First onto the track was Armin Hary, age twenty-three, looking less like a world-class runner going for Olympic gold than a Kaufhof department store clerk in Frankfurt boarding the weekend tram out to Stadtwald Park for a picnic in the woods. He was wearing baggy blue cotton pants, a green, gray, and white plaid pullover, and a straw cowboy hat cocked jauntily to one side, matching his smile, which also broke on a wise guy slant. “Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Hah-ree!” the Germans chanted upon catching sight of their man. Here was a character only contrarians and fans thirsting for reflected national glory could love; the rest of the world seemed to hate him. Hary was a cocky individualist who cared little about what others thought; all he wanted was to prevail. Growing up in the poor mining town of Gersweiler, not far from Saarbruecken, his young life had been shaped by the unhappiest of childhoods. His father, a German soldier in World War II, came back from three years at a prison camp in Finland to find Armin’s mother living with another man. Hary would say later that his mother was not the warmest person, but she taught him self-determination, and he emerged from those early days driven to create “something unique for eternity.” While not alone among athletes who came to Rome with movie star ambitions, he had a lock on the role of lead villain. He enjoyed his nickname, the Thief of Starts, as a slightly sinister twist on silent-film idol Rudolph Valentino’s Thief of Hearts. His apparent snub of the legendary Jesse Owens the day before had become the talk of the village. Watching him enter the stadium, the writer Marshall Smith, in a cable back to Life magazine, wrote: “Armin Hary annoyed everyone by his arrogant air, his cowboy hat…His conduct was so overbearing that even his German teammates said they hoped he would lose.”
Next came Peter Radford of Great Britain, a coal-haired flash from the West Midlands. Not yet twenty-one, he was heir to a sprinting tradition in the kingdom that traced back to Harold Abrahams, who at the 1924 Olympics in Paris became the first European to wrest the 100-meter gold from the dominant Americans. Radford brought his own inspirational story to the track, much like the great U.S. woman sprinter Wilma Rudolph and her childhood infirmity. Felled by kidney disease at age five, he was wheelchair-bound for three years but overcame that early handicap to become a schoolboy dash champion. In Rome he had won three heats going into the final, and his opponents knew that a year earlier he had run what was then the fastest electronically timed 100 in the world. Though not a favorite, Radford could not be overlooked.
Then there was Enrique Figuerola, wiry and intense. He was the pride of Cuba, a nation that seemed to be turning away from the United States more every day. As Figuerola approached the track for the dash in Rome, his government was announcing that it had seized three more major American corporations in Havana: the tire companies Firestone, Goodyear, and U.S. Rubber Company. Only a dozen Cuban athletes had been sent to the Olympics under the nascent regime of Fidel Castro: a single boxer, wrestler, swimmer, fencer, and weight lifter, two yachtsmen, two gymnasts, and three competitors in track and field. The only ones known on the world stage were the Star-class yachtsmen from the Cardenas family of Havana, remnants from Cuba’s society past who had brought the last medal back to the island, a silver from the 1948 Games in London. Figuerola, who had just turned twenty-one, ran well in the heats, tying Radford in the semifinals earlier that day.
In their blue warm-up suits, the Americans walked out of the tunnel as fully half the field, the maximum three—Ray Norton, Dave Sime, and Francis Budd. The youngest of the group at twenty, Budd came to Rome from Jumbo Jim Elliott’s renowned track program at Villanova University. In concert with Rudolph and Radford, he featured a personal history that oddly made early physical trauma seem like a predictor of future speed. Budd’s variation on the theme: during his childhood in Asbury Park, New Jersey, an illness, probably polio, withered a leg, the right calf two inches thinner than his left. His mother rubbed the leg night after night with goose grease, nutmeg, olive oil, mutton suet, and triple-distilled witch hazel, and—whatever the cause and effect—by high school Budd was excelling in football and track.
