This extreme endurance method was rejected in some quarters of track and field, though the Australian runners believed in it, as did some high jumpers. Joe Faust, a young high jumper from Culver City, California, the baby of the U.S. track-and-field team, had radically rejected the prevailing notion that a jumper had only so many tries in him. He could jump a hundred times a day to prepare for a meet rather than the more common fifteen jumps twice a week. The Soviet high jumpers were practicing the same way, repetitively, not worrying about whether they were wasting their best leaps in practice. In track and field, as in most sports, the intensity of practice was part of the endless debate over how to reach peak performance, not unlike the debate over pitch counts in baseball or full-pads practices in football.
If running more, rather than less, had always been Sime’s way to strength, could he overcome his fatigue now by running more in the furnace of Rome? It seemed as though every Olympic delegation entered a sprinter in the 100, sixty-three runners in all, so many that there were nine heats in the qualifying round. Each nation that brought a sprinter to Rome was allowed one automatic entry. To enter two or the maximum three runners, they had to meet a time standard set by the International Amateur Athletic Federation, which for the Rome games was 10.4 seconds. The top-ranked sprinters were seeded in different heats, so Sime, running in the third heat, faced no world-class competition. He only had to finish in the top three to move on, and he did exactly that, finishing third behind runners from Venezuela and Barbados, but a relaxed three-tenths of a second ahead of the fourth-place runner. In the heat immediately before his, Sime had watched the German star, Armin Hary, do the same thing, cruising to a second-place finish. Ray Norton, the American favorite for gold, finished first in the sixth heat, but in the slowest field of the nine races.
For the quarterfinal round, starting at four o’clock, there were twenty-seven runners left, placed in four heats. Norton, competing in the first of the four groups, barely improved on his qualifying race but survived, running a 10.6 to tie for second place. Sime and Hary went head-to-head in the second heat. Don Graham, the Post copyboy, had been there watching all day, engrossed by the scene. The stadium was noisy if not full, but he was struck by something unusual about the fans. Thousands of them were Germans, all cheering for Armin Hary (pronounced Hah-ree) as soon as he appeared, but cheering in a way that Graham had never seen or heard back in the States. These were organized chants, rhythmic, urgent, in unison. E. W. Tipping, an Australian writer, found himself in the standing room area in G Class 4, where he spent “a thousand lire to stand in the boiling sun all day, which not only beat down on us from a cloudless sky but bounced back as its reflections came off the white concrete and marble.” He was surrounded by Germans, Tipping noted. “They seem to be the noisiest of the barrackers.”
What was it about the Germans? Here was another reminder that World War II remained too close in memory, not just for fans from the Allied nations but also for the Italians. Mussolini might have aligned himself with Hitler, but to the Italian people the Germans still seemed too cold and organized. An editorial in the Italian paper Il Messaggero noted, “One might think it is a pity, one might find it ridiculous, but it is a fact that often even now—fifteen years after the last war—that a group of Germans awakes political associations as soon as it reveals the impression of being tightly organized.” The reception Germans were getting in Rome did not go unnoticed back home. A columnist in Die Welt thought his countrymen were being stereotyped unfairly. “The Germans don’t scream and shout more or less than the Italians, Americans, or British,” he argued. “The difference: one does not hear the screaming of the Italians, Americans, or British. They are part of the general background noise. If, however, the Germans start to cheer, everyone looks up and says, ‘Aha, the Germans!’”
Aha, the Germans—they were roaring all the way through the second heat of the quarterfinals. Hary and Sime blazed down the track, Hary off to a quick lead and Sime flying closer at the tape. Hary won by a half step, his time of 10.2 setting an Olympic record. Sime closed at 10.3, tying the old record shared by five Americans, including Jesse Owens. But these were just the quarterfinals; Sime and Hary would get two more chances at each other the next day, with the semis and the final, and Ray Norton would get his shot at gold then too. For now the stadium rocked with delirious, metronomic chants from the banner-waving German fans: “Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Rah! Rah! Rah! Cha! Cha! Cha!”
