Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  Brundage asked Alexander for his opinion, while advising the former Nairobi mayor that he was “viewed as a colonial in some quarters.”

  In a secret ballot the following year, the IOC executive committee voted to readmit South Africa, but the fallout before Mexico City was so intense, with as many as forty countries threatening to boycott, that the decision was reversed. Questions of race and Africa continued to haunt the Games thereafter. In 1968 U.S. sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith struck perhaps the most iconic pose of protest in Olympic history, raising their fists and bowing their heads on the medal stand to force the world to notice the lingering problems of racism in America. In 1972 in Munich, several black African nations, including Ethiopia, walked out in protest of the presence of white-ruled Rhodesia. Four years later, at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, another boycott was staged by black African nations in protest against New Zealand, whose most prominent rugby team had been touring South Africa. The controversies would continue for more than three decades after Michael Scott, representing the South African Sports Association and the Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport, arrived at the Luxor Hotel in Rome on that late August day in 1960 and sought his first meeting with Brundage and the IOC. It would not end until South Africa was readmitted in July 1991, after the fall of its white supremacist government.

  It would take fourteen more years for the correction of another historic misdeed. On April 19, 2005, the first section of the ancient Axum Obelisk was loaded onto a cargo plane in Rome and flown back to Ethiopia for its rightful restoration.

  AFTER CLOSING the Rome Games, and before landing in Chicago in time for his seventy-third birthday late in September, Avery Brundage spent several days each in Lausanne, Paris, and London. If the IOC president shared the prevailing opinion that the Rome Olympics were a huge success, he was still haunted by problems that would not go away, many of which, one way or another, had to do with money. For all its upper-class pretensions, the IOC was always in need of funds. Brundage and his executive committee had been slow in realizing the financial possibilities of television, and now were paying for it. The Italian organizers had been able to cite the IOC’s own rules in claiming that they had sole control over television contracts with CBS, Eurovision, and a Japanese network. In the end, despite Brundage’s urgings and protests, the most he could get out of the pool of broadcast rights was a 5 percent take of $60,000.

  With that modest amount, he had nothing to offer the various federations representing track and field, swimming, rowing, fencing, boxing, and all the other individual sports that had been pressuring him for what they considered their fair share of the proceeds. The IOC’s desperation was evidenced in the weekly volley of letters that chancellor Otto Mayer sent to various Italian organizers seeking a final financial accounting of the Games, hoping more money might be headed his way at Mon Repos. But the Italians were not to be rushed. When Marcello Garroni of the organizing committee did compile a final report, it showed that they had expenses of $10.6 million (not including construction costs) and revenues of $7.3 million, resulting in a deficit of $3.3 million. For Brundage, that meant no juice to squeeze from the fruit beyond television revenue.

  At the same time, Brundage and his IOC leadership remained obsessed about keeping the Olympic Movement clean, or from another perspective, keeping financial rewards away from the athletes who made the Olympics worth watching. Everywhere Brundage turned, he encountered stories of amateurism gone awry. One month after Rome, rumors about the questionable activities of Armin Hary busted into the open when a commission of the Deutscher Leichtathletik-Verban (DLV), the German Track and Field Association, began investigating the sprint champion for padding his expense accounts. In the brief time since his return to Frankfurt, Hary already had written an article critical of German functionaries, fallen into a spat with a movie company, ending his film career before it could begin, and bought a sports car. He believed that he was being targeted for his outspokenness and individualism, but the investigators had evidence. At least once, Hary had bogusly charged the federation for train tickets and then pocketed the transportation money while receiving a free ride to an event. Perhaps this did not sound like much, but it was enough to warrant a year’s suspension.

  German officials suspected the expense account padding was indicative of greater graft, though at the time they knew nothing of the much larger problem involving Hary and the shoe companies Puma and Adidas.

