Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  At the end, according to Pravda, the crowd chanted, “Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and our beloved government!” And the athletes cheered back a chorus: “Glory! Glory! Glory!”

  Later that week, several prominent Soviet Olympians, including Vlasov and Ter-Ovanesyan, were awarded Lenin state medals at another ceremony. As heroes of sport, they would be afforded even more special privileges, but the medals were also meant to inspire them to “perform even better,” said N. N. Romanov, chair of the Central Sports Committee, who had led the Soviet delegation in Rome. This was the second major award ceremony for sports representatives in three years, Pravda pointed out, emphasizing the importance of sports in the cold war. “In the spring of 1957 a large group of leading athletes and organizers of the Melbourne Olympics were also given awards,” the newspaper stated. “The Soviet athletes achieved decisive victory in Rome over the team of the leading capitalist country, USA. So now sports fans from all over the world recognize that the Soviet Union is the first and most powerful country in sports.”

  Not long after his return from Rome, Ter-Ovanesyan was at a training camp along the Black Sea. He had not won gold in 1960, but he had gained invaluable confidence in finishing third behind the two Americans, Ralph Boston and Bo Roberson. After his childhood reverence of Jesse Owens and his awe of the American long jumpers in Melbourne in 1956 and Moscow at the dual meet in 1958, he now realized his inferiority complex was gone, and so was any fear. Day after day at training camp, he was jumping freer and farther than ever before. By his own measurements, he was consistently eclipsing the world record set by Boston before the Olympics. He was so excited that he called the sports council in Moscow and said he was at the top of his game, ready to jump farther than anyone had ever jumped before, and was wondering whether there were any track meets where he could compete. They told him that a week later there would be a track meet in Yerevan in the Armenian republic. Ter-Ovanesyan grew up in Kiev, but Armenia was his homeland, the birthplace of his father. He quickly signed up for the Yerevan meet, and his expectations were met, as he surpassed Boston’s record with a leap measured at 27 feet 3 inches. As he later recalled the scene, the Armenians embraced him as one of their own and celebrated his accomplishment with a countryside festival where they feasted him to fresh-killed meats roasted over an open fire.

  In the decade after Rome, Ter-Ovanesyan made several trips to the United States to compete at track meets, and became so familiar with America that he could talk intimately of New York (its enormity and energy overwhelmed him) and Los Angeles (he loved Hollywood and once was invited to actor Gregory Peck’s house). The lure of the Western world remained powerful, and the possibility that he still might defect was strong enough to make him someone that both American and Soviet agents watched closely. Ralph Boston, who remained his great rival, remembered a moment at the U.S.-Soviet dual meet at Stanford in 1962, a nationally televised two-day spectacle, when Ter-Ovanesyan backed him into a corner to talk. Ter-Ovanesyan asked him some questions about life in the U.S., and when Boston asked him why they were standing in such a peculiar place, crowded up against two corner walls, Igor explained that “there are lip readers on the Soviet team, and I have to be very careful about what I say.” The next year, Ter-Ovanesyan led a Soviet team at an indoor meet at Madison Square Garden, and the CIA recruited David Sime, by then graduated from Duke Medical School and starting his residency, to fly up to New York for one last defection effort. “They got me a pass to go on the field to hook up with Igor to talk to him again,” Sime recalled. “So I fly to New York, and I see him, and he sees me, and he looks away.” Sime could tell that Ter-Ovanesyan looked uncomfortable, as though he were being monitored. “Shit, I gotta at least try,” Sime said to himself. “So I catch him for a moment. ‘Igor, how are you?’ I ask. He says, ‘Nice to see you, David. I can’t talk to you anymore.’”

  The next time Boston saw Ter-Ovanesyan, at the Olympics in Tokyo, there were security guards to his left and right. The hoped-for defection never happened. The West-loving long jumper won a bronze again in Tokyo, competed at two more Olympics, set the world record twice, and went on to become an esteemed coach, a professor of track and field at the Russian Sports Academy in Moscow, the vice president of the Russian Track and Field Federation, a lifetime honorable member of the International Association of Track and Field, and the founder of an organization called Sports Against Drugs.

