Rafer Johnson, his gold medal mission complete, relieved to never have to compete in the decathlon again, headed the other way, toward home. He was joined by Dave Sime, whose time in Rome was less satisfying but who wanted no part of the extended European tour. Sime could only wonder which was more frustrating—the injury that left him off the Olympic team in 1956, when he was arguably the fastest runner in the world, or the achingly close disappointments four years later in Rome? He had entered 1960 as an afterthought in the Olympic considerations, still in the shadows of favorite Ray Norton, and then had overcome the flu and an adverse reaction to medicine to win a silver medal in the 100, nipped by Armin Hary in a photo finish at the tape, and a week later stormed from behind to cross the line first in the 4 x 100 relay, only to have that final shot at gold snatched from him because of Norton’s disqualifying baton transfer. Off the track, along with his ailments, he had endured what he viewed as the bungling effort of the cocksure “Mr. Wolf,” the American agent who had botched the effort to persuade Igor Ter-Ovanesyan to defect. Now Sime wanted no more to do with amateur track. While his teammates traveled to Athens, he headed the other direction, making his way back to medical school at Duke. More prized to him than his silver medal was an illicit totem he had seized on his last night in the city, when he, Don Bragg, and Al Cantello slipped out of the village on motor scooters determined to find souvenirs. Perhaps it was not fulfilling Avery Brundage’s vision of the Olympic ideal, but the trackmen concluded their experience in Rome by shimmying up flagpoles to swipe Olympic banners. Actually, the less agile Sime needed a ladder, but in any case, one of the five-ringed flags came home with him in his suitcase.
THE OLYMPICS were not done. Events rolled in and ebbed in waves, and one of the final events was weight lifting, one of the oldest sports of Baron de Coubertin’s modern Games, going back to the first competition in Greece in 1896. After training and waiting in Rome for weeks, the iron men would finally get their chance. Here was an East-West competition much like the high jump, only sevenfold; a direct contest between the superpowers, the Americans against the Soviets, for world supremacy in seven weight classes. The Americans held a slight edge during the two previous Olympics, taking home more gold medals from Helsinki and Melbourne, but the Soviets were getting stronger, they had won the first-ever dual meet in the U.S. two years earlier, and in terms of national attention, the rivalry was lopsided in their favor. There were only a few pockets of weight-lifting mania in the U.S. compared with the sport’s broader popularity in the Soviet Union. Speed and hand-eye coordination were skills admired most by Americans, characteristics more applicable to the nation’s indigenous team sports of baseball, basketball, and football, whereas raw strength was a prized physical attribute in Russia. This is what led Bob Hoffman, the U.S. weight-lifting coach, to assert that outside of sending the first man into space, winning the weight contests in Rome “would be our best propaganda weapon” in the cold war with the Soviets. And of all the individual weight-lifting contests, the biggest coup would be to take the heavyweight class, where the winner is crowned the world’s strongest man.
The Soviet heavyweight was the confident Yuri Vlasov, whose star status was such that he carried his nation’s flag at the Opening Ceremony, immediately assuring his place in Olympic accounts by toting the pole with a single outstretched hand. The U.S. hope was James Bradford, who, if not forgotten, remained virtually invisible despite his heavyweight hulk. Bradford was a thoroughly American product, his biography evoking the promise and contradictions of his country. He came out of Washington, DC, born and reared in a black neighborhood a few blocks north of the U.S. Capitol building. When he was fourteen, he weighed 247 pounds but was “pretty much of a butterball” until he leafed through a copy of Strength and Health, the weight-lifting magazine published by Hoffman’s York Barbell Company in York, Pennsylvania. Inspired by the pictures and stories, he began working out at the 12th Street Y, where he emerged as a world-class young lifter with an unorthodox technique. He lifted the bar with virtually no split of the legs on the way up, only bending his back as he lifted over his head. This later became known as “the Bradford Press,” and though it demonstrated his raw strength, he said it developed not from his prowess but from a fear of dropping the weights during his practices at the Y. There was no weight room there—the neighborhood was dominated by basketball—so he practiced on the basketball court, and he knew he would get kicked out if he dropped the barbells and scarred the floor.
