdained the lower heights, shedding his blue sweat suit only to make the one mandatory qualifying jump.
But Nason was worried about his young hometown hero. A few days earlier, Thomas had confided that he was upset about the landing pits in Rome. There was no sawdust in them, only raw sand, which cut his legs. “The impact is terrible. It’s like landing on a rock pile,” Thomas had said. Because of the pits, he had not tried jumping seven feet since that practice with the Soviets.
With the bar s
et at seven feet and a quarter inch, Valeri Brumel was the first to jump. The son of a miner from Siberia, Brumel was a slender teenager, only eighteen, younger even than Thomas, and virtually unknown outside the Soviet Union. It was Brumel who had seemed most awed by Thomas at practice. Shavlakadze, the veteran of the Soviet trio, was concerned that his young teammate might fold under the pressure of his first major international event. But Brumel seemed calm now, and fearless, even as he grazed the bar and watched it fall on his first attempt. Then Bolshov missed too. Had Thomas psyched the Russians again? Here came old man Shavlakadze, already twenty-seven and looking like a nineteenth-century Cossack, with his bowlegs and carefully groomed mustache, white bandages on his right wrist and right calf, and his shoes colorfully mismatched, blue left, red right. The Georgian wasted no time, making a quick approach and easily clearing the bar.
“Now all the pressure was on John Thomas,” observed Cord Nelson, taking notes from his seat in the stands. Nelson focused his binoculars on Thomas and saw him drinking an Italian soda and taking his time. By passing at the earlier height, Thomas had been inactive for more than an hour. He set his takeoff position at the 37-degree angle, seven long steps, an eighth shorter one, kick, lift, roll. His lead leg made it over, but his trailing leg dragged and brushed the bar, and it fell. He still had two more tries at that height, but his gold medal task now became exponentially harder. With more misses than Shavlakadze, he would at least have to clear seven and a quarter and the next height to win. Wilfrid Smith, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, sensed that Thomas had become disoriented after the miss. “He was so confused, he wanted to jump right again, even though it was Brumel’s turn.”
In the second go-round, first Brumel and then Bolshov were successful, each jump greeted with a loud, nervous burst of ovation. Pravda’s correspondent, relishing the moment, harkened back to the earlier boasts of his American counterparts in the press box. “The American agency United Press International several days before this competition described a mutual training of Soviet and American athletes and had the temerity to claim that Thomas had gained an incredible psychological advantage that sapped the Soviet strength to fight for victory! And now Thomas was supposed to save the reputation of journalists and experts who could not find one single athlete but him who could aspire for gold. And look…”
Thomas cleared on his second attempt, and the bar was raised a notch to seven-one. The night sky grew blacker. Up in the press box, Jess Abramson thought the sequence of jumps was having a stressful cumulative effect on Thomas. “Those Russians kept hammering away at him, one after another clearing the height, with Thomas jumping last.” Jerry Nason thought back to an earlier interview he had conducted for the Globe. Thomas had revealed that to prevent an upset stomach before a meet, he ate strained baby food fruit from a jar. The only time he got butterflies, he said, was when he failed at a height that he had cleared before. That had already happened this evening. And he certainly seemed nervous out there now. Tex Maule noticed that Thomas’s long legs were quivering. Joe Faust, his teammate, who was out near the pit encouraging him, grew worried that sugar from too many Italian sodas was making him sluggish.
At seven-one, Shavlakadze, though lightly brushing the bar, cleared on his first attempt, and Brumel made it on his second. Bolshov missed three times and was out. Thomas failed twice, and had one try left. The stadium fell silent. What was he thinking? First he thought about what he had done wrong with the last jump, concentrating on the mistakes. Then, as he took his position, he tried to erase everything but the next jump. “There was nothing out of the ordinary I could see happening to me,” he said later. “You always have the attitude that you are going to clear the jump. Never that you are going to miss.”
But the third jump was the worst. He seemed hesitant on the approach, and his chest hit the bar on the way up. For a brief second, he remained prone in the pit. He was finished. Then he popped up, all the cameras trained on him, and walked over to shake the winner’s hand. Shavlakadze had the gold, young Brumel the silver, and Thomas settled for a bronze, which he snatched from Bolshov only because he had fewer misses.
Jerry Nason left the press section immediately after the medal ceremony in search of Thomas and found him in the tunnel, “on the verge of tears.” The veteran writer, realizing how vulnerable Thomas was at that moment, searched for words to buck him up. “I said he gave them the battle of the games, one against three,” Nason reported. “Thomas replied misty eyed. He was proud of the bronze and would wear it, not keep it in a box.” A crowd started forming around them. Someone asked Thomas whether he was surprised. “I wasn’t too surprised,” he said. “I knew Victor Bolshov had jumped seven feet early in the year, and he wasn’t even their best man.” Nason protectively led him out of the tunnel. “I’m going out to eat with my parents,” Thomas said. “I hope they are not too disappointed in me.”
