The Road From Rome

Avery Brundage, the Crusty Chicago businessman who ran the International Olympic Committee as his vast personal fiefdom during the middle decades of the 20th century, clung obsessively, if at times naively or hypocritically, to the notion that his movement could be free from professionalism, commercialism and politics. Any semblance of that idea is long gone now as the Beijing Olympics approach. While evocative sports stories will certainly emerge from the 2008 Summer Games, these Olympics seem destined to be remembered less for what happens in the competitions than for the surrounding atmospherics and, above all, for the simple fact that they are being staged in China. Whether Dara Torres can turn back the clock and win swimming gold at the age of 41 is a stirring question, but it's been overshadowed by political issues. How the Chinese handle their human-rights failings, the ghastly pollution in their capital city and the thousands of Western journalists clanging around looking for stories in a state known for rigid control will more likely define the Olympic days in Beijing.

Running close behind politics will be laments about the various ways the Olympics have been tainted. Citius, altius, fortius is the Olympic motto—faster, higher, stronger—and the athletes every four years do indeed seem to go faster, rise higher and exhibit more strength. Yet along with new records come ever more suspicions that illegal substances have something to do with those achievements. And today, when it comes to the Olympics, there is exponentially more of everything, not just more steroids and doping but more money, more commercial sponsors, more television, more athletes, more events—an overwhelming sense of excess that can make it harder to appreciate authentic moments of athletic brilliance and sportsmanship.

How did things get to this point? One way to find an answer is by looking back a half century to the days leading up to and including the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. The contests in Rome shimmered with performances that remain among the most golden in athletic history—from the barefoot Ethiopian Abebe Bikila in the marathon to the graceful Wilma Rudolph in the sprints; from audacious Cassius Clay in the boxing ring to dignified Rafer Johnson in the decathlon. But more than that, the forces of change were everywhere. In sports, culture and politics— interwoven in so many ways—one could sense an old order dying and a new one being born. With all its promise and trouble, the modern world as we see it today was coming into view. Television, money and drugs were bursting onto the scene, altering everything they touched. Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling. Rome brought the first doping scandal, the first commercially broadcast Summer Games and the first runner paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. It also, fittingly, brought the first round of controversy over China.

Today we see China promoting the Olympics for grand propaganda purposes, reintroducing itself to the world for what it expects to be its dominant century. But in 1958 China wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world. Mao Zedong's People's Republic withdrew from the Olympics altogether that year in an ideological snit over the refusal of Brundage and his IOC cohorts to ban Taiwan, which called itself the Republic of China and was run by Chiang Kai-shek, Mao's old antagonist. In retreating from the Olympics, China denounced Brundage as "a tool of the imperialistic State Department of the United States."

The context was different, but the central political question as the Rome Olympics neared was the same as it is now: how should the world deal with China? The issue was debated that year by Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign, and Brundage and the IOC became embroiled in it as well. The United States did not recognize Mao's mainland government, Mao did not recognize Chiang's island government and the IOC had nothing but trouble with both. Not long after the People's Republic withdrew from the Olympics, the IOC ruled that Taiwan could no longer call itself the Republic of China at the Olympics because it did not represent the geographical entity of China. It could march in the opening ceremony only as Taiwan or the other name for the island, Formosa.

Suddenly Brundage went from being called a tool of American foreign policy to being labeled a communist sympathizer. Right-wing groups in the United States mounted an intense letter-writing campaign denouncing him. The State Department, while claiming to be free from political involvement in the Olympics, began a lobbying effort to persuade the IOC to overturn the decision. The Taiwanese, in diplomatic cables with Washington, went so far as to suggest that perhaps they should introduce Brundage, a known philanderer, to some of the "fleshpots of Rome" to help the cause. When all else failed, the United States urged Taiwan to boycott the Olympics rather than accede to the change in nomenclature, which was taken as a symbolic victory for the Reds in the cold war.