Under the tutelage of Hoffman at York Barbells, Bradford won a silver medal at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, then rejoined the army. When he finished officer training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was leaving to serve with the 30th Infantry National Guard unit in the Korean War, the hardest part of his journey was getting out of the southern bus station. “Here I am a brand spanking new second lieutenant going overseas to defend America and willing to die—because we had been taught at Fort Benning that second lieutenants were cannon fodder, and our cry was ‘Follow me!’ The song we would sing was ‘Follow Me and Die!’—yet when I left Fort Benning to get to the airport, I had the hardest time. I went into the bus station and happened to go into the wrong part, the whites-only part, and they wouldn’t sell me a ticket. They called the sheriff on me and threw me out. And I’m thinking, What is this? A couple of other guys from the class were catching a cab, and they took me in the cab with them. And even then, when we got to the airport, some other cab drivers gave ours a hard time, and he was saying there was nothing he could do because these white fellows took me along.”
Yet Bradford considered himself a patriot. “With all its problems, America is still the greatest country on Earth,” he would say. And it was his love of country that brought him out of retirement in 1960 to take on the resurgent Russians one last time in Rome. He was thirty-two by then, married (his wife, Grace Bradford, was an opera singer in the DC area), the father of three young children, and struggling to make payments on what would become his lifelong family home, a little row house at 641 Ingraham Street in Northeast Washington. The monthly mortgage was $105, while his federal paycheck as a documents clerk in the Library of Congress was $56 per week, meaning fully half his salary went into the house. If Big Jim accepted a few under-the-table loans and bonuses from York Barbells, it could not be said that they enriched him but barely helped him pay the bills. The enforcers of amateurism knew nothing about Hoffman’s financial books, but they were made aware of an offer from Armour beef to provide Bradford and his family with all the meats he needed to train for the Olympics. “Avery Brundage said, ‘If he takes one dollar, he’s out!’” No deal for “the dog kids love to bite.”
Working in the stacks of the world’s largest library had made Bradford a perfect Olympian, at least in the sense that he acquired a keen awareness of the world, unlike many athletes who tended to focus narrowly on their sport. Day after day, from his perch in the government publications section of the Library of Congress, Bradford organized documents arriving from the United Nations. His assignment was to bind them in the proper books and folders. Some documents were in English, but many were in French, German, and Spanish, and while not fluent in foreign languages, Bradford, by sheer necessity, learned enough to get things in the right place. He started paying attention to world events and problems—hunger and disease in Africa, human rights in Asia, nuclear issues in Europe—and came to think of himself as a man of the world. When weight lifting took him overseas, he made a point of getting along with the local people. “For example, in 1959 we went to Warsaw, Poland, and it was still Communist, during the cold war, and other members of the team kept reminding me about that, but I seemed to get along so well with the people. In Poland you weren’t supposed to go out at night without an escort, but I would go to the restaurants and drink beer. I would try to learn their language, and I would want to eat their food. I became native, whereas the other guys would want a hot dog or hamburger.” Bradford also became a connoisseur of inter
national airline food and became partial to KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. “Oh, gosh, with KLM, as soon as the plane would taxi down the runway, they were feeding you. Cheese, tea, or anything you wanted, and they fed you all the way from America to wherever you were going.”
If Bradford was a welcome ambassador for America, he went largely unappreciated at home. A supervisor at the Library of Congress threatened to fire him for taking time off to attend the U.S. Trials and only grudgingly gave him permission to compete in Rome—and then only if he took an unpaid leave, which he could barely afford. Avery Brundage was a big proponent of unpaid leave, or uncompensated time, believing it was a key component of pure amateurism. But Brundage, the Chicago millionaire, and his IOC compatriots, like the Marquess of Exeter, with his lordly castles in the British countryside, did not have to punch a time clock or use half of their take-home pay to cover a monthly $105 mortgage. From Bradford’s perspective, he was caught between a heartless employer and a haughty overseer, but he wanted to compete, and he loved to lift, so he accepted the leave without pay and went to Rome.