His parents were fine, but the American reporters were a mess. For them, Thomas’s defeat was an incomprehensible end to a calamitous day. Not only had he lost, but he was beaten by two Russians and tied by a third. In the propaganda cold war, there could be no worse way to lose. Jesse Abramson started tapping out his opening for the Herald Trib: “The world’s highest, most consistent, most un-ruffled, most unbeatable leaper, the best bet everyone on the face of the Earth conceded was most likely to win a gold medal here, placed third.” The Los Angeles Times called it “the darkest day in United States track-and-field history.” Oscar Fraley of UPI gave it the gloomy label “Black Thursday” and said it was “possibly the most humbling day America ever has suffered in the Olympics.” Back in Manhattan, Dick Schaap, the young sports editor of Newsweek, took a cable from his correspondent in Rome, Curtis G. Pepper, and slapped on a headline: “Disaster at Rome.” Not surprisingly, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia went the other way. “Like a dam bursting with torrents of water gushing through, the success of Soviet sportsmen continued to be the center of attention, and let us note, in sports where foreign observers did not foresee our success…”
As it happened, Armin Hary blitzkrieged his way to gold on the anniversary of an event far more troubling than the temporary loss of prestige for the American track-and-field team. Precisely twenty-one years earlier, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler had ordered his army into Poland for the start of World War II. And now, at the same hour that Soviet high jumpers outperformed the American John Thomas, Nikita Khrushchev was bringing more tension to cold war politics by declaring that he would travel to New York for the opening of the 15th General Assembly session of the United Nations. It was another aggressive move, seizing the initiative from the United States. Khrushchev’s announcement provoked immediate concern in Washington. In a memorandum to President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Christian A. Herter surmised that Khrushchev, who said his aim in New York was to inspire a worldwide disarmament conference, in truth had a different goal in mind: “to turn the UN General Assembly session into a spectacular propaganda circus.” The Soviet premier was to sail for America two days before the end of the Rome Olympics.
THE STORY LINE of American humiliation was too strong to let contradictory evidence intrude. Black Thursday in reality was not bleak for the U.S. in sports beyond the floodlights of track and field.
The American swimmers had their finest day at the Stadio del Nuoto. Chris von Saltza, at age sixteen the leader of the “sweethearts” from Santa Clara Swim Club, won the 400-meter freestyle, shattering the world record and at the same time gaining revenge on her friendly nemesis, Australia’s Dawn Fraser, who had beaten her in the 100 but this time finished fifth. And the U.S. men won both relays. Lance Larson, swimming a strong butterfly in the third leg of the 400-meter medley, finally earned the gold medal that had been denied him unfairly in the 100 free. Most impressive was the performance of Jeff Farrell, the irrepressible Kansan who had overcome a bad shoulder injury in college and made the Olympic team by swimming in the Trials days after having his appendix removed. With the me
dley relay and 800 freestyle relay set only an hour and ten minutes apart, Farrell had the strength to swim the anchor leg in both, each time leading the U.S. to Olympic and world records. The medley, an Olympic event for the first time, was particularly satisfying. After Frank McKinney led off with the backstroke and Paul Hait followed with the breaststroke, Larson hit the water for the third leg holding a slim lead and widened it to 7 meters with his blistering butterfly. Then Farrell, who had failed to qualify for the 100 in the Trials, swam the fastest freestyle of the games, kicking farther and farther away from the second-place Australians and winning by seven seconds, or 15 meters.
At the Palazzetto dello Sport, the graceful little Pier Luigi Nervi–designed arena within walking distance of the Olympic Village, the U.S. basketball team spent that supposedly disastrous day trouncing Yugoslavia. The final score, 104–42, made the game look closer than it was. In the tradition of all nervous coaches, Pete Newell had worried beforehand. His squad, with Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, and Jerry Lucas leading the way, had been thrashing the opposition all week, with a scoring average of 107 points and a victory margin of 45 points in wins over Italy, Japan, and Hungary. But Newell warned his players that he had seen Yugoslavia, and they “were really good.”
Terry Dischinger, the gunning forward from Purdue who was the team’s fourth or fifth scoring option, poured in 12 points in the opening minutes, and the rout was on. The Yugoslavs started squabbling among themselves. Newell thought they gave up. “They knew they couldn’t beat us, and they didn’t care.” Their indifferent play reflected an interesting political twist that Newell noticed in other Eastern bloc teams. They seemed to be saving energy for the Soviets, whom they truly despised. The score was 40–7 when the starters were pulled. Newell was an inveterate talker with an endless supply of inspirational gimmicks. During pre-Olympic training at West Point, when the team broke for lunch at an Italian restaurant, he kept punching the same song on the jukebox: Mario Lanza singing “Arrivederci Roma”—an unsubtle reminder of their mission. But now his team had played Newell into silence. “At halftime I didn’t know what to say other than kind of talk about the weather or something like that,” he recalled. “What can you say when you’re ahead that much?” The Soviets were next, and Newell would have plenty to say about them.
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