The ruling pushed Vlasov into a comfortable lead with his best lift still to come. Weight-lifting crowds traditionally sided with the athletes when judges rejected a lift, but this time the large and boisterous audience inside the Palazzetto dello Sport was on Bradford’s side and “broke into loud boos when the Russian protest was upheld,” according to a wire report.
For the rest of his life, Bradford would insist that had it not been for Soviet manipulation of the appeal, he would have won. Perhaps athletes deserve the prerogative of saying “if only,” especially when something suspicious interferes with their hopes. In any case, Bradford knew that he could not match Vlasov in the clean and jerk, and as it turned out, Vlasov’s margin there was so overwhelming that he would have had more points even without the appeal. When Bradford tried to lift 412 pounds, more than he ever had before, he tumbled over backward from the weight. The official Italian film of the Olympics shows him later leaning against a side wall, No. 5 in a white shirt, bowing his head and shaking it in dismay. Vlasov, now free from the pressure, strutted onto the platform thinking only of breaking the world record. A Pravda correspondent reported, “There was a lot of excitement in the audience” when Vlasov, after topping Bradford’s best lift, asked for 446 pounds, a “weight that until recently was considered pretty much impossible for the human body. In a split second, this weight was up on his outstretched arms, and the audience burst into applause.” When he jerked the record amount over his head, “people got up chanting bravo! And then endless applause, and the crowd surrounded Vlasov and picked him up on their shoulders.” As Bob Hoffman’s last man fell, his assessment of what weight lifting meant to the Soviets seemed correct. Vlasov’s record-breaking performance, Pravda concluded, was “the biggest achievement of the Olympics” and the team’s overall performance such “a convincing and full victory” that it “symbolized the strength and power of Soviet sports.”
Over at the Palazzo dello Sport, the medals were being awarded after the basketball finals, which had taken place simultaneously. The U.S. team, never seriously challenged throughout the tournament, crushed Brazil for the gold medal, winning 90–63. After Jerry Lucas’s early rebound basket, the first of a game-high twenty-five points for the Ohio State center, the Americans never trailed, playing what Coach Newell called their best game of the Olympics. Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, though scoring only eighteen points between them, played brilliant floor games, and the Brazilians seemed to give up midway through the first half after big Walt Bellamy landed an elbow to the mouth of a Brazilian player and sent him sprawling to the court. Though it did not seem deliberate, Bellamy was ejected, but the Brazilians played timidly after that. “That was the end of the game for them,” Robertson said later. “They were out of it at that point. They were not going to win anyway, but they didn’t put up a big battle at all then.”
The most compelling action at the Palazzo happened off the court. In a contest to determine the final positions below first place, the Soviets faced the Italians, and the crowd was fiercely partisan for the home team. There had been several near-fights in the game; the Italian fans thought the Russians were playing dirty. They jeered and whistled whenever a Soviet player stepped to the free-throw line, and several times tossed things onto the court, halting play. Loud chants of “Italia! Italia!” went up when the home team closed the gap, but the Soviets eventually prevailed, 78–70. Only a week earlier, in the same arena, Pete Newell had watched with apprehension as the Italian boxing crowd jeered and hissed through the playing of the national anthem, upset by a decision that favored the Americans. Newell viewed that response in a cold war context and wondered whether the audience was expressing a political as well as sporting rebuke of the United States. Now the sentiments had turned, and the Soviets were greeted with loud jeers when they took the second step on the medals podium, while Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, standing on the top rung for the U.S., received a rousing ovation. West was surprised by the emotions that overwhelmed him at that moment, as the flag rose, the anthem played, and he stood side by side with his teammate, representing his country at a difficult moment in history. Robertson was equally moved and felt a sense of brotherhood with his fellow captain. “It was a moment of jubilation for me, a very special moment,” he said later. “Jerry and I being from different parts of the country…and neither of us had any money, and we are on the stands for the gold medal, one black and one white, with all the troubles that were going on in the country at that particular time, which people don’t like you to talk that much about, the race relations then. For [the two of us] to stand there and take that medal for the country, it meant a lot.”
