The Road From Rome

That almost happened, but for one simple and overriding fact: Taiwan had a superb decathlete, C. K. Yang, who seemed destined to bring honor to the island by winning its first Olympic medal. The Taiwanese delegation chose to stay in Rome, but revealed its dismay during the opening ceremony when a lead official took out a handmade banner as the team marched past Brundage on the reviewing stand. UNDER PROTEST, it read. Yang went on to win a silver medal in one of the most memorable contests of the 1960 Games, barely losing the decathlon gold to his close friend and UCLA teammate Rafer Johnson, the captain of the U.S. team. (Johnson also made history at the opening ceremony as the first black athlete to carry the Stars and Stripes at the head of the American delegation.)

In the cold-war mentality of the Rome Games, the propaganda value of winning medals had become absolutely critical. The Soviets and their Eastern-bloc allies claimed that every medal they accumulated was further proof of the superiority of their political systems. Reading the accounts from East Berlin, one would think that Ingrid Krämer, the brilliant diver from Dresden, won two gold medals in Rome not because of the extraordinary way she pierced the water with barely a splash but because of "her joyful life in the socialism of the German Democratic Republic." Now the Chinese seem to be assuming the old Soviet role as the nation placing the most emphasis on state-supported Olympic success. There have been reports from China already about athletes who wanted to retire but were forced to keep training, against their will, because their government wanted them to win medals in Beijing.

During the Rome Olympics, the Americans complained that Soviet athletes were essentially professionals supported by the state, while American athletes received no state support and were held to the amateur rules of that era, which sometimes veered toward the preposterous. Lee Calhoun, the best 110-meter hurdler of that era, won a gold medal in Melbourne in 1956 and repeated his gold-medal performance in Rome, but between those two Olympics he had been suspended for a year because he and his college sweetheart, Gwen, had the temerity to get married on the television program "Bride and Groom." Track officials ruled that by taking wedding presents from that show, Calhoun violated the amateur code and had become a professional. Johnson, the great decathlete, had acting aspirations, and befriended the actor Kirk Douglas, who often ran on the UCLA track. But when Douglas invited Johnson to try out for a role in the movie "Spartacus," officials warned Johnson that he would be ruled ineligible in Rome if he accepted the part. They said he would be taking advantage of his athletic prowess for financial gain.

There was a ruling-class aspect to the amateur rules that appeared obvious to most athletes. Slavery Avery, they called Brundage, who along with his associates on the IOC executive committee was thought to have a holier-than-thou attitude about amateurism. It came across as too easy for the Chicago millionaire and his upper-crust associates to talk about the virtues of sports for sports' sake. What, for example, could the vice president of the IOC, David Burghley, the Marquess of Exeter, know about the daily financial struggles of poor and middle-income athletes who had to train constantly to retain their world-class edge?

The most glaring example of incipient commercialism in 1960 involved not an American but the German sprinter Armin Hary, a rapscallion individualist who angered the Americans soon after arriving in Rome by refusing to meet with Jesse Owens, the immortal sprinter who had won four gold medals at the 1936 Games in Nazi Berlin and who had come to Rome to write a syndicated column for a Chicago newspaper. (Owens handled Hary's rudeness with grace, retorting that he had been snubbed by bigger jerks before, but never faster ones.) Hary ended up winning the 100-meter sprint, defeating the American Dave Sime in a photo finish. In so doing, he became the first Olympic sprinter to take payments under the table for wearing a certain brand of shoes. Or two brands, in this case. There were two major German shoe companies then, Adidas and Puma, and Hary wore Adidas in the race, then ditched those and put on Puma shoes to accept the gold medal.

Today that sort of action seems almost quaint. Most of the athletes have shoe contracts of one sort or another, and the U.S. basketball squad—another so-called Dream Team, led by the NBA stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant—might as well be called the Nike team, since everything about the squad seems bought and paid for by Nike. In that sense, there is no longer an imbalance between athletes from the West and those from state-supported programs like the one the Chinese use. The Olympics have become a free-for-all fair fight, for better and worse.