Over at the Olympic Village, the cyclist Jack Simes had plopped down on a comfortable chair in the canteen to watch the marathon with a group of American athletes. “We don’t understand the Italian commentary, but that doesn’t matter because the TV shots are great, with light trucks and cameras following the race,” Simes wrote in his diary. “I’m surprised that the European TV is clear, too. Hartman [Jack Hartman, his cycling teammate] once said it’s because they have more lines on the screen than we do, and that makes a better picture. I wonder how it can be that fifteen years ago the place was a pile of rubble, and now they have better TV than we do. I thought everything was supposed to be better in America and we invented TV. The marathon is at night to give the runners some relief from the Roman heat wave. [When there are only] a few guys off in front, someone says, ‘Look, it’s the guy from Africa.’ And there are chuckles and comments as the camera closes in on his face. The camera pans down to his shoeless feet.”
W. H. Strang, a British national who worked in Ethiopia, was on vacation back home in Northampton, watching the race on Eurovision. When he saw Abebe Bikila in the lead, he felt a rush of pride, he noted later in a letter to the Ethiopian Herald. It reminded him that running was such a routine part of everyday life in Addis Ababa. “It is a common sight to see dozens of men running to market every day along the Jimma road, past the old airport buildings, carrying heavily loaded baskets above their heads. It is men such as these as well as those who run for miles behind their donkeys, who have demonstrated what reserves of power there must be in their bodies to enable them to run such long distances in such difficult circumstances. There must be hundreds of Ethiopians with tremendous potentials of endurance.”
Out of those hundreds came one now, padding down the uneven roadway of the Appian Way, breathing lightly, showing no outward signs of strain. During his adolescent years in the mountains near Debre Berhan, Abebe Bikila preferred riding to running. He could ride anything from a horse to an ox, and felt so natural bareback that when he was herding the oxen he would often ride one backward. At age seventeen, when he left the countryside and joined his divorced mother in Addis Ababa, he started playing soccer and became infatuated with the uniforms of Haile Selassie’s Imperial Army, which he joined two years later as a private in the Fifth Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Body Guard. It was there that he began running and eventually caught the attention of Onni Niskanen, the nation’s director of athletics, who was putting together a team for the Rome Olympics. Abebe Bikila had been running the 5000-and 10,000-meter races, and winning them regularly, but began training for the marathon. In early August, running in the desert near Debre Zeit, he finished a training marathon with a time bettering the winning mark at the 1956 Melbourne Games. That was the time that leaked out to Robert Pariente of L’Équipe, who could not believe it.
One Westerner who could believe it was LeRoy Walker, gold medal hurdler Lee Calhoun’s coach at North Carolina College. Earlier that summer, the State Department had sent Walker to Ethiopia to help train their Olympians, part of the larger cold war effort to win friends in black Africa and counteract Soviet attacks on American racism. Walker was a sprint and hurdle coach who knew little about distance running, but for the rest of his life he jokingly claimed a role in the development of the first great African distance men. As he would later recount the story, with the hyperbole of a joyous legend, when he first encountered six Ethiopian distance runners, he told them to warm up by running around a little hill and back. “Thirty minutes go by, then an hour or two. No sign of the runners. They musta got eaten by lions or something. Two hours. They come back two and a half hours later! Where the hell have you all been? ‘Running,’ they said. Well, it turns out that little hill was a mountain some thirteen miles away.” Walker later told Dave Sime another story: all of the Ethiopians were given a small amount of pocket money to take the bus from their homes to the training facility. One runner was so poor that he kept the money and ran the round-trip home and back, more than thirty miles. And that was before and after their training runs.