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV was on his way to New York by then. He had left the night before from the Soviet naval port of Baltiski on a ten-day sail from Estonia out the Baltic and across the Atlantic aboard the Baltika, accompanied by a cordon of leaders from Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. According to William Taubman, Khrushchev’s biographer, he spent his time reading position papers, getting briefed by intelligence officers while lazing on a deck chair, consulting with the Eastern Europeans, and playing countless games of shuffleboard. He prided himself on not getting seasick. When he left, he was concerned about how he would be received at the United Nations, but as the trip toward New York progressed, he became exhilarated by the prospect of a bold confrontation with the West.
19
A THOUSAND SENTINELS
AT THEIR assembly point atop the Campidoglio steps, sixty-nine distance runners warmed up before the start of the marathon. It was quarter after five on the Saturday afternoon of September 10, the last full day of the Rome Olympics. Sunlight glanced off the ruins of the Coliseum nearby, and church bells pealed in the distance as some athletes went through stretching routines and others jogged in tight orbits around shrubs and statuary. Lining the streets below, spectators jostled for position in the swelling crowd.
Gordon McKenzie, one of three Americans in the race, was nervous as he descended the steps and approached the starting line. McKenzie did not think of himself as a marathoner. He had been a miler at New York University and then a 10,000-meter specialist until earlier that year when he entered the Boston Marathon, where his wife, Chris, a fellow runner, had urged him on from the back of a motor scooter. For finishing second in Boston, he had won a bowl of stew, a laurel leaf, a trophy, and a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. His optimism in Rome now was tempered by uncertainty. He knew little about the marathon route and less about the field of competitors. Reports before the race had mentioned three Brits, two New Zealanders, two Soviets, a Moroccan, and an Argentine as the likeliest to head the pack. As he waited for the gun that would send the international horde off and running, McKenzie stood next to his teammate Allen Kelley, and not far from “a skinny little African guy in bare feet.” How could someone think of running without shoes? McKenzie wondered.
“Well,” he said to Kelley, nodding in the direction of the barefooted stranger. “There’s one guy we don’t have to worry about.”
In bare feet, dark red trunks, bright green shirt, the two vertical lines of No. 11 defining his narrow, bony back—that was Abebe Bikila. He had running shoes with him when the Ethiopian team arrived from Addis Ababa nearly a month earlier, but the shoes were frayed and had to be replaced. In Rome he bought new ones, and wore them on several practice runs, but they did not fit the contours of his thin feet and caused blisters. On the day of the race, he decided it would be less painful to run with no shoes than with ill-fitting shoes, so there he was in his bare feet. If anyone’s soles could be tough enough for the twenty-six-plus miles of pounding, Abebe Bikila’s were, hardened by countless hours of barefoot running over Ethiopia’s rugged terrain.
The crosswinds of change were blowing across black Africa that summer, with so many new nations being born: Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Congo, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, and Togo. But to this point, the emerg
ence of a new Africa had been felt only faintly in Rome. In the decision-making suites, Avery Brundage and his IOC executive board had averted their eyes from the blatant segregation in South Africa, putting it off to another time, while in the sporting arenas, the Africans, like fellow athletes from other emerging regions around the world, were mostly overwhelmed by the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans. Only two of the nearly one hundred competitors from sub-Saharan African nations had won medals (not counting the whites-only squad from South Africa, which claimed one silver and two bronze). Clement Quartey, a light welterweight from Ghana, had won a silver medal in boxing, and Abdoulaye Seye, a sprinter from Senegal, had taken a bronze in the 200-meter dash. Even then, Seye’s feat had an Old World tint, since he ran wearing the colors of colonial France rather than his homeland.
The writer A. J. Liebling, who claimed a sentimental rooting interest in underdog nations ever since he “took Carthage’s side against Rome,” had spent his time at the Stadio Olimpico hoping that some newcomer would win an event “to encourage the others.” He had been especially taken by the Flying Sikh, India’s Milkha Singh, who had broken an Olympic record even as he finished fourth in the 400, barely missing a medal. But as the Rome Games neared an end, Liebling informed his New Yorker readers, “the notion that every jungle harbors instinctive high jumpers and every desert swift-footed runners was exposed as a romantic fallacy, and the new boys looked a couple of Olympiads away, by which time they would have had some coaching.” The small Ethiopian squad, with the added incentive of competing in the capital city of a country that had invaded them twice, had been shut out so far, but here was one last chance.