Hary did his own part to intensify any lingering disdain for Germans. At the 1936 Berlin Games, Jesse Owens, the superb athlete from Ohio State, had won four gold medals, defying the racist theories of Hitler and his Nazis. Now a revered elder statesman in track, Owens was in Rome writing a syndicated column for U.S. newspapers. He took particular interest in his own events, including the 100-meter dash, and passed the word that morning through an intermediary, a German newspaperman, that he would love to meet Hary. But Hary abruptly turned him down, snapping, “I’m sorry, I haven’t time to fool with him.” News of Hary’s dismissive attitude toward Owens spread through the Olympics, usually beginning with the phrase “Can you believe it?” One of the lasting myths of the 1936 Berlin Games was that Hitler had snubbed Owens by leaving the stadium before the American was to receive a gold medal. It did not actually happen that way. By the time Owens won, Hitler had been instructed by Olympic officials to shake hands with all winners or none, not just the Germans, and he chose to congratulate none, but the myth endured as an accurate reflection of the Führer’s attitude. Nearly a quarter century later, Hary apparently meant no larger insult. In fact, he worshipped Owens and had read a translation of a book about the black runner’s 1936 experience “about five hundred times.” He was simply a self-centered lone-wolf runner who wanted no distractions—and thought that another runner would certainly understand—but he had unwittingly awakened echoes of Germany’s past.
Owens took it in stride. “I’ve been put off by busier people, buddy, but never by faster ones,” he said.
ABOUT THE TIME the cheering died down, the shot-put final began. There was a cold war going on here, it seemed, but it was an all-American cold war. Californian Parry O’Brien, a two-time gold medal winner and the old man of the sport at age twenty-eight, had been feuding for months with Kansan Bill Nieder, who had formed an alliance with the third great thrower, Dallas Long, the nineteen-year-old phenom from Phoenix who had made his name at the 1958 dual meet in Moscow and had won the event at the Olympic Trials at Stanford in July.
Although Nancy Nelson, Cord Nelson’s twelve-year-old daughter, had picked Nieder as her man in the Nelson competitions, and her uncle Bert thought it was a wise choice, Nieder was lucky just to be competing. Hampered by a strained right knee, he had finished fourth at the Trials, meaning that he would get to Rome only as an alternate. “I was so heartbroken I was ready to go home and never touch a shot again,” he said later. “I wasn’t even going to report with the Olympic squad.” But O’Brien turned him around, not through encouragement but through a remembered insult. Months earlier, when Nieder had set a new record, O’Brien ridiculed him, saying dismissively, “Nieder is a cow-pasture performer. He only does well in meets when there is no competition.” Burning to prove O’Brien wrong, Nieder reported to the Olympic team. He began outdistancing his teammates at the practice meets and forced U.S. track-and-field officials to find a way to get him into the competition, which they did as soon as the third-place finisher at the Trials, the inconsistent Dave Davis, suffered a minor injury.
To Parry O’Brien, shot-putting was part technique, part psychology. As the first athlete to put the shot beyond 60 feet, he had revolutionized the sport, inventing what came to be known as “the O’Brien glide,” a new method of throwing where he started with his face directly away from the field and spun 180 degrees, rather than the previous 90 degrees, allowing him to apply the most force for the longest period of time before letting loose. But beyond that, he was a fierce and unyielding competitor
who made a point of trying to upset his opponents and shroud himself in mystery. “I always wore two sweatshirts, which I would gradually peel off during warm-ups,” he once said. “If I threw long, the opponent would think, ‘How can I beat him if he threw that long with two sweatsuits on?’ I also took a little white plastic jar to competition and always made it quite visible to competitors. When asked, I would say it’s an energy-giving substance. It was clover and honey with water, nothing more, but I wouldn’t tell anyone that.”