  The temptation of Igor Ter-Ovanesyan was played out in reverse in the story of James Bradford, the black American weight lifter. After having to take an unpaid leave of absence from his job at the Library of Congress to compete in Rome, Bradford returned to Washington as an Olympic silver medalist, but no one seemed to care. There was no celebration for him at work, barely any notice at all of his world-class achievement. “Nah, they just ignored it,” Bradford said later. “I come back to my job, and that is it. That was par for the course then.”

  Bradford had been so discouraged by the finals in Rome, where he thought an appeal ruling cost him a gold medal, that he decided to give up competitive weight lifting, but he came out of retirement in 1961 at the urging of Yuri Vlasov, who called him and personally invited him to visit the Soviet Union for a series of weight-lifting events. Out of all his adventures overseas, this was a trip Bradford would never forget. Vlasov picked him up at the airport and drove him around in a specially built Russian car that was going to be given to President Eisenhower at the 1960 summit meeting that never happened because of the fallout from the U-2 spying incident. Instead of giving the car to Eisenhower, officials gave it to Vlasov when he returned from Rome. “So I was riding around in this car with a plaque on it that said ‘Awarded to the President of the United States,’” Bradford remembered. It was the first sign to him that world-class athletes were treated differently in the Soviet Union.

  Over the ensuing days, Vlasov offered him more evidence of the difference. “For example, all he did was weight lifting. He didn’t have to work. He asked me how much did my government pay me for weight lifting. I said they didn’t pay me anything. He said, ‘Bullshit!’ He couldn’t speak that much English, but he got that much out. He didn’t believe I had to work. He couldn’t believe that in a rich country like the United States, that I worked. His apartment was free. All he had to pay was something like ten dollars a month for utilities. His wife went to the champions store to get food. She would just take her basket into this store and pick up any food she wanted and go home with it. He had the car. It was a Russian model sedan. And also they made him a captain in the army, so he got the captain’s pay. And he was on some government council. And transportation was free, because he got a thing called Master of Sports and got a little pin that you put on, and he could go down to the airport and show this little pin and say, ‘I’m Vlasov, I want to go to Leningrad.’ If the plane was full, they would pull someone off.”

  The stories went on and on, and Bradford listened, thinking about how he was struggling to meet his mortgage on a little row house back on Ingraham Street in Northeast Washington and support a wife and three kids on $56 a week for his work at the Library of Congress, where no one seemed to know or care about his athletic prowess. Vlasov introduced Bradford to Valeriy Brumel, the great high jumper, who told him he had a job coaching high jumping at Moscow University. “I knew they were in a sense trying to pump me. I could feel this undercurrent of defection,” Bradford said later. “They were saying, ‘If you come over here, we could do this and we could do that.’” Bradford was impressed by the higher education system in the Soviet Union, and by the treatment of athletes, but he was not interested and came no closer to defecting than Ter-Ovanesyan had. He had fought against the Communists in the Korean War, and entered the Rome Olympics out of a patriotic urging to beat the Russians. At his hotel in Moscow, when he couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night, he got up and went down to the lobby and tried to go outside for a walk, but he couldn’t leave because the doors were locked. That wa
s difference enough for Bradford. He felt more freedom in the United States, despite the reality that there were many places in America where he could not eat or sleep because of the color of his skin. “Say what you want,” he would say. “I still think this is the greatest country on Earth, with all its problems.”

  There would come a time, decades later, when Yuri Vlasov would find himself in no frame of mind to sell the Soviet system to any outsider. With his dark-rimmed glasses and studious demeanor, Vlasov always had the look of an intellectual academic. He became a writer and poet after he retired from lifting, and one of his books, The Special Region of China, was about his father, who had been a Soviet spy executed in China by security forces. As a leader of the Soviet weight-lifting federation, Vlasov found himself increasingly disillusioned and started speaking out against a win-at-all-costs sporting philosophy and the massive use of steroids and other drugs in the pursuit of medals. “Gold medals have always been a yardstick of their work,” Vlasov said of Soviet sports officials, “and at the same time a shield concealing their idleness and easy life. What was important was medals. How you got them—whether fattening athletes up on chemicals or swallowing white hot coals—was a secondary matter.”

