THE 1960 SUMMER OLYMPICS AND WILMA RUDOLPH, CASSIUS CLAY AND RAFER JOHNSON
The 1960 Summer Olympic Games, also known as the Games of the XVII Olympiad, were held in Rome, Italy from August 25-September 11, 1960.
Italian President Giovanni Gronchi opened the Games, ‘Bel Paese’ track athlete, Giancarlo Peris, lit the Olympic Flame and 5,338 athletes — including 611 women — representing 83 countries, prepared to compete in 150 events.
It represented a wish fulfilled.
Following the 1904 Olympics held in St. Louis, MO, Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the Modern Games and a founding member of the International Olympic Committee, as well as its president from 1896–1925, wanted to have the Olympics hosted in Rome.
Ever the sentimentalist, he remarked,
“I desired Rome only because I wanted Olympism, after its return from the excursion to utilitarian America, to don once again the sumptuous toga, woven of art and philosophy, in which I had always wanted to clothe her.”
But harsh reality in the form of nature’s ire intervened, and ambushed his immediate plan.
The IOC selected Rome as the host city for the 1908 Games, but when Mt. Vesuvius erupted on April 7, 1906 killing 100 people and burying neighboring towns in ash, cinder and molten lava, Rome was compelled to pass the honor to London.
It was to take another 54 years until the Olympics would finally be held in Italy.
As it happened, holding the Olympics in Italy allowed for the coalescence of the ancient and the modern — that de Coubertin so desperately sought — to be realized.
The Basilica of Maxentius and the Baths of Caracalla were restored to host the wrestling and gymnastic events respectively, and an Olympic Stadium and a Sports Palace were constructed for the Games.
Both firsts and lasts were established at the Games.
The 1960 Games were the first to be televised, generating unprecedented interest; the first to showcase the Olympic Anthem composed by Spiros Samaras; and the first to have an Olympic champion run in bare feet.
[Unknown and unheralded 28-year-old Ethiopian Abebe Bikila became the first East African to win a medal when he won the gold in the Olympic marathon — -barefoot!!! He defended his title in Tokyo in 1964, wearing track shoes.]
The 1960 Olympics also was the last time that the country of South Africa was allowed to participate.
Once apartheid ended, South Africa was permitted to rejoin Olympic competition, which it did 32 years later, in 1992.
Rome in 1960 was bursting at the seams with memorable performances and personal achievement.
To wit:
— Swedish sprint canoeist Gert Fredriksson won his sixth Olympic title;
— Fencer Aladar Gerevich of Hungary won his sixth consecutive gold medal in the team sabre event;
— The Japanese men’s gymnastic team won the first of five successive golds;
— The U.S. men’s national basketball team — led by promising college players Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas and Walt Bellamy — captured its fifth straight Olympic gold medal;
[This 1960 team, thought to be one of the best amateur sports teams in basketball history and selected to the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1984, also shared a lofty distinction with the 1992 “Dream Team.” Both were elected to The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010 — as units — marking only the seventh and eighth teams so honored.]
— Danish sailor Paul Elvstrom won his fourth straight gold medal in the Finn class, a feat duplicated in an individual event by the likes of Al Oerter, Carl Lewis, Michael Phelps Kaori Icho and Ray Ewry (1906 Intercalated Games);
— German Armin Hary won the 100 metres in an Olympic record time of 10.2 seconds;
— American Jeff Farrell won two gold medals in swimming; he had undergone an emergency appendectomy six days before the Olympic Trials;
— Herb Elliott, AUS, won the men’s 1500 metres in one of the most dominating performances in Olympic history, bettering his world record time of 3:36.0 with a time of 3:35.6;
— American Chris von Saltza, 16, won four medals in women’s swimming, three gold;
— The future Constantine II, the last King of Greece (abdicated and ended hybrid monarchy, 1973) did his country proud, winning a gold medal in sailing: dragon class;
— The Pakistani Men’s Field Hockey Team snapped a run of Indian team victories since 1928, defeating India in the final and winning Pakistan’s first Olympic gold medal; &
— American wrestlers Shelby Wilson and Doug Blubaugh, who grappled together growing up, won gold medals in their respective weight classes.
Yet with all that success in mind, and due respect joyfully paid — along with an admission of bias on the writer’s part — maybe the 1960 Summer Olympics could be viewed most clearly through an American trifocal lense.