His tactics effectively riled up Nieder, a twenty-five-year-old army lieutenant who had played football at Kansas and was known for his bright smile and hair-trigger temper. If O’Brien tried to show him up, Nieder invariably responded. At the pre-Olympic meet in Switzerland, O’Brien seemed bothered by a photographer standing to his side and ordered the man to relocate behind him. When it was Nieder’s turn, he loudly shouted to the photographer, “Come stand in front of me if you want!” It was tit for tat at anything between those two; some teammates speculated that they were competing even on that train down through the Alps to Rome when furniture started flying out of the compartment somewhere in the Swiss night. One writer called them “the Hatfield and McCoy of American shot-putters.” Dallas Long, the youngest and quietest of the trio, generally sided with Nieder. “O’Brien was aloof, always aloof,” Long said later, recalling how the veteran athlete had not uttered one encouraging word to him in Moscow in 1958, when they had competed together against the Soviets and Long was only seventeen.
Nieder, in a pre-Olympics interview with Sport magazine writer Al Stump, said that he and Long encouraged each other to go after O’Brien. “Every time Long and I write to each other, we add the line: Let’s whip O’Brien at Rome! It’s like a war cry with Long and me. I don’t mind telling you that if we can knock O’Brien back to third place in the Olympics, we’ll consider it as big a thrill as anything that’s happened to us.”
But before they reached Rome, Long had become another American victim of unpeeled European fruit. On the train ride from Switzerland, he had vomited uncontrollably, and though he was a Phoenix kid and accustomed to brutal heat, the sun in Rome only further enervated him. After losing eight pounds and some muscle mass, he tried to recover by practicing with the weight lifters, but that proved more troublesome when he strained his back attempting to lift too much. He went into the shot-put final without any expectations of beating O’Brien or Nieder, just hoping to bring home the bronze.
Athletes are accustomed to routines, but the actual day of competition tends to destroy the regimen, especially in an event like the shot put, where, as Long put it, “there is a lot of hurry up and wait. Sit around and wait. Throw and wait. Watch and wait.” They started at nine that morning, and it was after six that evening when the competitors came to their final throws. As expected, the three Americans had far outdistanced the rest of the field. Viktor Lipshis of the Soviet Union was in fourth place, more than a foot short of 60 feet, while O’Brien, Nieder, and Long had all shattered the old Olympic mark of 60 feet 11 inches set by O’Brien at Melbourne four years earlier.
One throw left. O’Brien leading with a throw of 62 feet 81/2 inches. Would he leave Rome with his third gold medal? The cocky champ paced around with a towel around his neck, flexing his muscles. Nieder’s turn. He had felt like “a complete failure” after the Trials, and now he was worried that he would fail again. He wondered whether he had the power of concentration he needed in a tense situation like this. Cord Nelson had noticed that during Nieder’s first throw, he seemed shaken by the roar in the stadium for a different event, the 5000-meter run. But Nieder hated to lose to O’Brien. He had his lucky bandage on his right hand, which had long since healed from a year-old injury. He thought about the cow pasture and the war cry. His right leg protected by an elastic brace, he unfurled one last time. He held the sixteen-pound shot in the palm of his hand, unlike the other throwers, who kept it on their fingertips. Nelson chronicled the scene in his notebook: “He bent low. He shoved off, backwards, a little too fast. His left leg swung around a little too far, and he never did get his right leg under him for maximum power. But he was exploding. And the ball rolled up to his fingers, pressing them back as his arm shot forward.”
In practice, Nieder had gone past 67 feet. Not quite that now, but good enough—64 feet 63/4 inches. He had whipped O’Brien in Rome. And Cord Nelson’s twelve-year-old daughter had the winner.
IN THE CAFETERIAS at the Olympic Village that night there was much talk about the 100. What would happen tomorrow? Could Ray Norton, so disappointing that summer yet still the favorite, fulfill all the predictions and become the world’s fastest human? Could Dave Sime redeem his 1956 disappointment? Who was this fleet German? The U.S. coaches knew something about Armin Hary. The year before, he had come to the States in a brief, unsuccessful stint at San Jose State. You have to worry about him, Bud Winter, the coach there, told Paul Zimmerman of the L.A. Times. The extraordinary aspect of Hary was his lightning-quick break. In international track circles, they called him the Thief of Starts. It often appeared that he was getting off the mark a split second before the starting gun was fired. During the preliminary heats earlier that day, Arthur Daley of the New York Times thought he “rocketed off the mark as if he was so psychic he could sense when the starter’s finger was tightening on the trigger.”
