ROME TEEMED with spies that weekend. One among them was Imants Les? inskis, who traveled to the Olympics ostensibly to cover the games for Dzimtenes Balss (Homeland Voice), a biweekly newsletter in Riga, Latvia. His name does not appear on the official list of accredited journalists, indicating he might not have needed a press pass, or, more likely, that he used one of his many aliases. His true mission was not to cover athletic events in any case. He was an agent for the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence operation, and Dzimtenes Balss was a KGB propaganda tool attached to Riga’s Communist Party paper, Cina. At the time, the newsletter did not circulate back home but was intended to spread the good news about Soviet-controlled Latvia to readers abroad.
Les? inskis came to Rome both well trained by the Soviet state and privately disenchanted with it. As a child in Latvia, he had learned Communist Party ideology from his mother, a party member who was said to be one of the few citizens in her neighborhood welcoming the Soviet tanks when they first rolled into the Baltics. An excellent student, he was sent to Russia’s elite Institute of Foreign Relations on the recommendation of Eduards Berklavs, a powerful Latvian Communist leader. But Berklavs, who believed in “socialism with a human face” and opposed the “Russification” of Latvia, was eventually denounced as a nationalist and purged from his position as deputy chairman of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic’s Council of Ministers. This happened in 1959, shortly after Les? inskis graduated summa cum laude from the institute, and—according to accounts he later told his daughter—his connections to Berklavs put him in jeopardy. He was given the choice of “working for the KGB or having his promising future in shambles.”
Soviet agents in Rome took on various missions. Konstantin Gyanov, the KGB’s head of sports security, was in charge of monitoring the athletes, watching where they went and to whom they talked. It was not as overt as in Melbourne, when security officers were stationed in every apartment suite, and the athletes could go out for a walk only if there were five or six of them together, but still the athletes knew at all times that they might be under surveillance. Other agents kept an eye on the Vatican and various exile groups to track defection activities from the other end. Les? inskis did some of both; his assignment was to ingratiate himself with Latvian exiles on the Australian Olympic team and try to persuade them that all was well in the homeland and that they could come back and visit. But in fact, he told his family later, he could no longer abide the government for which he was spying. His “belief system was shaken”—first by the crushing repression of the Hungarian revolution, then by the ousting of his patron Berklavs.
So overwhelming was his disillusionment that, even though he had a wife and young daughter, Ieva, back in Riga, Les? inskis took a break from his work with the Australians and walked into the U.S. embassy on the Via Veneto to seek political asylum. His anxiety about defecting was intensified by the fact that he knew little English then, though he was fluent in French and German. The duty officer had to find a political colleague who spoke French, so that nuances would not be missed in the delicate and potentially dangerous conversation. After debriefing Les? inskis, the Americans made a counteroffer: don’t defect, but return to your job, only as a double agent. They talked about the “little daughter” that he might never see again if he defected, and argued further that a defection would not be as beneficial to his native Latvia as remaining with the KGB and working his way up to positions where he could glean the inner workings of the Soviet system. Les? inskis agreed, and left the embassy a double man—same job, different mission.
While the traveling busloads from the Soviet delegation were still on their mission to the Italian countryside that Sunday night, September 4, Igor Ter-Ovanesyan slipped out of the village to have dinner with Dave Sime and his wife Betty at the Scoglio di Frisio on Via Merulana. There were KGB agents circling around the team, Ter-Ovanesyan realized. He was polite when they were around but felt that he had little in common with them and tried to “keep them at arm’s reach.” He could never be sure that they were not following him and considered the pressure of being watched “awful—the worst thing that can be imagined in the world.”
Sime did not know what to expect this time. At their previous dinner, Igor had talked about how much he loved Americans and their freedom, but he felt that he had a bright future in the Soviet Union—especially if he won a medal in Rome. Now a medal was his, not gold but bronze, which was still more than his coaches expected of him. And Sime already had an uneasy feeling about the American agent, the pseudonymous Mr. Wolf, who was supposed to close the deal.