Wilma Rudolph.
Cassius Clay.
Rafer Johnson.
The 1960 Olympic Games in Rome provided some defining moments in the extraordinary life story of Wilma Rudolph.
She stormed to gold medal victories in the 100m; 200m; and 4x100 Relay, all in world-record times.
She had set the stage for this unparalleled success as a 16-year-old member of the Women’s 4x100 Olympic Relay team which took home a bronze in the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games.
The fact that she could walk, let alone run, had been very much open to question.
The 20th of 22 children, as a child Rudolph was paralyzed by polio and contracted both scarlet fever and double pneumonia.
It nearly killed her.
Doctors were dubious as to whether or not she would ever walk again.
She was not…dubious.
“My doctor told me I would never walk again,” she said. “My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.”
By the time she was twelve, she had regained her ability to walk and took up athletics.
The rest, as they say, is history.
As a twenty-year-old in Rome, Rudolph indelibly etched her name in American and global lore, authoring one of the most enduring achievements in athletics.
As David Maraniss, author of Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, correctly assessed, women’s events at the time were not even given the time of day.
It was as though they weren’t considered part of the Games:
“Oh yes, absolutely. Particularly the United States track and field establishment. They would often not even cover women’s track and field. The Olympic trials for the women were not even reported in the Bible of track and field, ‘The Track and Field News.’
But Wilma Rudolph came along at a very important time in sort of the rise of women in sports because it was the first televised Olympics. She was charismatic, had a beautiful way of running, and the story of her life was so compelling that she really helped set the stage for all of the women athletes to follow.”
Just like that, a star was born.
She was dubbed, “The Black Gazelle” by the European press, saluting her speed, beauty and grace.
And both America’s and the world’s perception of women in athletics, would never again be the same.
“The fastest woman in the world” became a civil rights advocate and on the 60th anniversary of the Games, remains — and shall remain — an inspiration to Black and women athletes of past and future generations.
On his way to becoming “The Greatest” as Muhammad Ali, 18-year-old Cassius Clay conquered — for that moment at least — his fear of flying, to burst onto the scene as the light heavyweight gold medalist in Rome, 1960.
Another icon in the making.
And an icon he was.
Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964, could not, out of fear of flying, board the plane to Rome; in fact, he took a bus home from the Olympic Trials in San Francisco rather than suffer through another flight.
In his 1975 autobiography, The Greatest: My Own Story, Ali said that he consulted the Air Force regarding the safety of air travel between the United States and Rome.
“They said they couldn’t even remember the last time one [a flight] had crashed,” he said.
Not enough for him.
He bought a parachute at an Army supply store to wear on the plane.
On the flight, teammate Nikos Spanakos, a 5’3” 123 pound American featherweight, recalled “that he was screaming the entire flight,” and talked incessantly to assuage his deep-rooted fears.
Needless to say, he — and they — made it.
The 1960 Olympics turned Clay into an instant and forever celebrity.
Dave Kindred, a National Hall of Fame sportswriter who figures that over the last fifty years, no one has written more about Ali, said as much, when he looked at a photo of the boxing team.
“He’s at the end of the line, but he’s making sure he’s seen, leaning out to make sure his face gets in the picture. He wanted to be famous, however you did that. He made boxing what it became and now no one even knows who the heavyweight champion is.”
Continued Kindred, “He just had a great natural athleticism, a great natural charisma. He was absolutely unique, and he was the most famous man in the world. Literally, the surveys always had him and the Pope running 1–2. Sometimes Ali would be №1 and sometimes the Pope would be №1.”
In 1960, he was far from #1.
Olympic teammates Rudolph, Ray Norton and Rafer Johnson, the track and field luminaries, and basketball heroes Robertson, Lucas and West were considered the Team USA stars heading into the Rome Games — not Clay, the brash mouth from the South.
Maraniss, who insists that Clay had a crush on Rudolph, contends that, “in retrospect, because of the worldwide fame he gained later as Muhammad Ali, there is a temptation to present him as a larger figure at the Rome Olympics than he really was.
He was ebullient and memorable from the start, but he was not a leader of the U.S. delegation.
It was Clay seeking out people, not people seeking out Clay…
An American official said that in four days, Clay had already posed with 28 different delegations and signed countless autographs.”
