XVII Olympiad

Ellen Phillips

Description

Rome had been selected to host the 1908 Olympic Games, but the impact of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1906 on the Italian economy forced the Eternal City to withdraw. Rome would finally get a second chance to host the world's premier sporting festival in 1960, and XVII Olympiad, the fifteenth volume in The Olympic Century series, begins with the story of those Games.The 1960 Olympics were the first summer Games to be broadcast in North America, sparking massive interest in both the host city and the athletes. The book profiles heroes of Rome like the American sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who overcame childhood polio to become a triple-gold medal winner, and the young boxer Cassius Clay, who would win Olympic gold before going on to untold fame as heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. Rome also saw the emergence of the powerful Japanese men's gymnastics team, which began an unprecedented streak of five team golds, and produced the indelible image of Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila winning the marathon in bare feet.Following Rome, the focus of the book shifts to Austria, and the 1964 Winter Games in the mountain town of Innsbruck. The sport of luge made its Olympic debut in 1964, and Russian speed skater Lidia Skobilkova cemented her place in Olympic history by winning all four women's events. The book also profiles the Goitschen sisters of France, who finished first and second in both slalom and giant slalom. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former President of the International Olympic Committee, called The Olympic Century, "The most comprehensive history of the Olympic games ever published".

Informations

• Publié par: Warwick Press Inc.
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781987944143
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT VOLUME 15
THE XVII OLYMPIAD
ROME 1960 INNSBRUCK 1964
by Ellen Phillips
W
Warwick Press Inc. Toronto
Copyright 1996 WSRP
The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.
Published by:
Warwick Press Inc., Toronto
www.olympicbooks.com
1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison
Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley
Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman
Art Director: Christopher M. Register
Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons
Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske
Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin
Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez
Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee
Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin
Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat
Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto
Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany
Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg
Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O Neil
Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters
Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)
Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).
International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)
International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Val ry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)
All rights reserved. No part of The Olympic Century book series may be copied, republished, stored in a retrieval system, or otherwise reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written consent of the IOC, the USOC, and WSRP.
eBook Conversion: eBook Partnership, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-987944-24-2 (24 Volume Series)
ISBN 978-1-987944-14-3 (Volume 15)
CONTENTS
I R OME I MMEMORIAL
II T ROUBLES AND T ITANS
III W ORLDS D IVIDED
IV F AST T RACK
A PPENDIX
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P HOTO C REDITS
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX

ROME IMMEMORIAL
ROME 1960
By the evening of September 5, 1960, glaring summer had given way to the first winds of a Roman autumn: The afternoons sparkled, but at night the air was damp and chill. In the Stadio Olimpico this 12th day of the Games of the XVII Olympiad, the first day of the decathlon ended late: Exhausted athletes were still straggling out at 10:30 p.m. Leading the contenders were two men who had been classmates, close friends, and training comrades for the past two years, and inseparable companions in the days leading up to this competition. Now they kept a distance between them: They didn t speak, and they didn t meet each other s eyes. For the most part, they stared at the ground.
The older of the two was Yang Chuan-kwang, known in the West as C. K. Yang. Born in 1933 on Taiwan, Yang was a descendant of mainland Chinese who had colonized the island centuries before it was surrendered to Japan in 1895. During Yang s boyhood and youth, Taiwan was green, rural, and isolated, and its mountain landscape-which had earned it the name Formosa, meaning beautiful, from early Portuguese explorers-was still unspoiled. Only a handful of cities and towns clung to the edge of its coastal plain, and these were small and low, their narrow streets rarely paved and always thronged with carts (some drawn by water buffalo, some by men), with bicycles and pedicabs. Behind the lowlands towered volcanic mountains wreathed with rice terraces and crowned with forests. Yang spent a good part of his childhood in those mountain woods, sheltering with his family from Allied bombing. At the end of World War II, when the refugees returned to the towns, he was a malarial adolescent, thin and unusually tall for a Taiwanese. His looks inspired his classmates at Taitung Agricultural High School to call him Bamboo.
Below: America s Rafer Johnson and Taiwan s Yang Chuan-kwang, Decathlon Medalists, Rome 1960

