Bynum Shaw of the Baltimore Sun had been monitoring coverage of the Olympics from his bureau in Germany. He was particularly interested in East German television, which he could pick up in Berlin. When Dresden’s Ingrid Kraemer won the diving events, Shaw noted, her victories were “hailed as an example of the rewards of clean socialist living.” When West German Armin Hary won the 100, no correlation was made between politics and athletic success. And now, at the finish of the heavyweight eights, with a crew from West Germany about to win gold, the East German announcers seemed to be looking desperately for a socialist hook. They found it back in third place. As Shaw reported: “The East German commentary ran like this, starting in a small disapproving voice and ending in a wild frenzy—‘That’s the German team coming in now, with Canada not far behind. But look, here come the Czechs in a great finish! There they go, in magnificent coordination! What a thrill! Czechoslovakia wins the bronze medal!’”
At least the Czechs were in the picture, more than could be said of the Americans.
At the end of the race, the U.S. oarsmen stopped dead in the water and slumped—exhausted, silent, disappointed. They had made no mistakes, they had raced as fast as they were capable that day, but it was not sufficient. The Germans were an average five years older, twenty-six to twenty-one, at the physical peak for an endurance sport, and were obviously superior. Now the Americans had to stay far from shore and watch the crews from Canada and Czechoslovakia row dockside and receive silver and bronze while still seated in their shells, and then witness the German eight clamber merrily out of their boat and stand tall on the dock as Avery Brundage placed gold medals around every neck; and then listen as not the “Star-Spangled Banner” but after forty years something else—Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—rang out across the deep lacquered waters. Finally the Yanks could row in, to polite clapping, with dusk settling over the mountain, and start what Peter Bos called “the process of ‘Life goes on.’”
THAT NIGHT, Dave Sime and Jim Beatty and their wives made their way back from Sorrento. It had been a long, full day, with a boat ride to Capri, and the couples were exhausted as they boarded the train for Rome. Sime had a fever again, and his face was swelling in reaction to prednisone that Doc Hanley had given him ten days earlier. He needed to alter the corticosteroid dosage to stop the swelling before he ran in the relay, and he also wanted to look presentable for dinner the next night with the American agent “Mr. Wolf” and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. The couples rode third-class in a car that throbbed with Italian life: old men, families, babies crying, chickens cackling.
When they reached the Termini station in Rome, the streets were raucous, people everywhere exuding a spirit of liberation. It was not just a Saturday night but a night of national triumph. Adding to the glory of Berruti’s victory in the 200, the Italians had won gold in water polo, coming from behind to tie the defending champion Hungarians 3–3 in a final match that, in a sense, was meaningless, since they had already clinched the championship. Yet it sent the sixteen thousand partisans at Stadio del Nuoto into delirium. The Italian team had entered the Olympics with such modest expectations, said one of its stars, Eraldo Pizzo, that “if someone had offered us a bronze medal before the Games started, we’d have taken it.” Now they were celebrating on the Via Veneto, walking the street wearing their gold medals, surrounded by loving throngs, people buying them drinks all around, as the chants echoed late into the night, “Ber-ru-ti! Ber-ru-ti! Ber-ru-ti! Italia! Italia! Italia!”
13
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING
THE second Sunday of the Olympics was another day off, and at midmorning a line of buses pulled away from the village carrying Soviet officials and dozens of athletes on an all-day outing into the Italian countryside. The caravan traveled southeast down the Appia Nuova in the direction of Lake Albano and turned off to Genzano di Roma, where it was said the scalding sidewalks outside the town hall were so crowded with celebrants of Italian-Soviet Friendship Day that it “was almost impossible to walk.” The mayor led the welcoming party and greeted his guests with a long speech, the first of many.
The Soviets were invited to stay for a fireworks display later but politely declined, leaving after lunch for an hour-and-a-half drive around the eastern rim of Rome and up to the town of Monterotondo, where another celebration in their honor awaited, this time at the local stadium. A festive band of drums and horns led them into the center of town playing the “Inno di Garibaldi” hymn. That evening they finished the tour with a stop at the suburb of Torpignattara, where the local Communist Party wanted to honor them. “The town was decorated with lights, flowers, little flags, the streets were flooded with people, balconies were full, there were hundreds of faces and waving arms in windows,” reported a correspondent from Pravda, who accompanied the delegation. “One can hear from everywhere slogans being chanted. Peace. Friendship. Long live the Soviet Union. An Italian roofer, Fernando Dedolini, found an interpreter and took him to a group of our athletes and said, ‘Soviet athletes achieved the greatest glory in Rome. When you go back home, please tell your workers that the Italian people admire the grand foreign policy of your government and its endless fight for peace.’”