Mile after mile, the marathon duel continued up the Appian Way, past the famed Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis, the little seventeenth-century church near the spot where legend holds Saint Peter had a vision of Jesus (Q: “Lord, where are you going?” A: “I am going to Rome, to be crucified anew”), until finally they whisked through the St. Sebastian Gate and neared the Axum Obelisk. It was there that Rhadi tried to accelerate, but Bikila found another gear and pulled away, and word of a lone front-runner filtered back to a surprised press corps. The British writer Neil Allen, from his seat jammed amid his fellow journalists, feeling “the sudden chill of the night” and looking “dazedly at the floodlit Arch of Constantine,” could not believe it when the loudspeaker crackled the name of the leader, Abebe Bikila. But when the name was repeated, he realized he had not misheard. “A completely unknown athlete from Ethiopia was going to win the Olympic marathon. Suddenly, faces lifted, the great crowd waited patiently. Journalists and officials edged forward in the wooden stands, peering along the darkness of the Appian Way hoping to be the first to spot this last and most unexpected hero of the Games.” At last the lights of a convoy could be seen “twinkling in the distance,” Allen recorded in his diary. “There was a brief tussle with one of the persistent Lambretta scooters before it was bundled out of the way, and then—here he came!”
At the Opening Ceremony seventeen days earlier, A. J. Liebling had looked down on the small Ethiopian team marching through the Stadio Olimpico and wondered what they were thinking. What could have been going through their minds on the approach into the Foro Italico as they passed marble blocks extolling the conquest of Addis Ababa and then as they stepped inside a stadium constructed by their oppressor, Mussolini? Liebling now thought he knew what one Ethiopian was thinking. “He had been thinking, correctly, that it would be a fine thing for the home folks if he could run barefoot all over Rome and win the marathon. So he did. It wasn’t even a race; he just ran away from the field, accompanied most of the way by the Moroccan Rhadi, who had used the ten thousand meter as a tune-up. The two Africans, symbolizing the escape of their continent from the people like the Il Tempo editorialist who suggested that all the troubles of the Western world had started with Italy’s expulsion from Africa, fled through the night, leaving behind not only the representatives of the colonial powers but the Russians, whose intentions they apparently suspected. They moved so unobtrusively that half the people in the streets didn’t know that the business end of the marathon had passed them by.”
The official film crew focused solely on the barefoot Ethiopian striding toward the waiting crowd. The street widened, a bright white line down the middle, as the Arch of Constantine came into view, glowing in the darkness. Abebe Bikila ran on the right side, nearest the bleachers. A shadow cast by the strobe light ran with him, his only competition, and in the final steps, his shadow beat him to the finish. The time was 2:15:16. No one had run an Olympic marathon close to that time before. Abebe raised his hands above his waist and kept running until he was directly under the arch, prancing underneath, like a boxer in the ring awaiting the call of his name. Next came a little jig, then three toe touches, pushing his hands down to the ground as though he were unrolling a rug, finally throwing out his palms in an encompassing gesture—he was now everyone’s runner, not just Ethiopia’s—while sportswriters with pens in their mouths crafted deadline leads on portable typewriters for the world’s newspapers. “A skinny barefooted palace guard in the Ethiopian Army of King Haile Selassie ran the fastest marathon in history tonight,” wrote Times reporter Allison Danzig. Nearby, Jesse Abramson of the Herald Tribune tapped out a similar refrain: “In bare feet, an Ethiopian army corporal who had never run a race outside his isolated East African homeland…” Sportswriters tend to share thoughts with one another, so it was no surprise that Abramson, too, seemed interested in reading Abebe’s mind, saying that “he might have asked at the end, if he could speak
anything other than Amharic, ‘Please, can we Ethiopians recover that statue which Mussolini pinched from us twenty-four years ago when I was a lad of four?’” What he did say, through a translator, was that he was not at all tired and could have run much farther. Neil Allen was reading into another source. Pliny was right, he thought: ex Africa semper aliquid novi—always something new from Africa.
In another twenty-five seconds, Rhadi came in, but then there was a two-minute wait for the bronze medalist, New Zealand’s Magee. Coach Lydiard had left his hotel room to be at the finish line, where he waited “tensely” for his runner, he recorded in his diary. “Very pleased with Magee. Has vindicated my faith in him as a marathon runner.” Magee had no idea he had won bronze until officials told him after the race. Gordon McKenzie was still out there, struggling, along with so many runners. What a terrible race, he thought. The course was full of cobblestones and potholes. It was like culture shock running on it. He was emotionally drained and demoralized. The entire effort had been nothing but hard, without incentive or adrenaline, only suffering. By the time he reached the finish, twenty-one minutes after the winner, the medals had been handed out and the crowds were leaving. There was still a massive traffic jam on the streets behind the arch; everyone had a place to go on this bustling Saturday night, but none on such a lonely mission as his. With 300 meters to go, he had given one last push to try to pass another runner, and his calves had seized. He walked five paces, then jogged in, losing three places at the very end, down to forty-eighth place. The only person waiting for him was his wife, Chris. He was told about the surprising winner, a skinny guy from Africa without shoes. “And I had laughed at the barefoot runner,” he said later. “How do you like that? That will teach you not to make snap judgments.”
