Roman Soldiers: David Maraniss

THE ITALIAN SOLDIERS stand 10 meters apart, piercing the night with torches and keeping the road clear. A barefoot Ethiopian man hurls his slim frame down the ancient pass as astonished spectators look on. Abebe Bikila is on his way to setting a new world record in the marathon and winning the Olympic gold medal — the first black African to do so.

It should not be difficult to construct a compelling narrative around events such as this, and David Maraniss, a Pulitzer winner and associate editor at the Washington Post, is up to the task with his new book, "Rome, 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World."

"There's a way to illuminate history through sports," said Maraniss, and his book offers vivid snapshots of a time when cold war rivalry was thick, America struggled over segregation, African countries were gaining independence, doping and steroids were on the rise and many athletes, especially women, struggled to get a fair shake from an International Olympic Committee controlled by royalty and an autocratic, egocentric, possibly criminally insane American businessman.

Ah, the days.

The book jumps from story to story, picking up and dropping off characters frequently, which seems a wise way to deal with the scope of potential material — despite the book's considerable heft, entire Olympic events are left nearly unmentioned. Those which are covered — basketball, track and field, boxing, spycraft and diving, among others — are presented with depth, clarity and erudition.

One of the few things that sticks in the reader's craw is the book's subtitle. It is difficult to see how this 1960 Rome Olympics changed the world. The Olympics seem a historical product, not a historical agent.

Remarkably, Maraniss appears to share this skepticism.

"You know, the subtitle is just a subtitle," he said. "I don't write polemics. I didn't write it with that subtitle in mind. I wrote it because of what I saw as all of the important things I saw coming together in Rome."

The author says he did not pick the subtitle. "I mean, I'm willing to argue for it, but it's not the point of the book. The point of the book is the world was stirring at that moment."

Express spoke with Maraniss about Cassius Clay, James Bradford, Avery Brundage, the India-Pakistan field hockey championship and, yes, subtitles. He will also discuss his work on Wednesday at Politics & Prose.

» EXPRESS: There's a D.C. angle to the book: You write about Bradford, the weightlifter from D.C.
» MARANISS: Yeah, James Bradford was a heavyweight weightlifter, a black guy who still lives in the same house he lived in back in 1960 and worked at the Library of Congress for decades. He was essentially ignored. The Library of Congress wouldn't even give him a leave of absence to go to Rome. He had to take an unpaid leave. When he returned with a silver medal, they paid no attention to him. So he completely felt like an invisible man during that era.

» EXPRESS: Why did they pay no attention to him?
» MARANISS: I can't answer that question. Racism certainly had something to do with it. He always assumed it was because he was black and Washington in 1960 was a very segregated, racist place.

» EXPRESS: Olney, Maryland is mentioned in the book as well.
» MARANISS: Just tangentially. A doctor from Olney, Dr. Ziegler, was affiliated with the weightlifting team and the good doctor was experimenting with anabolic steroids with some of the weightlifters. He didn't know what the effects were. He felt guilty about it later. I did a lot of research on it. Both the American and Soviet weightlifting teams in 1960 were just starting the experiments with steroids that would come to dominate a lot of sports in later decades.

Another aspect of the Rome Olympics was doping: A doping scandal at the Rome Olympics, when the Danish cyclist [Knud Enemark Jensen] died from doping that affected his blood, started everything that was to follow.

» EXPRESS: One of my favorite aspects of book is that you had access to [IOC President Avery] Brundage's notes.
» MARANISS: [laughs] What a character Avery Brundage was. He thought that he was the king of the world and that the Olympics were larger than any religion or ideology or government. Luckily for me, he kept voluminous notes and they're all at the archives of the University of Illinois.

So, he'd be doodling away while some meeting was going one about things ranging from wines that he loved to royalty that he'd met to the price of prostitutes in Rome. He was kind of a classic hypocrite. At the same time that he was lecturing the athletes on responsibility and bemoaning the modern world, he had a mistress and was a complete lothario — that all becomes clear in his own notes [laughs].

» EXPRESS: Cassius Clay is a reason many people will pick up your book, and you really can see everything that he became so famous for in the stories you recount about his behavior in the 1960 Olympics. Do you have a favorite anecdote about him during that time?
» MARANISS: What I'd like to say about Clay is that he was the same personality, but with none of the meaning behind it. He's a character in the book. He's not a main character, because there's no reason to make him such. He was only 18-years-old then and he was kind of like the obstreperous little brother to the other athletes. He was in no way the most famous then, although he knew he would be, or was saying that he would be the champion of the world.

He was afraid to fly. They had to give him sleeping pills to put him on the plane to Rome. The sleeping pills didn't put him to sleep. He yapped his way over there and by his second day in the Olympic Village, I think everyone knew who Cassius Clay was.

He won the gold medal in the light-heavyweight division, wore his medal to sleep that night was wearing it all around the Olympic Village for the next several days. People would roll their eyes when they'd see Cassius coming: That was Clay in 1960. In four years, he'd be Mohammad Ali, on his way to becoming the most famous athlete probably in the world history, along with Michael Jordan. But then he was just an 18-year-old kid.

» EXPRESS: What are your favorite stories from the book?
» MARANISS: I mean, there are so many, but [here are] three that are at the center of the book.

First is Abebe Bikila ... He did it running barefoot through the streets of Rome, the capital city of the country that had invaded his home, Ethiopia, almost 25 years earlier. I think that his brilliant marathon race really paved the way for all of the great east African runners that would follow. You know, dozens of them would win gold medals after that, but he was the very first and [it was] an important moment in African history.

Maybe my favorite characters in the book are Wilma Rudolph and the Tigerbelles from little Tennessee State University, a historically black school. This was way before Title IX, before there were any women's sports in colleges sanctioned by the NCAA. At Tennessee State, the coach, Ed Temple, didn't even have his own office. He had to share it with his wife, the postmaster of the little school. They had to travel in station wagons — they had no buses to travel to Tuskegee or Alabama State through the Jim Crow segregated deep south of 1960.

You know, they really had nothing, and out of that came the greatest women's track and field program in history and Wilma Rudolph, who overcame childhood polio and teenage pregnancy to win three gold medals in Rome.

The third one I would mention has to do with the spy angle to the book: Dave Sime, a student at Duke Medical School [and American sprinter], was recruited by American intelligence agents to try to get a Soviet broad jumper, Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, to defect. And he befriended Ter-Ovanesyan in Rome and the whole thing only fell apart because the American agent who was supposed to close the deal scared the heck out of Ter-Ovanesyan by talking to him in an Armenian dialect. [Ter-Ovanesyan] thought he was a double-agent and bolted from the room.

» EXPRESS: One of my favorite parts of the book is the section about the India-Pakistan field hockey championship.
» MARANISS: I was 11-years-old in 1960 and I remember watching parts of [the Olympics] on TV, but my only really clear memory is after the field hockey game, when the Pakistani team gathered and started chanting and I was in my living room in Madison, Wisconsin — I knew nothing about field hockey, nothing about Pakistan, nothing about India — and I was jumping around my living room, chanting for the Pakistanis [laughs].

It's one of the many times in the those Olympics when politics and sports converged and the Pakistani upset of India was a huge moment in Pakistani life.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Wed., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Lisa Berg