Another day of propaganda in the cold war—and not a bad day for the Soviets who stayed back in the village, either. They played chess, watched television, jitterbugged to American rock and roll, and tossed another verbal grenade down the street at their superpower adversaries. This time it was Yuri Litovev, coach of the USSR hurdlers, offering a critical appraisal of the U.S. team, saying they were chokers. “The Americans came here expecting to defeat everyone,” Litovev declared. “When they could not do it, they became afraid.” His case in point was poor Ray Norton, taking it from all quarters now. Litovev said that when he saw Norton run at the dual meet in Philadelphia in 1959, he ran “free and smooth,” far from the runner who finished last in both the 100 and 200 in the heat of Rome. “Here I see a different man, one I do not recognize,” Litovev said. “He is tense and runs as if he is tied up.”
To say that an opponent choked is perhaps the worst insult in the world of sports, and it was not well taken when Litovev’s quotes were read back to officials and athletes relaxing in the quiet Sunday sun outside their dorms in the U.S. sector. Dave Sime, back from Sorrento, called it “a lot of hogwash. No nationality or race of people has a lien on championships.” Bud Winter, the Olympic assistant and Norton’s head coach at San Jose State, responded in a bitter tit for tat, saying “there’s never been a bigger choke-up than the Russians at Melbourne.” And head coach Larry Snyder dismissed it as political pap: “The Olympics provide a big propaganda sounding board. Let them make hay out of it while they can. We all know it is absolutely ridiculous.”
The Soviets were asserting themselves like never before in Rome, and their confidence was a source of consternation for the Americans. If the Olympic stage was a proxy battleground in the cold war, U.S. officials felt increasingly frustrated that they were in an unfair fight, with the two sides playing by different rules. Ever since the Soviet Olympic Committee was recognized by the IOC in 1951, the essential question had been the same: Did their state-sponsored system—in which they claimed to have no professionals, even as their star athletes were treated as elites and provided with jobs and housing and living stipends—comply with Olympic amateur regulations? Western nations were not beyond reproach in terms of under-the-table payments to supposed amateurs, but those flaws were considered less pervasive. In its own way, the amateur debate was a smaller version of the larger struggle between communism and capitalism.
The American press and public began paying more attention to the issue after the summer of 1954, when Avery Brundage, in his second year as president of the IOC, paid a visit to the USSR. The head of the Soviet Olympic Committee had sent Brundage a cablegram inviting him to attend, at its expense, the annual sports parade in Moscow. Brundage accepted but decided to pay his own way. He expected to stay three days in Moscow and ended up tourin
g the country for three weeks, from Moscow to Leningrad to Kiev to Tbilisi and Odessa. His reaction to what he saw there in some ways mirrored his response two decades earlier to his encounters with Nazi Germany.
The glory of sports superseded politics. He was greatly impressed by the organization and the emphasis on physical culture, starting with the sports parade in the capital, an event that overwhelmed him. “The sports parade I was invited to was fantastic,” he said later. “It wasn’t really a parade at all. It was a huge demonstration of physical culture and gymnastics. I’d never seen anything that approached it in magnitude and beauty. There were Uzbeks and Tajiks and Cossacks and Armenians and Georgians; each delegation included four hundred to three thousand boys and girls, more than thirty-four thousand participants.” The colorful costumes and immensity of the production made Brundage think it was something out of The Arabian Nights.
After the young athletes paraded around the field, he watched them one after another give demonstrations with wands, balls, hoops, and ribbons. He was amazed to see one group swiftly set up seventy horizontal bars on a vast green carpet covering the stadium infield, where an equal number of girl gymnasts performed to classical music. The stands on the far side of the stadium were filled with thousands of people holding blue, yellow, or green cards, switching colors in unison like a card section at an American football game. As the colors changed behind them, portable water fountains spurted high in the air, and loudspeakers played the music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. Ideological banners were woven into the scene. “Ready for Labor and Defense.” “Glory to the Fatherland.” “Hail Lenin and Stalin.” “Three Million Bales of Cotton for the Nation.” “Peace—Peace—Peace.” All the propaganda for peace was particularly striking to Brundage. He thought the Russians had “stolen the ball” from the Americans, at least in the appropriation of language.
For decades, Brundage had been proselytizing with religious fervor his belief that physical education and competitive sports made for better citizens—and, if need be, better soldiers as well. He now found it ironic that his philosophy was met with ambivalence in the U.S. but embraced by the Soviets. “The USSR has adopted such a program on a national scale never before attempted (except by the Germans in the thirties and their ‘Kraft durch Freude’) and have placed all the power of the state behind it,” Brundage concluded. “As I watched those thousands of husky, healthy Soviet boys and girls parading enthusiastically, I thought of Army rejections of 47 percent in the United States. In those countries behind the Iron Curtain, life is grim, and sports fills a vacuum. Their champions are given the title of Master of Sports, and they occupy respected positions in their world, idolized by the youth of the country.”
But did their system contradict the Olympic ideal of amateurism? In Moscow, at meetings with top sports officials, Brundage brought a briefcase full of clippings from the Western press detailing how the USSR violated various Olympic rules. In an account of his trip later published in the Saturday Evening Post and ghostwritten by Will Grimsley, a wire-service feature writer, Brundage said, “These newspaper stories alleged that the Communists took athletes away from their work and studies and put them into training camps for many weeks at a time; that they gave athletes special allowances and favors, as well as cash prizes; that they included political agents on their teams; and that they used sport for political purposes, propaganda, and national aggrandizement.”