He earned the moniker, “the Mayor of the Olympic Village.”
But he came to fight.
Receiving a bye in the round of 32 in the 178-pound division, he opened against Belgium’s Yvon Becaus in the round of 16 on August 30.
After a “left hook and right cross with 1:10 left in the second round,” the referee stopped the contest.
Next up was the USSR’s Gennady Shatkov in the quarterfinals on Sept 1.
Shatkov had captured the gold medal four years earlier in the middleweight division in Melbourne.
Clay won by a 5–0 decision and duplicated that feat against Aussie Tony Madigan two days later in the semis.
Three-time European champion and 1956 bronze medalist Zbigniew Pietrzykowski of Poland was Clay’s opponent in the September 5 final.
Puzzled by the southpaw’s style at the outset — Clay’s only top-level amateur loss was to lefty Amos Johnson in the 1959 Pan American Games Trials Final — he had to win the third and final round decisively, in order to win the gold.
He did and he did; another 5–0 decision.
Parlaying his gold medal victory into the most illustrious boxing career in history, Clay’s rhyming and ‘poetry’ was just beginning with a ditty entitled, “HOW CASSIUS TOOK ROME,” which he somehow calmly penned on the flight home.
“To make America the greatest is my goal. So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole.”
Cassius Marcellus Clay was on his way.
The captain of the 1960 U.S. Olympic Team was the most respected athlete of them all, Rafer Johnson.
Maraniss noted that, “Rafer Johnson, the person and the athlete, was viewed as a powerful antidote to the otherwise irrefutable poison of American racism. No one could question his sense of purpose or his good will.”
With the Cold War raging and the battle for civil rights gathering steam in the United States, Johnson became the first Black athlete to carry the U.S. flag at an Olympics opening ceremony.
Was it thumbing our nose at the Soviet Union, known to both delight in highlighting segregationist behavior in America and also take great pleasure in denouncing the racial inequities of the United States?
Or was it a signal of some so kind, that change was on the horizon?
Maraniss sagely observed that with respect to Rafer Johnson, “there could be no more valuable figure in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union…”
Johnson captured the gold medal in the decathlon by fending off his friend and UCLA training partner, C.K. Yang, who was representing Formosa, the Olympic designation at the time for Taiwanese athletes.
Their battle was epic, among the most stirring in Olympic history, and the two-day decathlon — a grueling 10-event test of versatility, strength, speed and endurance that included sprints, high hurdles, pole-vaulting, the high jump and broad jump, the javelin and discus throws, and the 1500-metre run — would be decided in the final event, the 1500 metres.
It was Yang’s specialty.
Johnson, leading on points, didn’t have to win the event to strike gold, but he did need to finish within 10 seconds of Yang.
“I planned to stick with him like a buddy in combat,” Johnson told The Los Angeles Times in 1990.
“I had one other advantage, and I don’t think C.K. knew this at the time. This was my last decathlon. I was prepared to run as fast as I had to in this last race of my life.”
For Yang’s part, he was all too familiar with his pal’s deep reservoir of strength, tenacity and will.
Yang, who died in 2007, recalled, “I knew he would never let go of me unless he collapsed.”
Johnson sewed it up, finishing 1.2 seconds behind Yang, the silver medalist.
Vasily Kuznetsov of the Soviet Union won the bronze.
With the well-deserved acclaim as the world’s greatest all-around athlete, Johnson never competed again.
Instead, he became a good-will ambassador for the United States and a close associate of the Kennedy family, taking a leadership role in the Special Olympics, championed by Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
He also joined Robert F. Kennedy’s entourage during his ’68 presidential campaign and was/is singularly remembered for tackling the senator’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, and wrestling his gun away in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.
Rafer Johnson’s final moment in the Olympic spotlight arrived when he climbed a precarious 99 steps at the Los Angeles Coliseum to light the cauldron for the 1984 Games.
(Ali — diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease as many as a dozen years before — accepted this honor in Atlanta, 1996).
“I was in a sense an Olympian again, preparing my body to do something exceptional,” Johnson wrote in his memoir.
“Was I concerned about making it to the top of the stairs?
Yes.
Was I thinking about whether I might trip or fall?
Yes.
Did I have any doubt that I would come through?
No.”
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in January 2020.]