While Budd now seemed the healthiest of the U.S. trio, Dave Sime, looking loose and confident, an orange baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, believed he had regained his strength. After running three heats in a day and a half, plus more practice sprints on the side, the big redhead had sweated his way back to form at last. He had wanted this chance at Olympic gold for more than four years, since the leg injury denied him a trip to Melbourne. That was motivation enough, but the prospect of chasing down the irritating Armin Hary inspired him even more. They had run in two heats together already, including the semifinals that morning, and Sime, four inches taller but with a slower start, had nearly caught Hary at the tape each time, losing by an inch. He had promised Jesse Owens that he would catch that rabbit, and here was the time.
It was also the time for Ray Norton, who had arrived at the Games with star billing alongside Rafer Johnson and high jumper John Thomas. His college coach, Bud Winter of San Jose State, in Rome coaching the Olympic runners, was convinced that his prize student would live up to a promise he had made four years earlier when he first saw Norton race in high school in the Bay Area. Come to San Jose, Winter had said then, and I’ll make you the world’s fastest human. Only an Olympic gold medal could anoint Norton with that honorific, but he seemed on the verge. Now in his prime at twenty-two, he had set a world record for the slightly shorter 100-yard dash, had tied the record for the 200, and had swept the sprints at the Olympic Trials. He had studied the films of Jesse Owens, modeled himself after Owens, and wanted nothing more than to reenact Owens’s glory of 1936. Sports Illustrated and Track & Field News thought he would, predicting a Norton sweep of the dashes and relay in Rome, and the newspapermen repeated the forecast of three gold medals.
With Norton, it was essential that he keep loose. Early in his career, when he failed to make the 1956 team, he developed a reputation for tightening with nerves. But Winter took pride in changing that. The coach was a proponent of the speed paradox: by urging his runners to exert slightly less, they would run faster. Run all out, Winter would say, and a sprinter might go thirty yards in three seconds, three times in a row. Now run four-fifths speed, and the time would drop a tenth of a second. Norton seemed to have mastered the technique. He ran with what they called a “loose lip,” his mouth open and his teeth not quite clenching, and he also unfisted his hands and ran with his fingers slightly spread. Coming into Rome, one writer went so far as to call him “the most relaxed sprinter in the world.”
At the village, away from the track, Norton carried himself with quiet confidence. If Rafer Johnson held a status above the others, more in the company of the gods, Norton was an alpha male among the pack of alphas on the squad. Wilma Rudolph was proof of that. By the first week there, virtually every man in the village had fallen in love with the winsome Tigerbelle. Cassius Clay, the young boxer from Louisville, was dizzy over her. Livio Berruti, the elegant, wavy-haired Italian sprinter, was certain that he could consummate a romantic pairing with her if only they could get some time alone. When Dave Sime ate breakfast one morning at a cafeteria table with the Tigerbelles, one of them teasingly said to him, “Hey, Doc, if you win gold, you can have our whole relay team.” Sime laughed and shot back, “Wilma?” But Rudolph only smiled and shook her head no, absolutely not. Even if it was a joke, she was not available, for the same reason that Berruti could never find his opportunity. Rudolph was spending most of her free moments with Ray Norton. They had become the most visible couple in the village, walking hand in hand wherever they went. Even young Clay, so boastful and fearless in the ring, kept his distance. Norton, four years older and more established, intimidated him.
But on the inside, Norton was hounded by worries as he walked into Stadio Olimpico for the hundred final. His mind was not at all loose and relaxed. He had not run a good race since the Olympic Trials, a slump that he attributed to a midsummer incident near the team’s temporary training field in Eugene, Oreg
on. A high jumper——either John Thomas or Joe Faust, their recollections differ on that point—found a small garter snake and twirled it close to the sprinter while he was doing stretching exercises. Norton said he jumped in fright and twisted his lower back, an injury that lingered all summer. Sime started beating him race after race. Then came the train ride down from Switzerland in the triple-digit heat, an unsettling passage that Norton believed set him back again. With aspirin as his only pain treatment, he felt uncomfortable in the 100-meter preliminaries, he said later. “I used to drop my hands and look to the sides and coast and do all kinds of funny little things. Well, I tried, but my body wasn’t responding.”