Fallacy or not, some observers were immediately drawn to the romance of the shoeless Abebe Bikila. While the rest of the press corps was stuck in makeshift bleacher perches near the finish line, the Italian sportswriter Gian Paolo Ormezzano was lucky enough to hitch a ride in the back of an official Olympic film vehicle that would accompany the runners along the route. Ormezzano and his friend Sergio Valentini, a journalist working for the film company, decided to choose a runner to support “to make it more fun.” One look at Abebe Bikila, and they had their man. Did he have a chance, or was he one guy no one had to worry about, as the American McKenzie assumed? There was at least one hint about his talent. Robert Pariente, a track expert for the French sports journal L’Équipe, happened to notice a recent running time of 2:21:35 next to the Ethiopian’s name on an early marathon tip sheet. But Pariente quickly dismissed it, saying to himself, “Is not possible in the desert.”
In the last seconds before the starting gun, Silvio de Florentis, wearing the colors of the home Italian team, was so nervous that he “pissed in [his] pants like a horse.” Like McKenzie, he had never run a competitive marathon until that year, and he too had not heard of the Ethiopian. He thought the Russians were the ones to worry about. The New Zealand runners—Barry Magee, Jeff Julian, and Ray Puckett—were seen off by Arthur Lydiard, their renowned distance coach. Two from Lydiard’s impressive stable of runners had won gold medals already, Peter Snell in the 800 and Murray Halberg in the 5000, and he now had high hopes for Magee, though the marathon course itself already had proved vexing for his team. Days earlier, they had tried to trace the route by car, five of them crammed into a compact Fiat, but their scouting mission encountered one calamity after another. First they were stopped by the cops for having too many passengers, then they were slowed by an accident in front of them involving a truck and a motor scooter, and finally, after only the first ten miles, the car gave out altogether, and they had to push it up a hill before giving up and hailing a cab to retreat, unenlightened, back to the Olympic Village.
There were only more frustrations for Lydiard now. After giving last-minute instructions to his runners, he thought he might follow the race on television at a bar, but he could not find one nearby, so as the race began he felt completely out of touch. His audacious Australian counterpart, Percy Cerutty, might have done something bold and out-of-bounds at that point, like seizing an official motor scooter to follow the race, but Lydiard and Cerutty were running gurus of opposite temperaments, and Lydiard went back to his hotel room.
At half past five the marathoners went off in an amoebalike mass, expanding and contracting, spilling out to the sides, elongating, flowing around the Coliseum down the Passeggiata Archeologica toward Viale Cristoforo Colombo and nine miles southward on the first leg of a triangle that led back to a finish line near the start. No modern marathon since the first one in Athens in 1896 had featured more tradition; much of the course was a spectacular tour of ancient Roman history. Yet at the same time, no modern marathon was more defiant of Olympic tradition. Marathons traditionally were held during daylight and ended with the runners entering the main stadium to the cheers of a vast throng. In the heat of Rome, the race began at twilight and proceeded into darkness; and the finish line was not inside the Stadio Olimpico but at the Arch of Constantine amid the Roman ruins.