By the time Bradford took the stage, the Soviets had already snatched the team title. In the first contest, the U.S.’s Charles Vinci, a 4-foot-11 lifter nicknamed Mighty Mite, defended his gold medal in the bantamweight class, but the tone of the team match was set next when Isaac (Ike) Berger, who had also won in Melbourne, was upset in the featherweight division by Yevgenyi Minayev of Russia. Berger, the son of an Israeli cantor, grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and was a youth cantor himself before transforming his body from that of a 5-foot-1 weakling into a sculpted little muscleman at the gym on Pitkin Avenue. Since joining Hoffman’s York-based squad at age seventeen, he had beaten Minayev six times, and he fully expected to win again in Rome. “I was the surest guy to win on the squad, I was so far ahead of the competition,” Berger said later. But as the match dragged on—it took ten hours, the longest in Olympic history—Minayev got stronger, while Berger wore down. His legs were weak, “like blubber,” he would say later. Too late, he realized that he had made a mistake by overlifting in practice, going back to the day of the Opening Ceremony when he had set a new world record of 3361/2 pounds in the clean and jerk. “You can’t do that. I overtrained. I wanted to show off. Why did I lift so much in practice? I felt good and wanted to see what I could do. It was really dumb.” In the end, Minayev beat him by ten pounds. It was such an upset, Berger recalled, that Coach Hoffman approached him afterward and snarled, “Someone must have paid you to lose!”
Berger was paid, but not as an enticement to lose. By his account, the small sums of cash that he received each month came directly from Hoffman himself or one of his men at York Barbell. The money ostensibly was for Berger’s work at Hoffman’s high-protein-bar factory, though most of his time was spent working out at the gym. He also received an apartment and could eat free at almost any restaurant in town by saying he was one of Hoffman’s Olympians. Hoffman was the ultimate capitalist, always looking for a new product to sell, a new way to fund his weight lifters through bodybuilding contests and exercise schemes, yet the subculture he developed in York was in some ways much like that of a Soviet sports compound, where the athletes enjoyed subsidies that allowed them to devote themselves to sport.
There was another apparent connection between Hoffman and the Soviets in 1960, involving the early use of anabolic steroids. Sports historians John D. Fair at Auburn University at Montgomery and John Hoberman at the University of Texas, both experts on sports and the body, have traced the early use of anabolic steroids in the U.S. back to John Ziegler, a doctor from Olney, Maryland, who conducted steroid experiments on some of Hoffman’s weight lifters in the run-up to the 1960 Olympics. Ziegler told Fair that he started his experiments after learning from a Soviet doctor at an international meet in Vienna that Russian lifters were getting stronger by ingesting a drug form of testosterone. Hoffman, according to Fair, had “been looking for a magic potion” to help his weight lifters. His fad of the moment was isometric exercises, but he became interested, if cautious, when Ziegler told him about the dramatic effects of the anabolic steroid Diabanol (whose generic name was methandrostenolone), a pill that was just then being manufactured by Ciba Pharmaceutical, which was not intended for athletes but for burn victims. Ziegler became known as “the father of Diabanol,” a title that he regretted in his later years. Acknowledging to Fair that he tested steroids on some lifters, Ziegler lamented, “But I wish to God I’d never done it. I’d like to go back and take that whole chapter out of my life.”