  Brundage closely followed developments in Germany and exchanged correspondence on the Hary issue with the IOC’s vice president, Lord Burghley, the Marquess of Exeter, who as president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation could review Hary’s international status, including the validity of medals he won in Rome. If Hary’s suspension survived an internal appeal in Germany, Exeter wrote in a January 18, 1961, letter to Brundage, “We naturally will give it 100 percent support, too. It will of course mean that he was a professional at the [Rome] Games, and will forfeit his gold medal, and presumably their relay team will also be disqualified, as he was on it, though it is very bad luck on the other three…I think there will be a temporary outcry but feel that this will be excellent for amateurism in the long run, and will make some prima donnas think twice before taking similar action, and it stops the criticism to which International Federations have laid themselves open, and that is that they do not enforce their rules strictly enough.”

  Hary was found guilty, as it turned out, but officials cut his suspension to a few months, by which time he had retired, his knee damaged from a car crash that occurred while he was speeding back from Berlin with a young female gymnast. The gold medals were never revoked, but his life grew only more troubled. In 1980, twenty years after his stirring late-afternoon sprint down the Stadio Olimpico track, Hary hit bottom, convicted of a 3.2 million deutsche mark swindle and served three years in jail.

  Four months after the Rome Olympics, as the Hary story unfolded, Sports Illustrated published an article by Mike Agostini, a Trinidadian sprinter then living in London, who claimed that European promoters were paying amateur athletes to compete and that many countries provided a “happy hunting ground for trackmen,” some of whom were getting as much as $10,000 a year for appearances. For his own part, Agostini said that he wrote his magazine exposé on a $100 typewriter he was awarded for finishing second in an event arranged by a promoter in Dortmund, Germany. Borrowing a term coined decades earlier by the New York newspaperman Paul Gallico, Agostini labeled this practice “shamateurism.”

  The IOC president had been alerted to the SI piece by an Associated Press reporter seeking his response. While saying little in public, Brundage fumed in letters to associates, belittling Agostini as a “tramp athlete” but nonetheless believing the basic charges, especially about Swedish promoters. Officials in Stockholm already had been asked to investigate charges that Dan Waern, their Olympic miler, had been paid to run at various meets. Swedish authorities eventually cleared Waern of professionalism charges on the grounds that whatever compensation he received was no higher than that of other runners around the world—hardly the sort of decision aimed to please Brundage. “This seems to indicate that they have no respect at all for rules and regulations,” he complained in a letter to Lord Burghley. “Such a public repudiation of amateur principles should not be permitted to go unchallenged—it brings all amateur sport into disrepute.” In another letter, he noted that L’Équipe, the French sports magazine, had broken a story of the Swedes sending a cable to the French track-and-field federation inviting two French athletes to a Swedish competition and asking, “What are their financial requirements, which we shall keep confidential?” It was, said Brundage, “such brazen defiance.”

  Brundage was not ready to give up on his vision of pure amateurism, but Rome was the beginning of the end. The shoe endorsement corruption that began with Armin Hary in 1960 became so widespread that by the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood reported that runners
from around the world received at least $100,000 in cash and $350,000 in equipment from Puma and Adidas alone—and that all but five American medal winners received something from them. Brundage, who insisted that his Olympic Movement was free of politics, or able to transcend politics, was caught in a tightening vise between two competing ideologies and economic systems. Capitalism was crushing him from one side, Communism from the other. Each side, in different but equally powerful ways, exposed the vulnerabilities of pure amateurism in a world where competition was either up for bid or totally controlled by the state.