Not surprisingly, the Soviets denied the charges. Nikolai Romanov, chairman of the Committee on Physical Culture, told Brundage that the Soviet Union had no professional athletes and that there were “no special inducements or material rewards” for athletes. At one time, they would get cash prizes for outstanding performances, Romanov said, but that practice had been discontinued. Their policy on training camps was no different than that of the Americans, he argued, never more than fourteen days at a time, just like the U.S. Trials. And their approach to winning was also the same as it was in the West, he asserted.
“We want to win. You don’t criticize us for that, do you?” he asked.
“No,” Brundage replied. “So long as you follow the rules.”
Brundage then showed Romanov several articles written by Soviet defectors who said they were placed in training camps for months and were paid full salaries by the state to do nothing but compete. As the IOC president later recounted the scene, Romanov responded coldly, “These men are deserters, traitors. Would you attach any truth to their statements if they had been Americans and turned against your country?”
This was the same Nikolai Romanov who six years later led the Soviet delegation to Rome and headed the Olympic entourage on the Sunday tour of the Italian countryside.
THE DOMUS Mariae, headquarters for foreign correspondents, was bathed in sunshine that Sunday afternoon, with typewriters clacking away, Neil Allen wrote in his diary. “As journalists will at nearly any given hour, we talked shop”—mostly about what was in the other papers. It was all fairly bleak for the Brits. Christopher Basher, sports editor of the Observer, asserted that Great Britain’s mediocre Olympic showing was attributable in part to poor planning. Officials failed to prepare properly for the “gippy tummy” caused by the heat, he said, and ignored all advice on how best to adjust to late summer in Rome. Gordon Pirie, a highly touted 5000-meter man who failed to make it out of the qualifying round, was quoted as saying that the runners needed two weeks to acclimatize themselves but instead were flown to Italy only four days before the competition began. Basher agreed and said the delay was for no good reason. “There was too much talk of the athletes getting bored if they were here for any length of time. Anyone who gets bored in Rome, with every facility from a track to the opera on his doorstep, has not the temperament to win anyhow.” In the Times of London, the sporting insignificance of the Brits was seen as yet another sign of a lost empire: “Modern sport was given birth in Britain in the nineteenth century, but this is no reason to think that our methods are still the best. Anyone watching these Olympics must be aware that a sporting revolution is upon us…Britain seems no longer to be a great power…”
British gloom had nothing on French despair. One silver in rowing, a bronze each for a wrestler and a runner, and that was it so far for their team. There was hand-wringing in the National Assembly, calls for an investigation, laments everywhere for what was being called “L’Affaire Olympique.” When a visiting Italian dignitary presented French President Charles de Gaulle with an honorary gold medal that weekend, satire became irresistible. A Paris cartoon showed de Gaulle bounding off to compete in Rome himself, harrumphing “Nothing gets done in this country unless I do it.”
The German press, when not worrying about whether Armin Hary would get too big a head from his victory in the 100, focused again on the apparent vulnerability of the United States. “Rome is puzzled. What’s wrong with the Americans?” asked a columnist in Die Welt. “After ten days, the end result becomes visible: America, the apparently invincible colossus of the Olympic Games, is the big, sensational loser of the games. Never before have we looked into so many disappointed faces, never before have we seen the American self-confidence shattered in such a way.”
But was it really? Times reporter Arthur Daley left the press compound for a stroll through the athletic village that afternoon. To his surprise, he found the Americans “very much alive in the blazing sunshine. Not one had committed hara-kiri. The shock of unexpected defeats had worn off ever so slightly. At least the numbness had faded away, and toppled demigods were able to smile again.” Back home, American pride was especially strong in Nashville that Sunday, where an editorial in the Tennessean boasted, “A & I Athletes Show the Way at Rome.” “After a series of gloomy failures, America’s Olympic team surged forward in the athletic battle in Rome with some spectacular performances, of which all America is proud,” the editorial stated. “Particularly gratifying to Tennessee were the outstanding performances of Tennessee A&I’s Wilma Rudolph and Ralph Boston.
These are tremendous athletes, and it should be noted that both are excellent students at A&I. Tennessee and the country congratulate these performers, their coaching staff, and the state university.”
Correspondents for Pravda, those who avoided the bus tour, seemed to be feeling the most upbeat as they perused Italian journals in search of positive mentions of the Soviets. In Rome’s Il Messaggero, they found a column extolling Russian modesty “such that you forget you are standing next to famous world champions.” But modesty takes you only so far in the propaganda war; not nearly as far as winning. Combing through Milan’s Corriere della Sera, they passed quickly over some critical paragraphs “in which are mentioned many stupidities” and focused on the depiction of Soviets as winners who “from Olympics to Olympics become more and more competitive and frightening.”
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