EVEN IN sprinting, the most elemental sport, there are tools of the trade. Armin Hary carried them in a small black sack: a little hammer, nail spikes, and a starting block. Sprawled on the infield grass, his legs spread wide apart, he took the spikes from the sack one at a time and flicked them nonchalantly into the grass, mumblety-peg style. It seemed all free and easy now for Hary, but in fact he had grown increasingly nervous hour by hour leading up to this moment. He had awakened at six, feeling “well rested and strong,” and went to the cafeteria for a breakfast of two small steaks, two slices of dark bread with jam, two glasses of fruit juice, and a glass of milk. On the way out, he snatched a bunch of grapes and popped them into his mouth as he strolled back toward his room. During the walk, for the first time, he began to notice his surroundings. He was struck by the diversity of the athletic congregation and felt “something like the Olympic spirit.” After a deep and dreamless afternoon nap, with his teammates protecting his door so he wouldn’t be disturbed, he went to a nearby room to play cards. By now he was anxious, unable to eat, feeling a stage fright that would not go away until he entered the stadium and sat in the grass and tossed out his stakes like little knives.
Norton and Sime were now at the starting line, their warm-up suits off, pounding their blocks into place. It was the do-it-yourself ritual of the event: adjust, test, fix, reset, hammer. The Italian starting judge moved into position, holding a shiny chrome starting pistol. Hary edged closer to the track, posture erect, wiggling his loose legs back and forth, then finally flipped his cowboy hat, stripped down to his running gear, and went to work with hammer and block. He was on the outside, Lane 6. Sime had the far inside, Lane 1. Budd was next to Sime, then Norton, Figuerola, and Radford.
In a few minutes, the stadium’s crackling nervous hum softened to a cathedral hush as the runners settled into position, one knee touching, head down. Hary swallowed hard, rocking gently side to side. Most eyes were on him, the Thief of Starts. He had jumped the gun once during the semifinals; would he do it again? Signore Pedrazzini, the starter, dressed in a fine white summer suit, lifted his chrome pistol skyward.
Aposti. Fingers up, backs curved like frightened cats, heads rising with anticipation.
Via. A split second seemed like an hour now. Sime stared straight ahead but tried to keep track of Hary way out there in his peripheral vision.
The finger tightened on the trigger and…
Hary and Sime threw their bodies out before the sound of the gun. False start. The runners decelerated at twenty meters, turned, and ambled slowly back toward the blocks. Norton patted teammate Sime on the rump. There were no yellow flags assigned, meaning the gun jumpers had a freebie, since a second yellow brought disqualification. But the false start only intensified the anxiety. More waiting, legs jiggling, hands through the hair, everyone in position again at last. Aposti. Via. And they were off at the gun—but it sounded again, calling them back. Hary was fingered as the lone culprit this time, leaving too soon. From the stands, loud whistles of disapproval shrieked down from the German claques. When the yellow card went to Hary, he felt at once guilty and martyred at the same time, suffering from what he would later call a “culpability complex” that led him to blame himself even when he thought he was innocent. This time he probably did not leave early, photos would later show. But he coolly raised a finger over his lips to shush his jeering fans.
“Hary must feel like someone undergoing torture,” Neil Allen, a British sportswriter, muttered to a colleague. Yet when Allen trained his binoculars on the German approaching the blocks a third time, he was surprised that Hary “looked pale but unshaken.” What an ice-cold competitor, Allen thought to himself. The arrogance of a winner. A writer from Die Welt came to the same conclusion. Through his binoculars, he noticed that Hary “had a distinct wrinkle on his forehead” but seemed “relaxed to the tip of his toes.” They were right. Hary would say later that he felt “cold, calm, and fully concentrated.” His fans were mostly depressed, worried that the world was conspiring against him and that he could never win without his quick start. Elsewhere in the press box, there was some sense of relief. The prevailing feeling was that now the Thief of Starts would be put to the ultimate test: either play it safe or risk everything.
