Chapter One
All Roads to Rome
Two weeks before the opening of the 1960 Rome Olympics, in the midst of
one of the hottest summers of the cold war, a press counselor for the
Italian embassy in Washington paid a courtesy call on his counterpart at
the U.S. Department of State. With diplomatic politesse, Gabriele Paresce
said that he was there to remind American officials that Italy, as the
host country, hoped to keep the Rome Olympics “free from activity of a
political or propaganda nature.”
After reaching into his briefcase, Paresce handed John G. Kormann a
document known as an aide-memoire. It included part of a speech on the
Olympic spirit delivered by Italian defense minister Giulio Andreotti,
president of the Organizing Committee for the Games of the XVII Olympiad.
Other Italian press attachés were undertaking similar missions at capitals
around the world, Paresce said. He wanted to assure the Americans that in
their case the visit was a mere formality. The Italians expected no
problems from them. On the other hand, they were “seriously concerned that
the Iron Curtain countries should be admonished not to exploit contacts at
the Games for propaganda purposes.” When it came to the communists,
according to Paresce, it would be a case of “No propaganda, or we throw
you out!” Before leaving, he asked Kormann to relay his message to the
United States Olympic Committee. Kormann explained that American Olympic
officials were not controlled by the government and could not be told what
to do, but he happened to be on friendly terms with the press director,
Arthur Lentz, and would be happy to pass along the word. He said he was
certain that both the State Department and the USOC “wanted to maintain
the true spirit of the Games.” After Paresce left, Kormann called Lentz in
New York, where the U.S. team was assembling in preparation for Rome.
Lentz promised him that the Americans would do all they could to respect
the Italian request.
The next morning, Saturday, August 13, David Sime, a sprinter on the U.S.
team, was alone in his room at the Vanderbilt Hotel in Manhattan, weakened
by the flu, when the telephone rang. “Is this David Sime?” a man asked. He
said he was from the government and wanted to talk.
“About what?” Sime wondered. He was not in a sociable mood. If he had felt
better, he would have been at Van Cortlandt Stadium, in the Bronx, going
through the training regimen with the rest of the track-and-field team.
Instead, he remained at the delegation’s hotel at Park Avenue and 34th
Street, preserving his strength for his moment of truth. That would come
eighteen days later inside Stadio Olimpico in Rome, when the red-haired
Duke University medical student was scheduled to race in the 100-meter
dash, one of the premier events of the Olympics.
But this caller was insistent, and already knew enough to pronounce his
name so that it rhymed with rim. Scottish. Forget the e on the end.
Come on up, Sime said.
Once inside the room, the federal agent told Sime that the United States
of America could use his help. After analyzing intelligence from European
contacts and carefully observing Soviet stars who had been in Philadelphia
for the second US-USSR dual track meet in 1959, they had targeted an
athlete who might be approachable in Rome, an interesting prospect for
defection.
Is this a hoax? Sime asked. As an amateur athlete, one could never tell
what was real and what was a joke. Almost every week, some decision made
by the brass at the Amateur Athletic Union seemed unreal. Who could
believe it when they suspended the eligibility of his friend Lee Calhoun,
the champion high hurdler from North Carolina College at Durham, for a
year because Calhoun and his wife, Gwen, got married on the Bride and
Groom television game show? That was a joke, or should have been, but it
was not. Then there were the athletes themselves. Sime knew enough
prankster teammates, especially his pals from that summer’s Olympic Trials
and practice meets, pole-vaulter Don Bragg and javelin thrower Al
Cantello, to suspect that they might be setting him up.
Deadly serious, the visitor flashed a government ID. “We’d like you to
come to Washington,” he said. “We’ll have you back tonight.”
There was a flight to Washington, a black car waiting, a ride to a
nondescript building, a brisk walk to a secured room – it was all a
strange blur. “I had no idea where I was. There were three of us in the
room. ‘Here’s the guy’s name,’ they said.” It was Igor Ter-Ovanesyan.
“‘Here’s what he looks like. We will contact you in Rome and go from there
if you do it.’ They wanted me to meet with him because they figured I was
a medical student, and it would have more merit to it.”
That Dave Sime was on his way to Rome at all signified how far along an
unlikely comeback track he had traveled. There was a time, in the year
leading up to the 1956 Olympics, when he was considered the world’s
fastest human. That is what the track writers called him after he had won
the indoor sprints at the Millrose Games in New York earlier that year.
Big Red could run anything: 60-yard dash, 70-yard dash, 100, 200, low
hurdles, high hurdles. He was white lightning, a flash from Fairview, New
Jersey, so talented that as a thirteen-year-old he had won the Silver
Skates prize for speed skating at Madison Square Garden, making the front
page of the New York Daily News – and he didn’t even like to skate. A few
years later, he showed enough potential in football to be recruited to
play at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by an assistant coach
named Vince Lombardi. He might have gone into the services but decided
against it when he realized that colorblindness would prevent him from
becoming an air corps pilot. Basketball was truly his favorite sport (his
father had played for the old New York Celtics), but when it came to
selecting a college, he decided on Duke, lured there by baseball coach Ace
Parker, who wanted him to play center field.