  JIM MCKAY’S daytime job with The Verdict Is Yours was gone when the Rome Olympics ended. The television courtroom drama had moved from New York to Los Angeles, and McKay had no desire to make the transfer. Besides, he had always preferred sports, and the notice he received as studio host for the first Olympics where an American network paid for broadcast rights afforded him more freedom to pursue that course. While TV critics gave him mostly positive reviews, it was one viewer in particular who proved most important to McKay’s career. Roone Arledge, a young producer for ABC, was in the process of putting together a Saturday afternoon sports show, Wide World of Sports, the brainstorm of sports programmer Edgar J. Scherick. After watching McKay perform his Olympic duties with a universal touch, Arledge thought he would be the perfect host for the show, which would deal with a variety of sports, from track and field to gymnastics to car racing and surfing, and draw on athletes from around the world. McKay made the switch from CBS to ABC and was on camera when the first Wide World of Sports aired on the last Saturday of April 1961, televising the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. A colleague, Bill Flemming, the voice of Big Ten athletics, was sent to Des Moines to cover the Drake Relays for the same inaugural show.

  Although their wide world encompassed more than Olympic sports, the production in many ways served as ideal preparation for Olympic coverage, and in the coming years, as the Games grew exponentially with the parallel rise of television, Roone Arledge and Jim McKay became the two most prominent figures of that relationship. ABC carried the Winter Olympics in 1964 from Innsbruck, Austria, and both the Summer and Winter Games many times thereafter. The Tokyo Olympics in 1964, carried by NBC, were the first to offer live coverage through the use of a satellite, Syncom III, positioned over the Pacific Ocean, but the 1968 Games in Mexico City, with McKay hosting for ABC, used the most extensive satellite coverage, forty-five hours’ worth (compared to twenty hours in Rome), and also introduced slow-motion replays and color pictures—and went a long way toward establishing McKay as the voice and face of the Olympics, as familiar as the Dah…Dah…duh-dah-dah dun-dun fanfare theme song. (Working as a young researcher for McKay and Arledge in Mexico City was Dick Ebersol, who later was to become the lead executive for NBC’s Olympic broadcasts.) Four years later, at the Summer Games in Munich, McKay established his anchorman credentials, reporting calmly hour after hour, accompanied by the expert reporting of newsman Peter Jennings, when Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes and coaches hostage and eventually murdered them. His reporting of the tragedy earned McKay two Emmys.

  It was all so minimal in Rome, with McKay in that little studio in New York, tapping out his own scripts on a portable typewriter, drawing information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and with Peter Molnar’s crew of fewer than fifty in Rome filming and editing on the fly, literally trying to beat the clock every night with their canisters winging west toward New York City in the bellies of commercial jets. The televising of the Olympics grew from that infancy in Rome into an extravaganza, expanding every four years into an ever-larger enterprise that eventually entailed a broadcast army of more than three thousand people. The IOC, after a slow start getting in on the television money, eventually adapted to the lucrative new world, changing its rules so that the international body held more control along with the organizing committees for host cities.

  Television revenues rose dramatically every four years from Rome, going up to about $10 million at Mexico City, and then doubling and tripling every quadrennial from there until they exceeded $1.2 billion at Athens in 2004. At Rome, television revenues made up about $1 of every $400 it cost to host the Games, while by Munich in 1972, the ratio was $1 of every $50, and by 1984 in Los Angeles it was $1 of every $3, according to an analysis that John Slater of Western Carolina University presented at the Fourth International Symposium for Olympic Research. When Roone Arledge tapped Jim McKay for Wide World of Sports, influenced by the work he had seen in those archaic early shows detailing the Games in Rome, it was a crucial early step along that road to riches, down an Olympian path that Arledge later would say was “worth every penny—every single million bucks—you have to spend for it.”

  IN WASHINGTON a few days after the Rome Games ended, the ambassador from the Republic of China was invited to the State Department for a meeting with J. Graham Parsons, assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, and Larue R. Lutkins, acting director for Chinese Affairs. The purpose of the meeting was to hold a postmortem on the politics of the Olympics. According to a memorandum of conversation, Parsons began by berating his visitor, telling him how unhappy the U.S. was with the way his government handled the Olympic dispute over what the island nation should be called. The State Department, he said, had been “vigorously supporting the Chinese efforts to secure affiliation with the IOC under name Olympic Committee of the Republic of China” for several years. “And in recent months, particularly intensive efforts made by U.S. throughout the world toward this end,” the memo noted, paraphrasing Parsons’s criticisms. But during the Olympics, he complained, the “Chinese cut the ground out from under their own position by (1) agreeing to participate in basketball tourney in Bologna as Taiwan, and (2) subsequent leak from Taipei that they were prepared to accept designation as Taiwan in Rome Games, albeit under protest.”