Ter-Ovanesyan arrived at the restaurant “kind of excited about this whole moment of meeting with the Americans.” He was not thinking of politics so much—not like Imants Les? inskis—but about the contrasts of freedom and security. Here was that rare chance to “look into a different window,” he thought. He entered into an easy conversation with Sime, enjoying the moment, not taking it too seriously. Then the American agent appeared. Sime watched the scene unfold, or unravel, from there:
“And here comes this guy, Mr. Wolf. He comes up. I say, ‘Mr. Wolf, this is my friend…’ He says, ‘Yeah, yeah’…and he starts immediately. He didn’t even look at me or my wife. He goes right to Igor and starts speaking to him in the Russian dialect from where [Igor’s] from. And I can see Igor panic. Really panic.”
Mr. Wolf asked the couple to leave so that he could talk to Ter-Ovanesyan alone. This only heightened Igor’s alarm. “I don’t want to talk to you alone. I’m leaving with them,” he told the agent, and he got up and walked out with Dave and Betty. Sime recalled what happened next: “When we were walking out, he says, ‘David, I don’t know if this guy’s a double agent or not, but I don’t really want to talk to him. I’m too scared.’ And that was it. It ended. The CIA blew it.”
Ter-Ovanesyan remembered the incident much the same way and said that seeing the American agent in person frightened him, though that alone did not keep him from defecting. His mind had not approached the tipping point, he said. He imagined what would happen to his relatives—nothing good. And on a practical athletic level, he compared the two systems in terms of how they treated track-and-field stars. In the Soviet Union he was “more or less” a professional athlete. He was getting support in terms of his career, with stipends, special considerations, good coaches. He had a clear picture of where he was going and what he was doing and how the Communist state would treat him as a world-class athlete. America was all unknowns. Track stars there told him they had little to look forward to in their sport after the Olympics. Wasn’t it true that his friend Dave Sime couldn’t even play bush league summer baseball in South Dakota?
IN THE capital of the Free World, five blocks from the White House, came another lesson that Sunday in the contradictions of the United States in 1960. The American Contract Bridge League was holding a regional tournament at the Mayflower Hotel, with five hundred players at the tables, but when Frank Tucker and Roberto Seymour of Newark, New Jersey, and Kenneth Cox and Kenneth Shorter of New York arrived at the registration desk, they were told that they could not compete because of the color of their skin. The affiliate bridge organizations in Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina had whites-only charters. Over the objections of the regional president, who said he did not want any distractions, the four black men eventually were allowed into the ballroom to watch, though not play, and many sympathetic participants directed them to the best matches.
Here again was precisely the sort of racism the U.S. State Department could not rationalize in its cold war propaganda battle with the Soviets but desperately hoped to overshadow in Rome through the triumphant achievements of black athletes. The key figure in that enterprise, the American flag bearer Rafer Johnson, was just now preparing to take the world stage.
Johnson had spent much of that Sunday evening relaxing in a lounge chair under the pillars of his dorm in the Olympic Village, listening to jazz on a lit
tle portable radio. His time was coming, the two-day decathlon competition started in the morning, and now he wanted to clear his mind. He found it “really inspiring to have that kind of pulse, if you listen to music and just go with the sound and the beat, and empty your mind of any other thoughts that you possibly can, and just go with how the music makes you feel. Not the pressure of going into the decathlon tomorrow, or something that Coach Drake told you to remember, or the defeat in fifty-six, and do I have the juice to do it this time? ‘Kuznetsov is here, but now I got a tougher guy in C. K. Yang; a lot tougher now than Kuznetsov. What am I going to do?’ Instead of going through all that, it’s all of that but none of that. It is just music. ‘That is all I am listening to, and all that is on my mind is music.’ It just clears you out. So then when you finally start thinking about what you need to do, it is fresh. It is motivating, clean. It pushes you.”
14
THE GREATEST
ROME awoke to a different world Monday morning. Gone was the high blue sky, as a brisk wind blew in the first gray clouds since before the Opening Ceremony. The Germans said it was a hot-winded sirocco that had swept across the choppy sea from North Africa; local meteorologists simply noted that a low-pressure system had settled heavily over the capital region. The temperature dropped only slightly, into the eighties, still a relative relief, and while Olympic officials considered the possibility of a weather delay, Italian farmers looked heavenward at the prospect of the first rain in two months.