It was not until he reached Duke that Sime became interested in track. His
raw speed far outpaced his technique at first, but he schooled himself in
the art of sprinting by reading every book on running at the university
library, eventually patterning his style on the stride of a dash great
from an earlier era, Ralph Metcalfe. He spent hours thumbing through the
pages of a flip book of photographs depicting Metcalfe running, creating
the sensation of a moving picture. By the end of his sophomore year, Sime
had streaked to national stardom in the track world and was a favorite to
win gold in the sprints in ’56, but he hurt his leg before the Olympic
Trials and never made it to Melbourne. This disappointment, he said later,
was the “best thing that happened” in his life, forcing him to redirect
his attention to premed courses. He also concentrated on baseball. During
his junior season, Sime led the Atlantic Coast Conference and was named a
second-team all-American. He might have abandoned track altogether until a
test of his amateurism at once infuriated him and turned him around. After
that stellar junior season, he had landed a summer job playing semipro
baseball in Pierre, South Dakota, but before the opening game, he received
an emergency telephone call from Dan Ferris, the head of the AAU, who had
somehow learned of his intentions and whereabouts.
“If you play one game, you will be ineligible for all amateur athletic
events in track and field,” Ferris told him.
“So I am stuck,” Sime recalled. “I could have said, ‘Fuck, I’m going to do
it,’ and give up my amateur athletics. But I still was pissed that I
didn’t get to go to Melbourne. Bobby Morrow, who I beat every time when I
was healthy, wins the gold medals, and I’m sitting back home … So now I
didn’t know what to do.” Sime was without money, and the Pierre ball club
was of no help; it wouldn’t pay him unless he played in the first game. In
desperation, he called Eddie Cameron, Duke’s athletic director, who said
the NCAA would penalize Duke if he sent money to bring Sime home, but that
he could arrange transportation to an AAU track meet in Dayton. Sime flew
to Ohio, worked out for a day, did well in the meet, and soon found
himself on a national squad touring France – and back on a course that
eventually led him toward the race he had always wanted to run, for an
Olympic gold medal. Even Ace Parker, his baseball coach, thought it was
the right decision. When Sime debated with him whether to try pro ball or
keep his Olympic dream alive, Parker said that out of the few billion
people in the world, only a handful get a chance to run in the Olympics,
and that if he had that one-in-millions chance, he should seize it.
Now Sime, at age twenty-four, was an Olympian with an extra assignment:
run for your country, and bag a defector for your country as well. Dave
was all for it. He considered himself a patriot. To get a high-profile
athlete to switch sides and leave the Soviet Union for America seemed a
thrilling thing to do.
The airlift of American athletes from New York to Rome began the same day
as Sime’s whirlwind secret round-trip mission to Washington. First to
leave were the swimmers and members of the water polo team, along with an
advance deputation of coaches and officials. Another planeload departed
the next day. As each group assembled at Idlewild and waited for the Pan
American props that would haul them on the vibrating, seemingly endless
fifteen-and-a-half-hour flights, Arthur Lentz, the press officer, moved
through the throng of athletes distributing materials. He had already made
Berlitz tutors available to teach them how to say phrases like “Your
sister is very beautiful” in Italian. Now he was handing out copies of the
U.S. Declaration of Independence and a thirty-three-page booklet on the
virtues of American life – all printed in Russian. So much for any
pretense of keeping the Olympics free from politics. In the propaganda
struggle of cold war superpowers, neither side would disarm unilaterally.
The booklet, published by a CIA front called Freedom Fund Inc., noted,
among other things, that there were nearly a million people from the
Soviet Union now living in America, and that here even the Communist Party
could run a candidate for president. Another section discussed common
misperceptions of the U.S., one being that only the privileged class
benefited from the capitalist system. In emptying his supply of three
hundred booklets, Lentz told the athletes that they should pass along
their copies to members of the Soviet team at the Olympic Village in Rome.
To Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, not quite twenty-two, who had made the Soviet team
in the broad jump for the second straight Olympics, competing against
athletes from the United States remained an intimidating prospect. Igor
was the Soviet version of a gym rat, a lifelong product of the state-run
athletic system. His father, an Armenian-born discus thrower, and his
mother, a Ukrainian volleyball player, had met at the Kiev State Institute
of Physical Education, and both taught there while he was growing up.
Although he did not turn to track and field until he was fifteen,
Ter-Ovanesyan showed uncommon early talent, breaking the broad-jump record
for his age group in his first competition. From then on, his idols were
not Soviets but Americans who dominated track and field, starting with the
great Jesse Owens, who set the Olympic long-jump record at the 1936 Games
in Berlin and a world record a year before at an event in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, with a remarkable leap that was still unmatched a quarter
century later. “They were like gods for me, the American jumpers,” Igor
said later. First at Melbourne and then at the historic dual meets in
Moscow in 1958 and Philadelphia in 1959, he had felt psychologically
overmatched by the U.S. athletes and struggled to overcome an inferiority
complex.
