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Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World Review

David Maraniss is an associate editor at the Washington Post and a 1993 and 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner. He is not only a very good writer, but also a very entertaining one. He tells the tale of the 1960 Olympics in Rome just fifteen years after the Italians lost the Second World War, when the Italians were hiding the remains of their fascist regime from the hundreds of thousands of spectators who came to Italy to view the games.
This was a time when the US and the Soviets were fighting to show the world which nation was a superior regime; when the Soviets seemed to be superior to the US in science and physical strength. These were the days when there was a heated dispute over two Chinas - the mainland and Taiwan - and the blacks in South Africa were beginning to stir and express their human rights. The year 1960 was a terrible year when American blacks and women faced daily discrimination.
Maraniss tells what seem to be well over two hundred fascinating incidences that occurred at the Olympics, just before it and just after, incidences that began to open the eyes of the world to how badly too-many people were being treated. For instance:
The Olympic committee stressed verbally that all people may participate and that there should be no discrimination based on religion or color, but the head of the Olympic Committee was a vicious anti-Semite and bigot. He called the great athlete Jesse Owens "boy." He accepted the ridiculous statement of the white South Africans that there were no blacks in all of South Africa who could qualify for the Olympics.
One of the American participants was Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, who was eighteen at the time. He talked all the time. People tried to stop him from talking by giving him sleeping pills, but they didn't work.
The Americans tried to entice one of the Soviet stars to defect, without success.
The issue of drugs came to the front at this Olympics: a cyclist died during a race because of the drugs he took to help him win, and officials tried to cover up the truth.
President Eisenhower tried to beat the Soviet's Nikita Khrushchev's warm greeting to the athletes, but failed dismally.
Blacks discriminated against in the US were winners at the Olympics, but many returned to the US to face continued discrimination and abuse.
Black girls on their way to the Olympics were not allowed to pee in white establishments in the south. They had to do so in the fields, beside the road they took to the plane that would fly them to fame outside the US.
The US trying to belie what everyone knew, that its people discriminated against blacks, had a black man lead their athletes and carry the American flag in the initial march at the Olympics. The crowd applauded loudly.
However, the Soviets drew greater applause from the crowd by marching only their prettiest girls dressed in their most fetching attire.
While a great power, the US was clearly cheated out of winning a swim contest. The officials declared the person who came in second as the winner.
One of the most dramatic events was when a short black man from Ethiopia ran the 26 plus mile marathon against the best men that the world could produce without shoes, bare foot because he could not find shoes that fit him, and won.
Maraniss gives his readers many pieces of information. For example, the legend that the marathon race of 26 plus miles commemorates the run of an Athenian man from Marathon to Athens to alert his countrymen of impending danger, is not true; Lord Byron fabricated the story in the nineteenth century.
The soviets beat the US in metals achieved. This led the new American president Kennedy to speak about "the soft American." The US began to become interested in health and many studies confirmed the president's assessment. Studies showed that American children fared far worse in strength and flexibility than their European counterparts. The move to improve children's health was one of many changes that occurred as a result of the 1960 Olympics.

Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World Overview

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author David Maraniss, a groundbreaking book that weaves sports, politics, and history into a tour de force about the 1960 Rome Olympics, eighteen days of theater, suspense, victory, and defeat

David Maraniss draws compelling portraits of the athletes competing in Rome, including some of the most honored in Olympic history: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.

Along with these unforgettable characters and dramatic contests, there was a deeper meaning to those late-summer days at the dawn of the sixties. Change was apparent everywhere. The world as we know it was coming into view.

Rome saw the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. Old-boy notions of Olympic amateurism were crumbling and could never be taken seriously again. In the heat of the cold war, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections. Every move was judged for its propaganda value. East and West Germans competed as a unified team less than a year before the Berlin Wall.There was dispute over the two Chinas. An independence movement was sweeping sub-Saharan Africa, with fourteen nations in the process of being born. There was increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women as they emerged from generations of discrimination.

Using the meticulous research and sweeping narrative style that have become his trademark, Maraniss reveals the rich palate of character, competition, and meaning that gave Rome 1960 its singular essence.

Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World Specifications

Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: Armed with the same engaging narrative found in Clemente and When Pride Still Mattered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss chronicles the triumphs, tragedies, and treacheries of "the Olympics that changed the world" with Rome 1960. The same Games that announced the greatness of icons like Cassius Clay, Wilma Rudolph, and Rafer Johnson, also exposed a growing unrest between East and West, black and white, and male and female. Even the host city of Rome, Maraniss recounts, was "infused with a golden hue...an illuminating that comes with a moment of historical transition, when one era is dying and another is being born." With moving portraits of the Games's remarkable personalities woven among tales of espionage and propaganda, Rome 1960 explores an Olympics unable to fight off the troubles of the modern world. Cold War sniping and issues of social inequalities were spilling into fields and stadiums, and the face of sport was rapidly changing. History buffs and sports fans alike will appreciate Maraniss’s quiet reporting, as he deftly removes himself from a storyline that is still relevant today. --Dave Callanan

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Customer Reviews

Bronze medal effort - Avid Reader - USA
While consumers rate this book very highly, professional reviews were more mixed. I've come down on the size of the pros.

The first problem with the book is the title: it's preposterous to claim that the 1960 Olympics "changed the world." They didn't even change the world of sport. Rather, it's the other way around, that the world and the world of sport forced changes in the Olympics, some of which started to surface in 1960. The Olympics were elitist, aristocratic, and racist at the time. As author David Maraniss points out, the rules on amateurism were incredibly unfair to poor or working-class athletes who were deemed to have traded on their fame when they did things as innocuous as appear on a TV game show or in a minor part in a movie. They faced millionaire businessmen and minor European royalty banning them from their sport. The Olympics leadership didn't change that policy -- rather the athletes agitated for more fair and realistic treatment, and the Olympics gradually acceded. Welcoming African nations and giving women equal treatment also came about through pressure from political and social changes that forced their way into the Olympics, not the other way around. So, the entire premise of the book should be restated.

Maraniss does a good job of putting those contradictions in place, and he gives some sense (not enough) of how complex the Olympics were in those days, but how small they were compared to today's productions. It was still a time when major countries could send unknowns who had "regular" lives to seek their moment of glory, rather than sending only highly groomed and trained professionals.

While I enjoyed some of the anecdotes about events or athletes, I found that for the most part, they were cursory. We were told over and over again that Rafer Johnson was the most respected man on the US team, but we don't really find out why, except that he's smart and handsome. Same thing with Wilma Rudolph, who apparently was the heartthrob of the team, but we don't get any real details on what made her so special. Over and over, the book begged for more details -- whether about the Tennessee State Tigerbelles or why the decathalon is structured to take place over 12-14 hours on consecutive days.

There were strange omissions, too. For example, in the concluding chapter, the author notes that the Soviets won more medals than the US for the first time, largely due to massive superiority in gymnastics. But he didn't cover a single gymnastics event in the book.

In short, the book feels rushed and superficial. It feels like it was put together from newspaper clippings, Sports Illustrated, and interviews with a couple of journalists who were at the games. One of the only things that rang with real emotion was a short visit the author had with Joe Faust, a high jumper who made the US squad but didn't get a medal and had a quirky after-life.

A Gold Medal Performance - Matthew Dunne - Wellesley, MA
I teach a high school history elective called "Sports and Society." David Maraniss's "Rome 1960" was a perfect fit for such a course. Maraniss has found a compelling event full of fascinating characters and ripe with episodes that set the stage for the major developments in sports in the decades that would follow. Maraniss weaves issues of drugs, race, gender, politics, international diplomacy, commercialism, television, and religion throughout a narrative as engaging and exciting as the most hotly contested Olympic competition. The inspirational Wilma Rudolph, the brash young Cassius Clay, the poised and focused Rafer Johnson, the surprising Abebe Bakila, the haughty Avery Brundage, and a host of other athletes, coaches, and Olympic officials come to life vividly on the wide canvas Maraniss paints of these truly defining Olympic games. If you love sports and you love history, I guarantee you'll love this book.

Another Maraaniss Masterpiece - MKE Braves Fan - Georgia
David Maraniss has been chronicling our world for some time now, and has been especially successful at finding the nexus between politics, values, and sport. "When Pride Still Mattered" and "Clemente" are excellent examples. In "Rome 1960" Maraniss takes on the cold war, civil rights, and the Rome Olympics and illustrate major issues of our time and the way sport figures into the mix. Get to know Wilma Rudolph, Mohammed Ali (as Cassius Clay), and Rafer Johnson as you never have before. See how each one of them played a big role in shaping American culture and values today. And relive the drama of one of the great sporting events of the 20th century.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010