  On the matter of steroids, Vlasov said they were widespread throughout the Soviet bloc sports system and in the international weight-lifting culture—and was ostracized for his outspokenness. Soviet officials restricted his travel, censored his books, and at one point, he claimed, even edited the film of the Rome Olympics to excise the shots of his famous entrance at the Opening Ceremony carrying the Soviet flag with one outstretched hand. He became known as a dissident, disenchanted with Communism, and was elected to the Soviet Duma—its parliament—in 1989, where at first he was affiliated politically with the liberal wing led by Boris Yeltsin. But his politics grew increasingly harsh after that, taking on a conspiratorial strain of anti-Zionism. Ter-Ovanesyan, who had considered Vlasov a friend, a fellow outsider within the restrictive Soviet system, was not surprised by the arc of his career. “He was considered an intellectual in sports, but he had an uneven temper,” Ter-Ovanesyan said of the great weight lifter. “He was prone to depressions. He was very strong, but his character was kind of neurotic.” In the Wild West atmosphere of post-Communist Russia, Vlasov became increasingly estranged, writing and theorizing as a lone wolf.

  ABEBE BIKILA made his triumphant return to Addis Ababa on the afternoon of September 15. A felicitous saying by then had swept his homeland: “It had taken Italy a million-man army to defeat Ethiopia, but only one lone Ethiopian soldier to conquer Rome.” The arrival of the marathon gold medalist at Haile Selassie the First Airport was witnessed by tens of thousands of countrymen shouting “Aaa-bbe! Aaa-bbe!” Makuria, the lion mascot of the Imperial Guard, was also there, wagging its tail. Abebe, draped in floral wreaths, rode through the crowded, noisy streets in the open bed of a white-painted Imperial Guard truck with the Olympic rings stenciled on its sides. Lampposts and windows were festooned with the green, yellow, and red Ethiopian flag. The caravan moved down Churchill Street and arrived at the Imperial Palace at Haile Selassie Square.

  “With His own hands His Majesty the Emperor decorated Abebe Bikila with the Chevalier of the Order of the Star of Ethiopia,” the Ethiopian Herald reported respectfully. Haile Selassie’s remarks sounded rather stiff, if regal. “We are very much pleased, for you have ably shown to the world that sport is neither new nor foreign to Ethiopia,” he said. “To win the laurel of world victory in a race which demands spiritual and physical strength is a significant event that brings global reputation to our country.” Later that evening, a cocktail party was held for Abebe at the officers club, and Brigadier General Mengistu Neway promoted him from private to first corporal, the first of many military promotions that would accompany his running fame. This same General Neway would attempt a coup only three months later, in December, while the emperor was out of the country. The rebellion was swiftly crushed and many members of the palace guard were jailed, including Abebe, who got rounded up in the chaos. But he was above politics, and evidence showed that he was out running when the coup occurred, and he was quickly released.

  Abebe was all of Africa’s now, and the world’s. In February 1961 he was invited back to Rome as a special guest of CONI, the Italian National Olympic Committee, for the premiere of the official film, La Grande Olimpiade, directed by Romolo Marcellini. In this gorgeous movie, as artistic and reverential of the human form as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia but minus the Nazi sentiments of that tribute to the 1936 Berlin Games, there are many evocative scenes and characters. But Abebe Bikila unavoidably captures the imagination as he runs through the silent night, alone and barefoot down the torchlit path of the Appia Antica on his way to marathon history. During his return to Rome, he posed with Gina Lollobrigida and other film stars at the premier, and told reporters how his life had changed. He now had a house, he said, and a new car, and all the gasoline he needed, and a salary of $400 a month.

  His reputation only grew in 1964, when he successfully defended his marathon gold medal at Tokyo, the first Olympian ever to win the grueling contest twice. He ran in socks and shoes this time, only two months after undergoing an appendectomy, and established a best-ever time of 2:12:11.2, four minutes better than his nearest opponent. The scene at the finish line in Rome, in the darkness near the Arch of Constantine, was haunting, but the ending in Tokyo gave Abebe more of a deserved moment in the sun. It was still daylight, and the final lap was run inside the Olympic Stadium, with eighty thousand spectators wildly cheering the thirty-two-year-old Ethiopian as he made his familiar long, level, incessant strides toward the tape. As in Rome, he jogged in place and did some calisthenics after finishing. He said later he could have run another six miles or more—this despite difficult conditions that found several marathoners collapsing on the infield grass near the end and being hauled out on stretchers.

