The Road From Rome

Fair, that is, except when it comes to doping. If—or more likely when—an athlete at the Beijing Games is disqualified because of a drug test, or loses his or her medals later because of revelations about the use of illegal substances, the context for that again will go back to the 1960 Olympics. Soviet and American weightlifters were experimenting with anabolic steroids during the competition in Rome, though the effects were not yet clearly established, either in terms of how the steroids might boost performance or how they might hurt the body. Steroids were not yet a banned substance, and Olympic officials were unaware that they were being used.

The drug story that broke in Rome and changed everything came on the first day of competition. A Danish cyclist named Knud Enemark Jensen went off with his three teammates that morning in the 100-kilometer time-trial road-cycling event, but he never reached the finish line. He grew dizzy in the Roman heat halfway through, collapsed to the pavement and died an hour later. At first it was assumed he had died of heatstroke, but the next day a Danish trainer acknowledged that he had administered a doping agent to Jensen and other members of the team.

Olympic officials had long suspected that some athletes were using various drugs—blood thinners, steroids, amphetamines—but Jensen's death finally forced a response. A medical committee was formed by the IOC in 1961, the first list of banned substances was issued in 1967, drug testing of some athletes began at the Mexico City Games in 1968 and steroids were added to the list of banned substances in 1976.

The moment that Jensen collapsed on the pavement was captured in photographs, but not on television. It is hard to imagine any event of that sort not being captured by the TV cameras in Beijing, where NBC, in a billion-dollar effort, will employ an army of 2,900 people to produce 1,400 hours of television coverage and 2,200 hours of coverage on the Internet. Here again, Rome provides context. Those were the first commercially televised Summer Olympics. CBS paid less than a half-million dollars for the rights and sent a crew of fewer than 50 people, only three of whom were announcers, to Rome. It was just before the era of transatlantic satellite broadcasts, so nothing seen in the United States was live. Every day, canisters of videotape and film were sent by commercial jet from Rome to New York.

Jim McKay, hosting his first Olympics, was not even in Rome, but sat in a studio at Grand Central Terminal tapping out his nightly scripts on a portable typewriter as editors spliced together the half-hour shows. Sometimes the tapes were still cold from the belly of the jet, and McKay and the editors would stick them under their armpits to warm them up.

McKay died only months before he could watch the opening ceremony in Beijing. But in television, as in so many other realms, the first glimpses of what the world will see on the stage in China this August came nearly a half century ago at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and author of eight books on politics, history and sports. This piece is adapted from “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World.”

© 2008