But the Western world, and all things American, intrigued him. Bored and
lonely during a track tour in Sweden in 1958, he picked up an old English
textbook and studied it at night in his Stockholm hotel room. Back in
Kiev, he began tuning in Voice of America broadcasts and listened to
“everything that wasn’t jammed.” On every trip to a European capital, he
bought American jazz records, books, magazines, as many totems of Western
culture as he could find, and smuggled them home in his suitcase. “Did you
ever see Louis Armstrong?” he once asked the sportswriter Dick Schaap. “He
is wonderful. He is the best. I collect all his records.” Schaap found it
hard to believe that Igor – who “looked like an Ivy Leaguer and acted
like a beatnik” – could be a Russian. But though Ter-Ovanesyan was
flirting with what seemed new and unfettered, there remained much about
the West that he did not understand, and he still felt a deep imprint of
love and loyalty for his fatherland.
Nineteen-sixty had been a difficult year in Soviet relations with the
West. Tension seemed to be building month by month, starting in May, when
an American U-2 reconnaissance plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was
shot down over Soviet airspace. That was followed by Premier Khrushchev’s
staged walkout from a four-powers summit meeting in Paris, the
cancellation of a future visit to Russia by President Eisenhower, a Soviet
promise to defend socialist Cuba with missiles if need be, surrogate
battles in Africa and Asia, more pressure over the status of West Berlin,
and now, on the eve of the Olympics, a public show trial, in Moscow, where
Powers faced espionage charges.
From the Soviet perspective, all of life was an ideological test, and in
this context Ter-Ovanesyan was reminded again and again of the political
importance of his mission. With his teammates, he was taken on a
pilgrimage to Lenin’s Tomb. They walked in silence in a slow, somber
circle around the mausoleum, a ritual meant to instill a deeper sense of
camaraderie and patriotism. He attended daily meetings of the Komsomol,
the young people’s branch of the Communist Party. He listened to rambling
lectures on the role he and his teammates would play in building
friendships with athletes from around the world.
Their performance in Rome, Igor was told, would reflect the triumph of a
new socialist society where sports was an essential part of the culture. A
send-off column from one of the writers he respected at Pravda read in
part: “Our sportsmen represent the new socialistic order where mental
health and moral purity are harmonically tied with physical development.
Sports and physical development are the habit of the nation. They are the
source of the good spirit, happiness, hard work, and long lives of the
Soviet people.” It was the same for writers as it was for athletes,
Ter-Ovanesyan thought. Just as there was pressure on him to reach certain
standards during his training regimen in order not to be regarded
negatively by his coaches, so in their sphere his sportswriter friends had
to deal with expectations from officials monitoring them and what they
published.
Pravda accounts said there were 24 million active athletes in the Soviet
Union and that there would be 30 million by the end of the year. From
those tens of millions, 299 were selected for the Olympic team that
assembled in Moscow and started leaving for Rome on the same mid-August
day that the American delegation began departing from New York. The Soviet
athletes included blacksmiths, builders, doctors, lawyers, engineers,
fishermen, printers, miners, farmers, scientists, and students, but most
were connected to the military. In preparing them for Rome, their official
handlers placed an emphasis on how best to impress the rest of the world.
This meant, among other things, overcoming prevailing Russian stereotypes.
At Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne in 1956, the world press had written
disparagingly of the poor dress and general unattractiveness of many of
the Soviet women athletes. If the characterization reflected the
prevailing sexist attitude of sportswriters, it nonetheless mirrored an
unpleasant portrait of grim Soviet life that Kremlin officials desperately
wanted to erase. From the time the first planeload of Russian athletes
marched through the airport in Rome, the physical appearance of both the
men and women was noted by foreign journalists. Readers from Paris to
London to San Francisco were informed that the Soviet women came off the
plane wearing sharp beige suits, hosiery, high-heeled brown pumps – and
lipstick.
Whatever their dress, the Soviets arrived in Rome with instructions to
exude an outward confidence. The doubts that nagged at Ter-Ovanesyan and
many of his teammates were smothered by a constant publicity drumbeat of
inevitable socialist victory. Since the 1958 dual meet in Moscow, Gavriel
Korobkov, the Soviet coach, had been maintaining a meticulous scrapbook
detailing the accomplishments of U.S. track-and-field athletes, and knew
precisely their best times in the sprints and distances and heights in the
jumps. Korobkov was a realist, not prone to political rhetoric, but he was
also a clever strategist. If the Americans had the superior athletes, he
also believed that they had some of the most fragile ones and that he
might be able to find ways to make them crack under pressure. While the
Soviets were still far below world standards in swimming, dominated by the
U.S. and Australia, if they could battle the Americans to a draw in track
and field, they thought they could take enough medals in various other
sports – from weight lifting to cycling to gymnastics to canoeing – to
win the overall point total and gain world bragging rights over the
Americans.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Rome 1960
by David Maraniss
Copyright © 2008 by David Maraniss.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2008
David Maraniss
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3407-5
