Books

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World
By David Maraniss, Simon & Schuster, 2008, 478 pp.

One of the most glaring (and ironic) differences between the 1960 Rome Summer Games — the Olympics that changed the world, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss — and the upcoming 2008 Summer Games in Beijing is that the People's Republic of China did not even participate in the 1960 Olympics.

In fact, Red China, as the West called mainland China during the Cold War, had stopped sending athletes to the Olympics altogether during the 1950s. Yet, this summer, 48 years after Rome, China is hosting the world's most important sporting event.

So, how did the 1960 Olympics in Rome help bring about such change in the world?

Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post, gives credit to a long list of unprecedented firsts at the 1960 Summer Games in this his seventh important book on war, politics and sports.

In 1960, for the first time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ordered the Nationalist Chinese to march as Taiwan and denied them the use of any form of the name China. This led to the first political act of the Olympics: During opening ceremonies the Nationalist Chinese unfurled a banner of protest.

"Every action in Rome was viewed through the political lens of those times," Maraniss explains. The Cold War was playing "an underappreciated role in forcing change in culture and sports, all much in evidence in Rome. ... The world was transmuting in 1960."

Not only the politics of the world were changing, but the world of sports itself would never be the same. With keen insight, Maraniss observes: "Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling in Rome and could never be taken seriously again."

The 1960 Rome Summer Games saw the first Olympic doping scandal. For the first time, a runner was paid to wear a certain brand of track shoe. Decathlete Rafer Johnson became the first black American to carry the flag and lead Team USA during the opening ceremonies. Boxing legend Muhammad Ali for the first time stepped onto the world stage as "an eighteen-year-old light-heavyweight boxer from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay."

In addition, the 1960 Olympics marked the first time "American women athletes took a more prominent role ... helped immeasurably by the radiance of sprinter Wilma Rudolph."

Maraniss' list of Olympic firsts covers all the events and most of the participating countries, as he discusses in easy-to-read reportage the long-term effects of a sporting revolution on the world's culture at large, not the least of which was CBS News' first broadcast of the Games.

Today in The Information Age it is difficult to imagine, but the 1960 Games were the first covered by commercial television. CBS would broadcast about 20 hours of taped programming devoted to the Olympics from Aug. 25 to Sept. 11, an average of 1 hour and 15 minutes a day shown at 11 p.m. after the news.

By contrast, according to The Associated Press, NBC has scheduled 212 hours of Olympic coverage each day for the Beijing games Aug. 8-24, amounting to 3,600 hours total, compared to 2,500 hours for all of the 12 Summer Games since 1960.

Maraniss has shaped his book around the 18 days of the 1960 Summer Games, with the goal of discovering the essence of the spectacular event, "the deeper palate of character, drama and meaning." Closely examining the details of competitions on the track, in the pool, on the court and in the field, he has helped identify the forces of change in the world of 1960.

"In sports, culture, and politics ... 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."

Maraniss also offers a clear picture of our world as it is now with the 1960 Olympics as a paradigm.

The central metaphor for change in the book is the IOC itself, led in 1960 by an aging Avery Brundage, who, as he was finishing his eighth year "as high priest of this secular empire of sweat," saw the modern world closing in on him from all sides.

"New nations were lobbying for more participants and a wider variety of events, while Brundage and his old guard wanted less. Women wanted to run longer distances, while Brundage and some other traditionalists thought anything beyond once around the oval track was unladylike. Civil rights activists ... were urging the IOC to ... expel the apartheid delegation from South Africa ... and the Soviet Union was mounting a challenge to the very structure of the International Olympic Committee."

With insight and clarity, Maraniss discusses the great world issues in play at the Games, the conflicts of East-West in the Cold War, the two-Chinas question, the repression of South Africa, emerging women's sports, the New Africa and even the politics of India and Pakistan, which would shape the future of Asia.

Of course, Maraniss keeps his eye on the Games themselves, and the book is filled with exciting accounts of the events, the athletes, the officials and all the sporting world's hangers-on. Rome 1960 is a must-read in preparing for this summer's Olympics. Try to get through it by the opening ceremonies in Beijing on Aug. 8.

Art Gould is a former newspaper reporter and book publisher. He lives in Anniston.