Small brown bottles of Diabanol made their way to Rome with the U.S. weight-lifting team. The effects were not established knowledge then, and steroid use was neither against the law nor specifically banned by the IOC. There is evidence that pills were administered to some U.S. weight lifters at the Olympic Village, but there were no indications that in this instance they improved performance. In his book Muscletown USA, Fair reprinted parts of a letter written by John Grimek, Hoffman’s top assistant and a two-time Mr. America, to Ziegler from Rome on September 7, the first day of the weight-lifting competition, in which Grimek said that from the early results, it “didn’t seem as if the ‘pills’ helped that much.” Unlike the doping of the Danish cyclists, the use of steroids by Olympic strongmen went undetected and unreported at the time, but it was another seminal chapter in the long and troubled story of drugs and the Olympics. Harold Connolly, the defending champion hammer thrower who had lost unexpectedly in Rome, said later that he came back determined to strengthen his body by finding out what the weight lifters—he said it was the Russians, not the Americans—were taking. A doctor told him that “the only thing that could build lean muscle and tissue mass” like that was anabolic steroids, so Connolly decided that he wanted to try them. After Rome, the deluge. Doping and steroids became more tempting, more prevalent, and more of a problem year by year, altering the bodies, blood, strength, and endurance of athletes ranging from weight lifters to cyclists, from East German women swimmers to American sprinters.
The match between heavyweights Bradford and Vlasov had its own controversy apart from drugs. Olympic weight-lifting competitions in that era involved three types of lifts: the press, in which the barbell is lifted from floor to chest and then chest to overhead in what are supposed to be two smooth movements with a slight bend but no shifting of the feet; the snatch, in which the weight is lifted floor to overhead in one explosive movement, allowing the lifter to bend and shift his feet; and the clean and jerk, in which the weight is taken from floor to shoulder height, held there briefly, then lifted overhead with a squat and spring of the legs. Bradford was considered the world’s best at the press, and he hoped to build a lead over Vlasov in the first of the three types of lifts. After spending hours meditating in his Olympic Village dorm room, visualizing his handling of the immense weights, he easily pressed 3741/2 pounds, but Vlasov matched him. Arkady Vorobyov, a Soviet weight-lifting expert, described the scene as “a competition between two schools—the old and the new. From the end of the last century, heavyweight weight lifters had been built like wardrobes, with boundless stomachs and backs the width of doorways. Nature had fashioned them with an axe rather than a chisel. Jim Bradford was clearly a representative of this ancient dynasty. When this lifter with the monstrously broad chest and great boulders of muscles appeared on the platform, the hall buzzed enthusiastically. His white costume crackled on his mighty black body. Bringing the weight up to his chest, he pressed with his arms alone. By comparison to his opponent, Vlasov seemed wiry and lean. It was just his massive legs which distinguished him.”
More weight was added for the next round, raising it to 3961/2 pounds. Bradford made his press with apparent ease. Next up, Vlasov. “After smearing his palms with magnesia and adjusting his glasses,” Vorobyov wrote, “Vlasov lifted the weight by a tremendous effort of willpower and pressed it. A magnificent performance!” To Soviet eyes, perhaps, but the Americans thought it was illegal, as did th
e panel of three judges, who disapproved the lift by a majority vote on the grounds that Vlasov paused too long on the way up. The match continued, with Vlasov lifting 11 pounds more than Bradford in the snatch—3411/2 to 3301/2. Bradford held a precarious lead, and it appeared that the gold medal would be decided by the clean and jerk, where Vlasov was superior. But just before they began their final lifts, Olympic officials announced that the initial ruling against Vlasov on the press had been overturned on appeal. Bradford, after thinking he was on his way to victory, was stunned. “I was ahead of everybody,” he recalled later. “I was into the clean and jerk when I found out that the Russians had had the rules changed. In the middle of the contest! They went all the way back to the press and gave this guy the press. They tried to say he did the same amount I did. He was better at the clean and jerk, but I was better at the press. I said to an American official, ‘Don’t let them do that!’ But he said, ‘Well, we don’t want to cause an international incident.’ And I said, ‘What does it take for me to win? I cannot beat somebody when they are going to do things like that.’ To me that was very unsportsmanlike. It really killed a lot in me.”
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