XVIII Olympiad

Carl Posey

Description

XVIII Olympiad, the sixteenth volume in The Olympic Century series, begins in Japan, at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the first Games ever held in Asia. The Tokyo Games were also the first ever broadcast globally by satellite.The book tells the story of Tokyo heroes like Osamu Watanabe of Japan, who won gold in freestyle wrestling without surrendering a point, and Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, who won two golds, one silver and two bronze to bring her Olympic medal total to 18. Other highlights of 1964 recounted in the book include the dominant US men's swim team, which won seven of a possible 10 medals in the pool, and Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, who matched his performance from Rome four years earlier to become the first person to repeat as Olympic marathon champion.Later in the book the focus turns to the Winter Olympics and the 1968 Games in Grenoble, France. Broadcast for the first time in colour, the 1968 Games saw East and West Germany compete as separate nations for the first time. The book profiles stars of Grenoble like gold-medal winning figure skater Peggy Fleming, who sparked a surge in interest in skating; the dashing Frenchman Jean-Claude Killy, who took three gold medals in skiing; and an elfin skier from Canada named Nancy Greene who won gold and silver and became an instant icon in her country.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: 9781987944150
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT VOLUME 16
THE XVIII OLYMPIAD
TOKYO 1964 GRENOBLE 1968
by Carl A. Posey
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 978-1-987944-15-0 (Volume 16)
CONTENTS
I U NDERDOGS
II U NDER T HE V OLCANO
III A SHADE OF D IFFERENCE
IV U TMOST G RAVITY
A PPENDIX
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P HOTO C REDITS
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX

UNDERDOGS
TOKYO 1964
Toying with an opponent had never been Joe Frazier s style. A thick, heavily muscled 195-pounder not quite 6 feet tall, Frazier had neither the legs nor the reach for much choreography in the ring; his style, like his life, could afford no such frills. A young man with a wife and three kids and few marketable skills had to fight the way he had to work, and he worked in the Cross Brothers slaughterhouse in Philadelphia, doing the hard, hand-wrecking labor of carving the carcasses of recently slain beef. Don t worry about the guys over here, he had written Florence, his wife. They fight like girls.
Over here meant Tokyo, and on this night in October 1964, under the conical glare illuminating the ring in the Korakuen Ice Palace, the 20-year-old from Philadelphia seemed to be toying with a 30-year-old German giant named Hans Huber, a powerful boxer a head taller than the American, blessed with the long frame and limbs of the true heavyweight. The three 3-minute rounds would be the most important nine minutes in either man s short life. But, trapped in the cosmic irony that seemed always to dog him, Joe Frazier wasn t able to wade in like a compact armored machine, as had been his custom. Circumstances beyond his control were making him fight the way Huber did-like a girl, as Frazier had put it.
Below: Joe Frazier, U.S.A., and Hans Huber, Germany, boxing heavyweight gold-medal bout, Tokyo 1964

Only two years earlier, Frazier had walked into Philadelphia s 23rd Police Athletic League Gym at 22nd Street and Columbia, a shortish, fat black kid with no experience. He had come up from Beaufort, South Carolina, a couple of years before, first to join an older brother in New York, and then to Philadelphia, where he found work and summoned his little family north. He was tough-indeed, his slaughterhouse work would have exhausted most men-with a left arm as powerful as a very strong leg. His sharecropper father had lost his own left arm in a shotgun accident, and Joe had taken up the left-side slack around the farm- my left-hand man, Rubin Frazier had liked to say. The muscle behind one of history s famous left hooks, Joe used to tell people, That s all from my dad, not from lifting weights or hitting a bag or anything like that.