Observing from the stands, Jesse Owens understood better than anyone the critical importance of a lightning start. Sitting next to journalist Paul G. Neimark, his as-told-to ghostwriter for Scripps Howard News Service. Owens thought back to his own sprints in 1935 and 1936 against Ralph Metcalfe, who “had the greatest finish of any runner who ever lived.” They raced fifteen times, Owens recalled, and he was able to hold off Metcalfe ten times. “Each time we met, I’d get away from the blocks faster and have that big yard or so lead going into the stretch. Then Ralph’s thunderclap finish would go to work. But even the great Metcalfe couldn’t make up that tenth of a second most of the time.” In this race, the diffident Hary had the opening burst like Owens, and Sime and Norton were more like Metcalfe. Norton, looking forward to a pro football career, had Metcalfe’s strength, and Sime had his precise running style, something he had copied when he taught himself the art of sprinting from books in the Duke library.
It seemed forever before the six sprinters settled in for the third start. Figuerola had trouble with his starting block and kept readjusting it. More anxiety for the runners. Another electric buzz of anticipation for the fans. Could Hary get off to another fast start? In the German section of the press box, they asked the question a different way: would the starter dare to shoot back Hary a second time? Jesse Owens was so concerned that he “had fingers on both hands crossed when Norton and Sime climbed into their starting blocks.” Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated kept his eyes on Sime as he “set his feet, saw a rough patch in his lane, and reached out and patted it down, hard. The hollow plop, plop, plop of his hand against the dusty red track sounded clearly throughout the stadium.” It was that deathly quiet, until the gun.
The third start was clean. Norton and Budd broke fast, but by the third step, Hary was striding, loose and relaxed, while the Americans were still short stepping. In his outside lane, closest to the stands, Hary fired clearly into the lead at twenty meters. The German cheering squadrons were chanting. “Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Hah-ree!”
Sime had a better than average start, but even with that he was two feet behind Hary after only three strides. At the halfway point he accelerated, the thunderclap of Metcalfe taking hold. He ran tall and erect. The entire stadium was up now, straining to see, organized German chants punctuating the larger roar of the masses. Norton was a meter and a half behind, but still believed in himself.
Between 60 and 70 meters, the Germans started to worry. Where was Hary’s looseness? He had completely changed his running style, the Frankfurt correspondent feared. “The elegantly looking powerful pacing of his legs, which make his body nearly weightlessly glide over the running lane, suddenly converted into a stamping and cramped fighting.” Hary’s thighs cramped, and he was running through pain.
Norton tried to kick into a finishing gear but had nothing. Ed Temple, Wilma Rudolph’s coach, noticed Norton’s exertion and knew it was over. The young man was trying too hard. Cord Nelson, editor of Track & Field News, reached the same conclusion from his seat in the stands, watching the race with his family. “Too tense,
” he said of Norton. He had seen it many times before. Sprinting, Nelson thought, was “the most violent action your body can take,” yet it also required a delicate balance of violence and relaxation.
Norton didn’t have it. He dropped to the back like debris thrown off a speeding boat. Budd fell back with him.
At 80 meters the Brits in the press box started pointing. Here came Radford, gaining ground stride by stride, past Norton and Budd and Figuerola! It was one of the best accelerations Neil Allen, Roger Bannister, and Harold Abrahams had ever seen. Radford kept repeating a simple mantra to himself to keep his pistons in sync: push the knee in front, lift the elbow behind.
Hary, arms and legs straining, somehow kept pushing forward. He could not see Radford near his tail but sensed that Sime on the far opposite lane was posing the real threat. “I could feel him like a breath of fire on my shoulders,” Hary said later of Sime.
It was now a two-man race, Sime inside, Hary outside. Don Graham, the young copy boy for the Washington Post, was exhilarated by the American’s rush at Hary. “Suddenly at the finish Dave Sime was just flying at him.”
At the end they both leaned at the tape, separated by an inch at most. Sime was pushing so hard that he lost peripheral vision; he could not see Hary. He lunged forward with such ferocity that he lost his balance, one hand whirling wildly as he struggled to stay on his feet and went flying literally, reeling and splattering violently cross-wise onto the track. He had given everything, he could run no faster, but was it enough? The judges were not ready to call it. They would wait for evidence from the new Raceend Omega Timer, a photo-finish apparatus from Switzerland that captured both a photograph of the tape and a precise quartz-clock timing down to the nearest hundredth of a second.
Rome 1960 Page 19