At an earlier meet in Switzerland where he ran a record ten-flat, the officials were so suspicious they made him run the race again—and he came in with the same time. By then Hary had been fighting the doubters for two years. It all went back to an obscure race in Friedrichshafen, Germany, in September 1958, when he apparently ran a ten-flat for the first time. Track experts from Germany, France, and the U.S. all questioned the time, saying it must have been a mistake on the part of the timers. A track writer for Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote that a sudden improvement of two-tenths of a second in the 100 had to be questioned. Marcel Hansenne of L’Équipe argued that German starters tended to favor Germans. There was so much pressure to discount the stunning time that officials settled on a way to do it: they ruled that Hary’s lane at the Friedrichshafen track was slightly downhill. That decision, according to his sympathetic biographer, Knut Teske, at once fueled Hary’s ambition and deepened his distrust of sports functionaries. One thing it did not do was force Hary to change the way he got off the blocks.
How did the Thief of Starts do it? The photographer Robert Riger slipped into a position close to the starting line and took a series of shots. His photographic evidence convinced him that Hary did not leave too soon, even though there were loud shouts of “No!” from fans in the stands when Hary broke in the quarterfinals on his way to the 10.2. German scientists who studied Hary reached the same conclusion. Films showed that his knees were the first part of his body to respond to the sound of the gun, then his toes, then his fingertips, and finally his churning legs. His reactions were three times faster than normal. The average person reacted to sound in twelve-hundredths of a second, Hary reacted in four-hundredths. But it was the combination of mental reaction and physical acceleration that made Hary so dangerous. “It is not something you can learn,” he once said. “The mental reaction ends as soon as I make the first movement. It is all body from then on.”
In the end, some observers believed the final the next day might come down to the official starter, Ennio Pedrazzini, who had been highly regarded as Italy’s top official. The starter used the language of the host country, which would take some getting used to for the Americans: Aposti…Via…and then the gun. And U.S. coaches were concerned that Pedrazzini, like most European officials, fired the gun quickly after the set, in 1 to 1.7 seconds, while most American starters waited a full 2 seconds. The fast gun would help Hary. On the other hand, Pedrazzini had a reputation as a tough starter who would not hesitate to call a false start if the Thief of Starts broke too soon. So it could go either way.
Jesse Owens visited the American sprinters at their dorm rooms in the vi
llage that night. First he talked with Norton, who told him that he was still recovering from an old back injury but felt that he would run his best race when it counted the next day. Owens was concerned about Norton’s slow times and wondered whether he was ready. Then he went to see Sime, who had sprinted faster each outing that day and had rejuvenated himself after the two preliminary races by running four extra 100-meter dashes on his own at the practice track. He was running his way out of fatigue. The extreme endurance method seemed to be working. Sime was as mad as anyone when he heard about Hary’s snub of the immortal American champ, and wanted badly to get back at him. “I almost caught that rabbit, Jesse,” he told Owens. “Maybe tomorrow I can.”
There was a different aura in the streets of Rome that night. The city had become lively, chaotic, bustling, antsy. Romans had returned in full force in the last hours of August, streaming back by the thousands from their holidays. At dusk, it took nearly three and a half hours to drive from the Stadio Olimpico to the Domus Mariae, near the Vatican. Summer was ending, time to get to work.
10
BLACK THURSDAY
LATE in the afternoon, at a quarter after five, the fastest men in the world emerged from the tunnel at the far end of Stadio Olimpico and strolled casually toward the starting area for the final of the 100-meter dash. It was the second day of track and field, the first of September, and the white bowl of the stadium was filling with spectators for the first time since the Opening Ceremony. Noisy American tour groups filtered in from side trips to Naples and the Amalfi coast. German fans began assembling in cheering squadrons, unfurling their banners. Even the press section was crowded and alert. For the pure distillation of human energy, there was no event like the Olympic 100: crackling anticipation, ten explosive seconds, and it was done.
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