A. J. Liebling, who did not have to run the race, but only watch it and write about it, agreed with McKenzie about the lesson of Abebe Bikila—“a man’s a man for all that”—but had a brighter assessment of the grueling event. “It was,” he wrote, “a glorious ending to the Olympic Games.”
20
“THE WORLD IS STIRRING”
AVERY BRUNDAGE once wrote in a memo to himself that as a student of history he was invariably disappointed when he compared the Closing Ceremony of the modern Olympics with the splendor of the ancient Greek Games. He loved the idea that in ancient Greece “the victors had to take part with their crown of oleaster on their head” and that the entire procession “sang old songs in honor of Herakles, the founder of the games.” No modern ritual, however elaborate, matched those, he lamented. There were no songs in honor of the modern creator, Baron de Coubertin, and certainly none for the old Chicago businessman.
For the Closing Ceremony in Rome, many of the victors were gone, and the nations of the world were represented by lone flag bearers (including Ingrid Kraemer for the combined Germany, Abebe Bikila for Ethiopia, Yuri Vlasov for the Soviet Union, and gold medalist swimmer Mike Troy for the United States) who marched into the Stadio Olimpico single file early on the Sunday evening of September 11. They formed an arc in the infield as Brundage stepped to the rostrum to bring the Games to a formal end. “In the name of the International Olympic Committee…I declare the Games of the Seventeenth Olympiad closed,” Brundage said. “And, in accordance with tradition, I call up the youth of all countries to assemble four years from now at Tokyo, there to celebrate with us the Games of the Eighteenth Olympiad. May they display cheerfulness and concord so that the Olympic torch will be carried on with ever-greater eagerness, courage, and honor for the good of humanity through the ages.”
Capitoline trumpeters, outfitted in Roman red, sounded a triple fanfare, and the Choir of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia sang the Olympic anthem as the Olympic flame slowly went out and the five-ringed Olympic flag descended. All went dark until, on cue, tens of thousands of spectators brightened the night by lighting paper torches. In the distance, searchlights emblazoned the sky above Monte Mario. Brundage might have preferred old songs extolling the founders, but some observers were overwhelmed by the flickering scene and infused it with symbolic meaning. “There can never have been such a dramatic moment in Olympic history as that this evening…” Neil Allen recorded in his diary. “The whole stadium was a dancing shimmer of flame, living evidence that the ideals and spirit behind the Olympics can never go out.” Wilfrid Smith, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, noted the gentleness of the night, the faint illumination of national flags in the infield, and with a sense of wistfulness wrote of the “harmonious salute” at that time in history “with peace precarious.”
Long after the stadium emptied, the black sky lit up again, this time with a midnight fireworks celebration. As glorious as the farewell rocketry was—with Brundage and his coterie watching from the terrace of Pincio Gardens overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and thousands of Romans catching the show from rooftops, church steps, bridges, and the slopes of Monte Mario—the celebration also brought a reminder of how precarious life could be. Debris from the fireworks landed in the dry hills, sparking brushfires whipped by the winds. A momentary panic spread among thousands of spectators on the slopes, causing a stampede during which at least ten people were trampled and seriously injured. Several cars in the area burst into flames, and the gardens of private villas were scorched as firemen battled dozens of separate blazes all through the night. These fires, in a sense, were the true Closing Ceremony, deepening the inevitable feeling of something gone—these specific Olympics and the larger Olympic ideal—that could not be recaptured. Only a week later, rainstorms would bring floods to central Italy and turn the infield of the Stadio Olimpico into a lake.