The dense sky was familiar to Rafer Johnson. It reminded him of late-summer mornings back in Kingsburg when he and his younger brother Jimmy rose at dawn to go fishing. He was up just as early now on this fifth of September in Rome, stirring from an anxious sleep, butterflies fluttering in his stomach. The nerves were natural, he believed. Experience had taught him that if he ever found himself without that feeling on competition morning, it would not be a good day. You had to have butterflies to be ready, he thought; without them you were in trouble.
After a breakfast of steak and eggs, Johnson, in a dark blue tracksuit, boarded the bus at the village gate and reached the Stadio Olimpico an hour early to warm up for the first day of five decathlon events. His friend, schoolmate, and rival, C. K. Yang, in a tracksuit gleaming white, arrived with him, buoyed by a message he had just received from his mother back home in Taiwan. “Misun, I know you will win. God bless you,” she had said. Misun was her pet name for C.K. It meant lovely child. The intensity of the imminent showdown left Johnson, Yang, and the Soviet Vasily Kuznetsov less eager than usual to talk to one another. When Johnson stepped onto the track, his nerves settled, overtaken by a jolt of adrenaline. He felt loose and “prepared at any cost” to win.
It would be a busy day inside the stadium, with most of the key events scheduled for the afternoon, and only irrepressible track fans were scattered around the stands when the morning competition began at nine. The press section filled slowly. Some in the high-spirited corps of American sports columnists, who became track experts once every four years, arrived with an uncharacteristic ho-hum attitude; none more so than Red Smith. Literate and deftly sarcastic, Smith was never at a loss for an opinion. He was always absorbing, and usually right, but he might have had a blind spot when it came to the decathlon. To track-and-field experts like Cord and Bert Nelson, who had taken their usual seats among the fans that morning, the decathlon was the sport’s ultimate challenge, but to Smith it was a grinding bore.
He had forced himself to the track, Smith groused, for the day when “the world’s greatest athletes” would begin “the world’s dullest competition.” In his opinion, the decathlon amounted to “a quadrennial chance for guys who can’t do anything very well to win interplanetary renown by doing many things in a great blaze of mediocrity.” The complex scoring system, in which competitors accumulated points based not on whether they won an event but how their best effort rated against an established standard, also frustrated Smith, while at the same time providing him with comic material. In the decathlon, he said, “victory is achieved by mathematics, and the chief scorer is an IBM electronic brain with the classical Greek name Ramac. Medals are awarded on the basis of a point score which runs into the thousands and which isn’t going to be explained here for the fairly sound reason that it’s already been explained in a booklet containing seventy-eight pages of arithmetic tables.” Shirley Povich was no kinder. He called the decathletes “the peasants of the games” and noted that “years back”—but wasn’t it just then, from the lips of his colleague Smith?—“one fellow was unkind enough to suggest that the decathlon is a haven for mediocrity.”
In theory, these provocative judgments could be defended, even championed, but in Rome they were proved wrong. There was nothing lowly about the best decathletes, even though their work was exhausting and merciless. To put mediocrity and Rafer Johnson in the same sentence seemed preposterous. He was universally regarded as the athletic royalty of the Games. Yang held the same status in Taiwan, and Kuznetsov in the Soviet Union. As for dullness, with thirty-one athletes competing in ten events, there were bound to be long dry spells, but Smith would be silenced by the time the two-day contest ended, his prediction overtaken by crackling tension on the track.
Although a test of endurance, the decathlon begins at a sprint. The first event is the 100-meter dash. Kuznetsov was in the first of the five heats along with David Edstrom, the young decathlete from the University of Oregon who had burst onto the international scene with his strong third-place finish at the US-USSR dual track meet in Moscow two years earlier.
