Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World - Hardcover

Maraniss, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416534075 ISBN 13: 9781416534075

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Synopsis

An account of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome reveals the competition's unexpected influence on the modern world, in a narrative synopsis that pays tribute to such athletes as Cassius Clay and Wilma Rudolph while evaluating the roles of Cold War propaganda, civil rights, and politics. 250,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post, is the author of critically acclaimed best-selling books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, Vietnam and the sixties, Roberto Clemente, and the 1960 Rome Olympics. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton, was part of a Post team that won the 2007 Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including in the nonfiction history category for They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. Maraniss is a fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of Biographers International Organization. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Linda. They have two grown children and three granddaughters.

Reviews

Reviewed by Jamie Malanowski

Seldom is a book as ill-served by its subtitle as is David Maraniss's Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. Maraniss resolutely illuminates every long-running story that enjoyed a chapter at these summer games, and there are many: the Cold War rivalry, waged not only between the United States and the U.S.S.R. but also between their satellites and surrogates; the struggle for racial and gender equality in sports and in American society writ large; the assertion of pride by newly independent Third World nations; and the burgeoning influence of drugs, money and television on athletics. It's true, as Maraniss writes in his preface, that "in sports, culture and politics -- interwoven in so many ways -- one could see an old order dying and a new one being born" in August 1960. But some 400 pages and weeks of exciting events later, one sees these games less as a turning point than as just another step along the road.

Aside from the overreaching subtitle, Maraniss has written a colorful, fast-moving and often dramatic book. He chose an underexposed subject: Despite the tremendous performances of American athletes such as the young and irrepressible Cassius Clay, as well as the legendary triumph of the barefoot Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila, the Rome Olympics are not remembered as vividly as the games in Mexico City, Montreal or Munich. Television, and its ability to turn medal winners into superstars of sport and advertising, made the difference; the Rome Olympics were the first to capture a significant TV audience, but coverage was still slight by today's standards. In 1960, as Maraniss explains, film of events was flown across the Atlantic via commercial airliner to New York, where it was cut, if it arrived in time, for the CBS Evening News, or for a 15-minute late-night recap narrated by Jim McKay. In that way, the games in Rome certainly changed television history: A then little-known ABC producer named Roone Arledge saw the programs, which led him to create "Wide World of Sports" with McKay as host.

Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor at The Washington Post, set a very high standard with his excellent books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente. His great strength as a biographer is his ability to dig deeply into his subject's story and bring out important themes over time. The nature of the Olympics, in which so many events are held in rapid succession over a compressed period, and in which most athletes perform only a few times on a few days, deprives him of his best asset. In his biography of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss showed how the coach honed his approach during stops at Fordham, West Point and with the New York Giants long before he reached the frozen tundra of Green Bay's Lambeau Field. In Rome 1960, the author simply lacks the space to build, even though he begins the stories of some of his central figures, including the effervescent sprinter Wilma Rudolph and the dignified decathlete Rafer Johnson, years before the games. Their victories, which are tales not only of athletic prowess but also of triumph over racial bigotry, are uplifting. But even so, Maraniss has to spread his attention around, and his stars become ensemble players. The book is like a dim sum brunch: lots of dishes that come and go, some before you're altogether ready to move on.

Because of this, oddly enough, the stories in the book that stand out are those of performers whose efforts have faded from memory, among them C.K. Yang, the decathlete from Taiwan who almost beat his friend Johnson; India's Milkha Singh, the "Flying Sikh," who became a national hero after he broke the Olympic record in the 400-meter dash, even though three other runners were faster and he did not win a medal; and hard-luck American sprinter Dave Sime, who, after missing the 1956 Melbourne games with an injury, and after being nipped at Rome in the 100-meter dash, led his team to victory in the 4 x 100 relay, only to have the performance disqualified because of a teammate's error. (Sime did come home with a story even rarer than that of a triumphant athlete: He was approached by the CIA to act as an intermediary in an effort to persuade a Soviet athlete to defect; Sime was a reluctant conspirator and, in any event, the effort failed. But it adds a bit of Cold War suspense to the book.)

Maraniss does a splendid job of resurrecting these heroes from almost a half-century ago, and of reminding us why we like the Olympics: They are days devoted to spirited young people with rare talents and tremendous discipline who vie for a moment in the sun that, for all but a few, is swiftly eclipsed by the triumphs of another day.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

David Maraniss has demonstrated great range throughout his writing career. His latest effort is a timely and, for the most part, a well executed look at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Although the book’s subtitle may be a bit of a reach, Maraniss has much to say about the implications of the Rome Games as a microcosm of the political, financial, and humanitarian forces shaping the world at the time. Only the New York Times Book Review opined that the event’s obscurity today suggests that nothing was, in fact, world-changing about it. Rome 1960 combines the author’s passion for sports with his keen eye for sociopolitical connections to offer a compelling portrait of the “Olympics that changed the world.”
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Overshadowed by more flamboyant or tragic Olympics, the 1960 Rome games were a sociopolitical watershed, argues journalist Maraniss (Clemente) in this colorful retrospective. The games showcased Cold War propaganda ploys as the Soviet Union surged past the U.S. in the medal tally. Steroids and amphetamines started seeping into Olympian bloodstreams. The code of genteel amateurism—one weight-lifter was forbidden to accept free cuts from a meat company—began crumbling in the face of lavish Communist athletic subsidies and under-the-table shoe endorsement deals. And civil rights and anticolonialism became conspicuous themes as charismatic black athletes—supercharged sprinter Wilma Rudolph, brash boxing phenom Cassius Clay, barefoot Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila—grabbed the limelight while the IOC sidestepped the apartheid issue. Still, we're talking about the Olympics, and Maraniss can't help wallowing in the classic tropes: personal rivalries, judging squabbles, come-from-behind victories and inspirational backstories of obstacles overcome (Rudolph wins the gold, having hurdled Jim Crow and childhood polio that left her in leg braces). As usual, these Olympic stories don't quite bear up under the mythic symbolism they're weighted with (with the exception perhaps of Abebe Bikila), but Maraniss provides an intelligent context for his evocative reportage. Photos. (July)
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While many Summer Olympic Games have left their mark on our collective memory—Berlin 1932 and Munich 1972 are two—Maraniss makes the strong point that the 1960 Rome Games represented a convergence of forces whose impacts are still felt today: television (and the big money it brought), corporate sponsorship, performance-enhancing drugs, the rise of women athletes, among others, all played out amid the tensions of the cold war and the American civil rights movement. Maraniss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for national reporting, delivers a compelling narrative, bringing together all of those forces, while also seamlessly profiling the major figures of the games, from Olympic officials to the coaches and, of course, the athletes themselves, who in 1960 included sprinter Wilma Rudolph, decath-alete Rafer Johnson, and a young boxer from Louisville who was still known at that time as Cassius Clay. Though neatly coinciding with the 2008 Beijing Games, also a cauldron for sociopolitical issues, this is a fine stand-alone effort. --Alan Moores

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416534075
• ISBN 13: 9781416534075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496