But Taitung Agricultural, like every school established during Japan s occupation, had a baseball team: The Japanese were passionate about the game. Yang, who yearned for acceptance, desperately wanted to be on that team. He made himself good enough. The speed he developed during that effort turned him to track, and success there encouraged him to take up high jumping and long jumping. People began to take notice: He was chosen, albeit last, as a candidate for the 1954 Asian Games and sent to training camp. The field practice he saw there led him to experiment. He taught himself hurdling from a book, and then moved on to the javelin. The team coach suggested he try the decathlon. At first, Yang wasn t interested: The pole vault looked dangerous, and he hated the 1,500-meter run that completed the competition s 10 events. On the other hand, the coach thought he had a better chance at the Asian Games in the decathlon than in jumping, and Yang wanted badly to shine. He gave it a shot. I had never pole-vaulted in my life, he recalled years later. They say, Now you hold the pole like this, stick it in the box, hang on to it, and jump. God was I scared.
This was only three weeks before the 1954 Asian competition at Manila. Yang tried the decathlon for the first time in the Taiwanese trials. He stayed in bed for two days afterward, but he made the team. And in Manila he took the first international gold medal ever won by a Taiwanese track and field athlete.
The medal followed by competition in the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games-he came in eighth-changed Yang s life. In the years after the war, Nationalist Chinese in flight from triumphant mainland Communists had established their government-in-exile on Taiwan, and the Nationalists were eager for the kind of international recognition sports provides. Among these enthusiasts was a millionaire architect named S. S. Kwan, head of the island s track and field federation. Kwan s goal, he said, was to break the egg, the egg being the zero number of Chinese Olympic medals. The architect therefore sent Yang, with an English-speaking coach to interpret for him, to compete in the 1958 U.S. decathlon championships. After Yang came in a good second, Kwan stood as his sponsor, arranging a year s crash course in English as well as financial support and admission to that nursery of world-class athletes, the University of California at Los Angeles. Still almost unknown in the West, the crew-cut, boyish-looking Yang was 26, old for a decathlete but tall, rangy, and strong.

UCLA was where Yang became friends with Rafer Johnson, the man who had bested him at the U.S. championships. Johnson in those days was golden, an all-American ideal. Born in Texas, he had been brought up in the San Joaquin Valley in the small town of Kingsburg, California. He had been spared most of the humiliations African-Americans suffered then: Kingsburg was a farming town where people worked hard and went to bed early and to church often. Its few blacks, according to Johnson, were judged by what they did, not by what they were. And, like many small American towns, Kingsburg loved its high-school athletes, especially stars like Johnson. In school he won letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track. Impressed by the feats of the great Bob Mathias, he turned to the decathlon and conquered that too.
As a high-school senior, Johnson was competing in national meets, his fares paid by the proud people of Kingsburg. During his freshman year at UCLA, where he went on an athletic scholarship, Johnson won the decathlon at the 1955 Pan-American Games and then broke the world decathlon record, happily in an Amateur Athletic Union meet held in his hometown. He was on his way to the Melbourne Games. UCLA coach Elvin Ducky Drake found him awesome: We don t know what his limits are. He has tremendous physical ability, combined with a calm, intellectual approach to his training and competition, plus great determination. That s a combination that s hard to beat. It was indeed. Even with severe injuries to muscles in his stomach and one knee, Johnson won the decathlon silver medal in Australia. Within a couple of years he held a host of records and tides, and he was a household name.
Rafer Johnson was also a good man-calm, tolerant, generous of spirit, mature for his years. It wasn t surprising that he had been a student-body president throughout his school career. And it was natural for him to befriend the young Taiwanese, a stranger in a strange land and a fellow athlete. He and Yang trained together, and having different strengths, they helped each other. They competed together and cheered each other on. They went to the beach and the movies together.
In 1960, however, they traveled to Rome separately. Rafer Johnson flew with the U.S. team, C. K. Yang with the Taiwanese.
Below: UCLA track and field coach Elvin Ducky Drake (center) talks strategy with his two top decathletes, Rafer