Of all Olympic events, the marathon is most often connected to the Games of ancient Greece. Perhaps fittingly, it is also the most enveloped in myth. In the words of Olympic historian John A. Lucas of Pennsylvania State University, “the task of disentangling…fact from legend and myth…is a formidable one.” One indisputable fact is that there was no comparable race at the ancient Games. The marathon was inspired by the legend of a messenger running approximately twenty-six miles from the small town of Marathon to Athens to announce a Greek victory over the Persians, but historians have concluded that the legendary run was only that, a legend, with no grounding in fact. While the story is often attributed to the Histories of the great Herodotus, he never wrote about it; instead he recounted the tale of a messenger named Pheidippides who was said to have run from Athens to Sparta, a much longer distance of 150 miles, to seek Sparta’s help in the battle of Marathon. Nineteenth-century romantic poets, including Lord Byron, seized on Marathon as a symbol of freedom, and Robert Browning wrote a poem that placed Pheidippides in the heroic role of running from Marathon to Athens, confusing it with the run to Sparta. By then the story, real or myth, was so alluring that when Baron de Coubertin was planning his first Olympics at Athens in 1896, he was persuaded by a compatriot, Michel Breal—a scholar of Greek mythology at the Sorbonne—to include a race called the marathon.
In the early going, Gordon McKenzie stayed near the back of the second pack of runners. He had an empty stomach (this was before the days of pre-race carbo-loading), having not eaten in six hours. Abebe Bikila began not far from McKenzie, near the rear, on the left side of the street, but effortlessly moved up to the back of the first pack by the time they ran past the Axum Obelisk, the majestic fourth-century monument that Mussolini’s army had looted from Ethiopia in 1937 and that now stood outside the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization building. In the lead at that early stage was Arthur Keily of Great Britain, followed by Rhadi ben Abdessalem of Morocco, a distance runner of remarkable stamina who only two days earlier had finished fourteenth in the 10,000. The first leg of the triangle went south along Cristoforo Colombo, past the Palazzo dello Sport and the grandiose state buildings of Mussolini’s EUR sector, then out into the Italian countryside on an up-and-back jag before turning east for the second shorter leg along the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the outer-ring highway around Rome.
McKenzie’s plan had been to store energy for this stretch of the marathon. He was a slow starter and had it in mind to run his own race and not worry about what others were doing. But his legs started feeling sore after the first forty-five minutes, darkness fell over the Raccordo Anulare, and he soon became disoriented. He had no sense of where he was or where he was going. There was a severe pain in the left side of his stomach, a discomfort he later recorded in his daily diary, with another notation that his “left hamstring joining buttock was very tight.” He was running in a pair of Hyde athletic shoes that had extra rubber soles in them, but his feet started to hurt. With every few paces, the nigh
t seemed darker, more alien. Now and then other runners passed him, but mostly he felt utterly alone, like he was “running in an isolation booth.” Up ahead New Zealand’s Barry Magee was also uncertain about where he was. He thought he was lagging in the middle of the field, but then a small pack led by Sergei Popov of the Soviet Union came up to join him. Popov was a favorite, holding the best time that year, so Magee figured he might be near the front, especially after they passed the early leader, Arthur Keily. By then he and Popov had moved ahead of their pack and were running alone. When Popov slowed at a water station, Magee took off by himself. It was then that he saw lights ahead of him, far in the distance.
Two competitors were up there, making the turn off the ring road and heading north, back toward the city, along the Appia Antica, the old Appian Way, queen of the Roman roads. What a strange and beautiful sight it was: a half moon glowing above, a thousand sentinels lining the ancient path, soldiers holding torches, stationed ten meters apart like human streetlights block after block; uneven cobblestones below, cypress trees and ancient ruins to the sides; a little convoy ahead, including a golf cart, two motorcycles, a station wagon carrying the film crew, and a lorry with photographers. All were focused on two small figures moving through the night: Rhadi ben Abdessalem and Abebe Bikila. They ran nearly side by side, No. 185 and No. 11. The soundman in the back of the station wagon picked up one noise in the silence, the steady pat, pat, pat, pat, pat of Abebe Bikila’s bare feet.
Robert Creamer of Sports Illustrated, in charge of his magazine’s coverage in Rome, had gone out to witness the marathon’s start at the Campidoglio—“It was marvelous to watch the old thing begin as they went piling off toward the Coliseum”—then retreated to the Time bureau to monitor the remainder of the race on television. One of the office workers was an Italian woman who had lived in Ethiopia during the era of Mussolini’s occupation. When she saw Abebe Bikila in the lead, Creamer recalled, “she got all excited and started shouting, ‘We’re winning! We’re winning!’”
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