THE MORNING after the Closing Ceremony, and before the floods washed out the roads from Rome north to Genoa, Gian Paolo Ormezzano, the young Italian journalist, left the city with his friend Livio Berruti, the gold medalist sprinter. As they drove north to Torino, where they both lived, they stopped for coffee at a bar in Civitavecchia across from a local prison. As soon as they emerged from the car, Berruti was recognized and mobbed by fans. Even the prison guards scurried over to congratulate the cool Italian in shades who had shocked the world by winning the 200. After the brief stop, Ormezzano drove on while Berruti napped. Weaving his car through Genoa, the writer ran a red light and was pulled over by traffic police. On the way down to the Olympics three weeks earlier, he had locked himself out of the car while stopping to relieve himself at the side of the road—and now this! He was worried that he might lose his license, and pointed over to his friend, who was slowly awakening. “I have your colleague in the car,” Ormezzano said, remembering that Berruti had been given a job as a policeman even though he rarely reported for work. But when the officers asked to see Berruti’s identification, he could not find it. Then, in a double take, they recognized him. “Look! It’s Berruti!” They let Ormezzano go, but not without an unofficial fine.
Many of Ormezzano’s colleagues from around the world were among the Olympic stragglers in Rome that Monday, enjoying one last meal on the Via Veneto and writing their final assessments of what they had witnessed. The statistical measurements were in hand. If the Games were a front in the propaganda battle of the cold war, the Soviets could claim victory. They had amassed the most medals, with forty-three gold, twenty-nine silver, and thirty-one bronze, compared to thirty-four gold, twenty-one silver, and sixteen bronze for the United States. In track and field, the U.S. men still prevailed over the Soviets, twenty-two medals to thirteen, but the Soviets accumulated their overall winning total by faring better in women’s track and field (six gold medals to America’s three won by Wilma Rudolph and the Tigerbelles), kayaking, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, weight lifting, and Greco-Roman wrestling. The two superpowers were followed in order of points by the combined German team, then Italy, Australia, Hungary, Poland, Japan, Great Britain, and Turkey. In all, forty-four nations received medals, including the first-ever medals for Ethiopia, Ghana, Taiwan, Iraq, Singapore, and the British West Indies.
/> As Arthur Daley of the Times examined the results and thought back on the competition, he reflected first on the stunning setting. “It must be admitted that it was a whale of a shindig while it lasted. Maybe it was the best. It’s impossible to visualize or recollect any Olympic Games that could match the tone these noble Romans threw. The stadiums and arenas were more sumptuous and opulent than those of any predecessor’s. Furthermore, the entire production was conducted with totally un-Italian efficiency but with typical Italian flair for drama and beauty.” Yet for all that, Daley wrote, “in the cold light of the morning after, too many disquieting thoughts keep intruding.” What haunted him were thoughts of Soviet prominence and of a world catching up to the United States. “The world is stirring not only politically,” he noted. “It is stirring athletically, too. Nations that weren’t in existence at the time of the Melbourne Games four years ago competed here with distinction. The U.S. scares not a soul any more. Once the Americans dominated the show. They don’t any more, nor are they likely to do so again.” Daley viewed the results through a cold war lens, which he said was all that mattered to the Soviets. “The totalitarian powers have the ability to marshal their youth for what they regard, among other things, as part of the propaganda war. They have said so, bluntly and unashamedly. And the Rome Olympics, on that basis, represented a resounding victory for Soviet Russia. The Red brothers beat us in total medals and in unofficial total points.”
Also lingering in Rome were the Soviet correspondents Alexei Dyakov and Vitali Petrusenko of Pravda, who continued the Soviet courtship with the Italian public, lauding the “very friendly, almost Slavic-like hospitality of the local residents,” who among other favors delivered a veritable greenhouse of bouquets to the Soviet embassy to send along to Russian athletes at the Olympic Village. “The village is deserted now,” the Soviet sportswriters noted in their day-after column. “Everybody left. The last athletes are packing their suitcases. Very soon there will be children running around and new residents who were lucky to get these new apartments.” Their fondness for the Italians was always considered apart from the Vatican, which remained a reliable villain. In a paragraph examining the financial benefits of the Games, Pravda asserted that hotels and restaurants did not fare as well as they hoped with the influx of foreign tourists because “the bulk of the revenue from tourists and guests of the Olympics somehow ended up in the safe deposit box of the Vatican.”
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