Like Joe Faust in the high jump, Jim Beatty in the metric mile, and hundreds of other competitors, Edstrom arrived in Rome realizing that he had no real chance at a medal—in his case because of a lingering groin injury that had slowed him since midsummer. Just to compete in the Olympics was a notable achievement in itself, but now he faced the outer limits of an athletic dream he had nurtured since his childhood growing up on his parents’ dwarf-fruit-tree farm in Sherwood, Oregon, about twenty miles from Portland. Inspired by the 1954 movie The Bob Mathias Story, in which Mathias, the handsome two-time (1948 and 1952) gold medal winner, played himself, young Edstrom became obsessed with the notion of being an Olympic decathlete. On a patch of vacant land inside the hundred-acre nursery behind their house, he and his father constructed a makeshift decathlon practice field, including a three-hundred-yard oval track, handmade hurdles, and a sawdust high-jump and pole-vault pit. Throughout his teenage years, almost every day in the summer and after school in the fall and spring, Edstrom worked on his lonesome backyard mission, keeping a diary of his progress. He became proficient enough to earn a track scholarship from the legendary coach Bill Bowerman at Oregon; then to team up with his second track-and-field hero, Rafer Johnson, in Moscow in 1958; and finally to join Johnson again in Rome. But he entered the Stadio Olimpico on the morning of September 5 with a groin pull, an injury he had never had before, and though he was not certain how his body would respond to the 100-meter dash, he had a feeling that it would not respond well.
The first heat went well for no one, as it turned out. Edstrom survived the race without further injury, but his time of 11.4 seconds put him in a deep hole, giving him 768 points in an event where a good score rose to the 950-to-1000 range. Kuznetsov outran Edstrom but was too slow himself, coming in at 11.1 seconds for only 870 points. The experts at Track & Field News concluded from that first dash that the Soviet star had lost a step from his peak showings in 1958 and 1959 and would not be a threat to Johnson and Yang now. “Kuznetsov and Edstrom showed right off that they would not be a factor for the gold medal,” the magazine noted. The Soviet journalists might have reached the same conclusion, but they were under orders not to mention Yang, who had obviously surpassed Kuznetsov. In their dispatches, they would keep noting that Kuznetsov held the second-best score in history—utterly ignoring Yang’s showing in the Trials—and compare their man only to the American, not the unrecognized Formosan.
“You have to do it on that day. You have to do it when they fire the gun.” Those words from Ducky Drake echoed again in Rafer Johnson’s brain as he lined up for his heat of the dash, No. 447 on his back. He knew how important it was to get off to a good start on the first event. But what if the gun goes off again and again and again? There were three false starts in Johnson’s heat, and the third was called so late that Rafer had sprinted 40 meters before he heard the recall gun. No excuses, but in a stamina-testing event where successful competitors need to conserve energy whenever possible. Johnson, through no fault of his own, had expended too much too early. On the fourth try, he came in with a 10.9, three-tenths of a second behind his best showings. When Yang, in the last of the five heats, got off on the first gun and broke the tape at 10.7, he left the track with 1034 points and an 86-point lead on Johnson.
With one man dropping out already, the tribe of thirty all-around athletes moved into the infield at midmorning for the second event, the long jump. Once again the luck of the draw seemed in Yang’s favor. He was the last to jump, giving him the advantage of knowing what marks he had to reach. Once this had been Johnson’s favorite event—he was good enough at it to qualify for the broad jump in Melbourne—but he ran into a stiff headwind on his first leap and managed only 23 feet 71/2 inches. Yang topped that on his first jump, going 24-53/4. That turned out to be C.K.’s best jump, while Rafer on his third and final try came closer to him, at 24 feet 5/8 inches. Still, Yang increased his lead, and went to the noon break ahead by 130 points.
ACROSS THE TIBER at the Olympic Village that lunch hour, cyclist Jack Simes (rhyming with dimes, not to be confused with sprinter Dave Sime, as in rim) sat down at a cafeteria table near the same young boxer he had eaten next to the day before. Simes, who had bombed out in his own Olympic competitions and was struggling with his place in sports, had never seen anyone quite like Cassius Clay. At the first dining encounter, he had been “amazed at this guy’s confidence,” he recorded in his diary. Clay had boasted that he was so fast nobody could hit him and that he would win a gold medal and soon everybody would know his name. Now Simes saw Clay at the table again, this time staring down at a plate of steaks stacked high like pancakes. “What kind of lunch is that?” Simes asked, laughing. A trainer with the boxing squad, sitting nearby, shook his head with a smile. Clay explained that he was readying for competition and needed the steaks for strength.
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