Later, Joe would explain that he had gone to the gym to lose weight-a matter of economics, not vanity: He couldn t squeeze his fat thighs into regular-size trousers, and he couldn t afford tailor-mades. But police sergeant Duke Dugent, the boxing instructor at the gym, knew it was more than big legs that had brought Joe to him. He said, Dugent would recall, he wanted to learn boxing to see if he could make a living at it.
Dugent had signed him up, put him on a diet, and started kneading 240 pounds of soft clay into 190 pounds of hard muscle. Gradually, the young man who had walked into the gym too fat, too short, and too slow to be a boxer-the clumsy kid who couldn t throw a punch without losing his balance-metamorphosed into a fighter.
Dugent taught Frazier to discard the long comic-strip left, telegraphed from a mile away, and to concentrate on short jabs and hooks, on combinations, on throwing volleys of quick, hard punches instead of the single haymaker. A barrage of hooks would open a man s defenses, along with the skin around the eyes, the mouth, and nose. Frazier was a quick study. At first he was bad, said Dugent, the next day he was good. Nothing got in his way. Up at 4:30 a.m. to run, Frazier did his wearying shift at Cross Brothers, then went to the gym until 8 at night, when he dragged himself home to his little house on Somerset Street near 12th. Sometimes, inside the gloves, his hands were laced with cuts from the slaughterhouse. He didn t seem to care. Joe Frazier had become a new man, powerful and graceful and deadly in the ring, with less and less time to think about minor discomforts.
For a while, he had looked unstoppable. Frazier won 35 of 37 amateur bouts, losing decisions twice to Buster Mathis, a 6-foot-9, 295-pound Grand Rapids housepainter turned boxer-a man of unexpected agility and speed. Still, Frazier won the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves heavyweight championship in 1963 and 1964, and many in the game thought him the best contender around. These bouts were not the 15-round endurance contests of the professional ring, but comparatively tame matches of only three 3-minute rounds. You had to win quickly, and there was little time to show such added value as stamina, determination, and the imponderable quality known as heart. The bouts paid nothing, but for Joe Frazier, as for every other strong young man trying to fight his way into the light, these were the first rungs of the climb to another, better stratum of life.
Early in 1964, Frazier entered the trials for the Olympic Games to be held in Tokyo that October. In New York he fought six fights and tallied six knockouts. He wanted to win a gold medal for his country in Tokyo, but he also could see where the Olympic trail might lead. Floyd Patterson had leapt from a middleweight gold medal at Helsinki 1952 to the world heavyweight championship four years later. And Patterson s successor-lumbering, indestructible Sonny Liston-had just lost the crown to another Olympian, Cassius Clay (soon to be known as Muhammad Ali), who had won the Rome 1960 light heavyweight gold. Manifestly, gold in Tokyo could mean gold at home. Frazier badly wanted to be part of that equation.
Below: The Korakuen Ice Palace boxing ring is empty except for Choh Dong-kih, who protests his disqualification. The South Korean flyweight made his point about what he deemed unfair judging by sitting in the ring for 51 minutes. Choh was ousted from his quarterfinal match against the Soviet Union s Stanislav Sorokin for holding .

On May 20, with his six KOs tidily in hand, Frazier stepped into the ring with his huge nemesis, Buster Mathis, and lost 2-1 in a narrow decision. It s back to the abattoir in Philadelphia, instead of on to Tokyo, for heavyweight Joe Frazier, reported a Philly sportswriter, and indeed, the loss to Mathis seemed to warrant the epitaph. With his hand just grasping a crucial rung of the ladder out of the slaughterhouse, Frazier had slipped and fallen. He had become once more the young father of three, drawing a hard-earned $100 a week, a once-promising amateur boxer who had failed to make the Olympic team. For the first time in his life-maybe the only time--Joe Frazier despaired. I don t want to ever fight again, he said. This is it.
Below: Hungarian referee Gy rgySermer takes a left to the chin from Spain s Valentin Loren. Sermer had disqualified Loren for repeated holding. The Spaniard s outburst prompted the international boxing federation to ban him from amateur boxing for life .

But it wasn t. Pat Duffy, boxing chairman of the Middle Atlantic