  These actions, Parsons argued, “were effectively exploited by Brundage and doubtless had an effect on the decisive nature of the vote [forcing the Republic of China to participate only as Taiwan].” Parsons said he understood that news leaks do occur but predicted that this particular leak would “sour private American citizens whose cooperation had been actively solicited and to make it more difficult for us in the future to enlist their cooperation for the cause.”

  The next morning, C. K. Yang arrived triumphantly in Taipei. As he descended the ramp of a chartered jet that had brought his team home from Rome, he carried a Republic of China flag—the very banner Olympic officials would not let his squad display at the Opening Ceremony inside the Stadio Olimpico. But he also carried a silver medal, the first Olympic medal ever won by his country, which served as a proud physical representation of the reason C.K.’s delegation leaders had refused to follow the State Department’s recommendation that they boycott the Rome Games. In a drenching rain, Yang now was mobbed by well-wishers, including his parents and sisters. His mother burst into tears when she saw him for the first time in a year. The family accompanied him in an open jeep that took them on a parade route through the streets to a luncheon at the Hero’s Hostel on Yenping South Road. After that, he flew across the island to his home town of Malan, where an ancestor, Khras Mahanhan, had been a chieftain of Taitung’s Ami tribe and known for his athletic prowess. Yang met with the island’s sportswriters and talked of marriage and the future. He expected to be ready to win gold in Tokyo.

  When word reached Taipei of the chewing-out their ambassador had received at the State Department, American diplomats there were called in for lunch with Foreign Minister Hsu Shao-chang. In polite tones, he expressed regret that the Americans did not appreciate Taiwan’s dilemma. The only alternative, he said, according to a cable later sent to the State Department, was to “withdraw from the Rome Games, alienate the IOC, and open the door to Chinese Communist participation in future Olympics.” He conceded that the press leak was unfortunate and the decision to participate in the pre-Olympic basketball Trials in Bologna might have been a tactical error, bu
t argued that neither of these mistakes was decisive because Brundage in fact had “long ago made up his mind that [we] must accept the Taiwan label or get out.”

  Republic of China or Taiwan—the issue of nomenclature would not go away, with the IOC swinging one way and then another and then back again. In 1968 the team was allowed to compete as the Republic of China, but eight years later in Montreal it was ordered to revert to Taiwan and left the Olympics rather than accede again to that demand. There was no Chinese representation, island or mainland, in Montreal or four years later at Moscow, but for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the Taiwanese returned as Chinese Taipei at the same time that the People’s Republic of China, after ending its long exile by appearing in the 1980 Winter Games, finally rejoined the Summer Games. With the largest population in the world to draw upon, the mainland Chinese quickly rose into the top ranks of competition, finishing fourth in the gold medal standings at Los Angeles and up to second twenty years later at Athens in 2004. For 2008, nearly a half century after the furious debate in Rome, something perhaps unimaginable then would come to pass, with the Beijing Olympics.

  In the days after Rome, Frenchy Grombach, the erstwhile American spook and retired brigadier general, would not let go in his Ahab-like pursuit of an unlikely white whale, Lord David Burghley, the Marquess of Exeter. Grombach was convinced that Lord Burghley was the insidious force behind the IOC’s decision to make Taiwan compete as Taiwan, and on October 6, less than a month after the Games ended, he sent a letter to the Anglo-American Detective Agency on Lower John Street in London, retaining gumshoes there in the hopes of uncovering the marquess’s business connections to mainland China. Word of the investigation reached Avery Brundage before it went public. On February 9, 1961, Brundage dictated a heads-up letter to Lord Burghley: