Book Excerpt: Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World

A Brief Preface

This book is shaped around eighteen days in the summer of 1960 when the Olympics came to Rome. In the history of the modern Games, other times and places have drawn more notice, but none offers a deeper palette of character, drama, and meaning. The contests in Rome shimmered with performances that remain among the most golden in athletic history, from Wilma Rudolph in the sprints to Abebe Bikila in the marathon; from Cassius Clay in the boxing ring to Rafer Johnson in the decathlon. But beyond that the forces of change were everywhere. In sports, culture, and politics—interwoven in so many ways—one could see an old order dying and a new one being born. With all its promise and trouble, the world as we see it today was coming into view.

Television, money, and drugs were bursting onto the scene, altering everything they touched. Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling in Rome and could never be taken as seriously again. Rome brought the first commercially broadcast Summer Games, the first doping scandal, the first runner paid for wearing a certain brand of track shoes. New nations and constituencies were being heard from, with increasing pressure from generations of discrimination and condescension.

The singular essence of the Olympic Games is that the world takes the same stage at the same time, performing a passion play of nations, races, ideologies, talents, styles, and aspirations that no other venue, not even the United Nations, can match. The 1960 Games came during a notably anxious period in cold war history; almost every action in Rome was viewed through the political lens of those tense times.

One week before the Opening Ceremony, a Moscow trial brought the conviction of an American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, on espionage charges after his high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Soviet territory. Two days before the Closing Ceremony, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev set sail for New York for a dramatic appearance at the U.N. General Assembly, where he pounded his fist and railed against America and the West. In between, even as athletes from East and West Germany competed as a unified team in Rome, officials in East Berlin closed their border temporarily, laying the first metaphorical bricks for what months later would become the all-too-real Berlin Wall.

The pressures of the cold war played an underappreciated role in forcing change in culture and sports, all much in evidence in Rome. At the opening Parade of Nations at the Stadio Olimpico, the crowd was stirred by the sight of Rafer Johnson marching into the arena at the head of the U.S. delegation, the first black athlete to carry the American flag. Johnson’s historic act reflected his unsurpassed status as a world-class decathlete, but it also served as a symbolic weapon at a time when the United States was promoting freedom abroad but struggling to answer blatant racism at home, where millions of Americans were denied freedom because of the color of their skin. One of the new battlegrounds in the cold war was black Africa, where fourteen nations came into being that year. The ambitions of a postcolonial world were played out at the Olympics when marathoner Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia became the first athlete from sub-Saharan Africa to win a gold medal, running barefoot through the Roman streets less than a quarter century after Italy had invaded his homeland.

Early formulations of the individualism that came to define the sixties could also be seen in Rome, notably in a cocky German sprinter, Armin Hary, and an eighteen-year-old light-heavyweight boxer from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay, whose gold medal performance marked the first step onto the world stage of a character soon to gain renown as Muhammad Ali. And finally, it was at the 1960 Olympics that American women athletes took a more prominent role. Sexism still dominated the Olympic Movement, as it did the entire world of sports, but the realities of the cold war helped force progress for the simple reason that success of U.S. women could boost the medal count versus the Soviets. On the Stadio Olimpico track, in the late-summer heat, the rise of women was helped immeasurably by the radiance of sprinter Wilma Rudolph and the Tigerbelles, who came out of Coach Ed Temple’s little program at Tennessee State University to capture the world’s admiration and inspire women athletes for generations thereafter.