  Upon Bikila’s return to Ethiopia, he was promoted again, now to lieutenant. Only the emperor claimed higher status among his countrymen. His plan was to win a third gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico City, but after running ten miles, he dropped out of the race because of a fracture in his left leg. That moment in 1968 marked the beginning of his misfortune and decline. Five months later, driving to Addis Ababa from his hometown of Debre Behran on a rainy evening, he was run off the road by the bright headlights of a Land Rover. He was unconscious when he was discovered by startled passengers from a bus that had stopped to check on a wrecked car resting on its side. His spinal injuries were so severe that he spent nine months being treated at a hospital in Great Britain and returned in a wheelchair. Four years later, at age forty-one, he was dead. More than seventy-five thousand people attended his funeral at St. Joseph Church in Addis Ababa, including Haile Selassie.

  On the day of his death, the Ethiopian Herald ran a poem that read in part:

  He made our flag to fly

  Right above

  Dead and gone Mussolini

  Then and then

  Abebe led, Mamo followed

  Ethiopia led, Kenya followed

  The Mussolini allusion was obvious. The reference to Mamo was Mamo Wolde, a fellow Ethiopian who won the marathon at Mexico City after Abebe was forced to drop out. The last line carried his meaning into a larger realm. As the first black African to win a gold medal, Abebe Bikila paved the way for what would become a long and illustrious line of East African distance runners. Many were from Ethiopia but even more hailed from Kenya, led by the brilliant Kipchoge Keino, who won the metric mile at Mexico City, outpacing the American Jim Ryun, and took home the steeplechase gold four years later in Munich. Mamo Wolde, Miruts Yifter, Mohammed Kedir, Derartu Tulu, Haile Gebrselassie, Fatuma Roba, Milton Wolde, Gezahegne Abera, Kenenisa Bekele, Meseret Defar, of Ethiopia; Kipchoge Keino, Amos Biwott, Peter Rono, Naftali Temu, Charles Asati, Matthew Birir, Paul Ereng, Julius Korir, Reuben Kosgei, Noah Ngeny, John Ngugi, Hezahiah Nyamau, Robert Ouko, Julius Sang, William T
anui, of Kenya—Olympic gold medal runners all, and all in a sense the progeny of the barefooted palace guard who stunned the world in Rome. The rub of contradiction is evident in most legends, and there was a small cultural and semantic irony in the emergence of Abebe Bikila as the symbol of black Africa. Ethiopians had been dismissive of their brethren on the continent—so much so that the word for black African in Amharic translated as “slave.” In the event, the rise of black Africa was paralleled by the Olympic decline and long-term disappearance of apartheid South Africa. Avery Brundage and his IOC inner circle had averted the issue in Rome, deciding to believe South African officials who claimed that no blacks were talented enough to make the Olympic team and that they did not discriminate against them—even though all sports in the nation were segregated, along with every other aspect of life. But with doubts persisting about that claim after Rome, with emerging nations around the world taking more active roles in IOC affairs, and with the threat of a boycott looming, the IOC voted to ban South Africa from the 1964 Games in Tokyo. Two years later, Brundage was still fighting a rear-guard action to bring South Africa back into the Olympic family. His reasoning was revealed in a May 3, 1966, letter to Reginald Stanley Alexander, a white IOC member from Kenya.

  “The African question remains, and it is a most thorny problem,” Brundage wrote.

  I am thinking of sending out a circular letter to all concerned along the following lines: We cannot penalize a National Olympic Committee for something its government does, or we will not have any left, since the perfect government has not yet been invented. We must view the accomplishment of the South African NOC under IOC pressure in obtaining permission to send a biracial committee composed of equal numbers of white and nonwhite men to select their Olympic team as a huge step forward in view of the prevailing conditions. Keeping South Africa out of the Olympic Games is not going to change the government, but it is going to hurt the athletes both black and white who are the most concerned.