BY the time the gates to Stadio Olimpico opened at three on the afternoon of August 25, thousands of athletes and officials from eighty-three delegations had begun the milelong march to get there from the village. Afghans, Bulgarians, Cubans, Danes, Ethiopians, Finns, and on and on, they moved as a human ribbon of exuberant color, crossing the Tiber over the Ponte Milvio and flowing down to the Foro Italico, where they crowded onto the infield grass of the compact Stadio dei Marmi. There, under a blistering summer sun, the temperature soaring toward triple digits, they waited for the start of the Parade of Nations opening the Games of the XVII Olympiad.
Mild complaints were whispered among women on the U.S. team about the impractical burden of their parade uniforms: blue blazers, white wool pleated skirts, red leather pumps, white berets, white stretch gloves, nylon hosiery, and big red purses they had to carry over their right shoulders. They were delighted to be there, but couldn’t someone have planned the outfits with a Mediterranean summer in mind? Most of the Americans had no Olympic experience and knew nothing about marching in formation. It was left to Bo Roberson, the broad jumper from Cornell, a veteran of Army ROTC, to take on the role of drill sergeant in the staging area, at the last minute putting his teammates through the hup-two-three-four paces, hoping they would not embarrass themselves when the world was watching.
The great white bowl of the main stadium filled slowly, but by four o’clock nearly eighty thousand people were inside. In the prime seats at midfield, there was a sudden buzz, and binoculars from above and to the sides focused on a particular row. It was not the queen of Greece who caused the flurry, nor Prince Albert of Belgium, Prince Axel and Princess Margaretha of Denmark, Prince Harald of Norway, or Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein. They seemed Old World; only a reigning monarch in the postwar popular culture could provoke such intense murmuring—movie star Elizabeth Taylor was arriving with singer Eddie Fisher, her husband. When Taylor’s entrance caught the attention of the vast cadre of journalists in the press area, they characteristically began a round of double-entendre jokes. It’s Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. A great deal of the same. Liz may have set a new record in neckline plunging at Olympic events.
One distraction replaced by another: a local semistreaker wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts jumped the fence and raced merrily around the oval, dissolving into the throng before the slow-moving security men could nab him. No doubt the Comtesse de Morelos, head of the Olympic fashion police, was horrified by his American-tourist sartorial selection. There was another half hour of anticipation. Then, to the sardonic bemusement of a correspondent from the Times of London, a ceremonial band “broke into what was recognized by both British and Italians as a Fascist marching song” to signal the start of the Parade of Nations. The oval track, a rich shade of dark Roman red, offered a vibrant contrast to the green infield and cerulean sky. Carrying the flag for the Greeks was Prince Constantine, a future king and current Dragon Class Olympic yachtsman, who before the fortnight was over would seize a gold medal in the Bay of Naples and receive a congratulatory embrace in the shower from a fully clothed, yacht-cavorting billionaire countryman, Aristotle Onassis.
In line after Greece, honored at the front as the ancient progenitor of the Olympic idea, competitors marched onto the track in alphabetical order based on the Italian spelling of their countries. The Australians, their men outfitted in green jackets, gray trousers, and green hats, were the largest of the first wave of delegations, though more than half of their two hundred athletes—including all swimmers, boxers, and cyclists—remained in the village. Earlier that day, team officials had issued an edict that anyone competing in the first week of the Games should not participate in the Opening Ceremony. The heat and the long march might sap their energy, it was explained. Whatever the reasoning, the order did not sit well with many Aussie athletes, individualists who bristled at the “petty tyranny” of their bureaucratic minders. In the sort of antiestablishment rebelliousness more commonly associated with later years of the sixties decade, those left behind staged a mock ceremony back at the village, the men noisily parading around bare chested with ties drooping from their necks.
Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Bermuda (more of those dreaded shorts, mustard color), Brazil, Bulgaria (a notably gregarious Iron Curtain contingent, smiling and waving miniature flags, the women in jonquil-colored frocks), Canada (the most sensibly dressed, in short sleeves, without coats), Czechoslovakia, Ceylon. Every team with its own story.
Chile once had planned to send eighty athletes to Rome, but only eight made the trip. The ribbony South American country was still recovering, three months later, from one of the twentieth century’s most devastating earthquakes, 9.5 magnitude, and a ferocious tsunami that washed over much of its coastline near Valparaiso. France subsidized travel expenses for three Chilean athletes, other European nations chipped in to fund the rest, and the IOC defrayed all other costs for the team.
Cuba marched in with a dozen athletes—no beards. Nineteen months after Fidel Castro seized power on the island, his athletes were moving noticeably into the orbit of the Soviets, much as his government was doing. In the village, the Russians had sent a contingent to attend the hoisting of the Cuban flag, and reporters from Pravda and Izvestia were making daily references to Soviet camaraderie with athletes from Cuba and other nascent socialist and anticolonialist governments around the world. As the Cuban Olympians marched into the stadium in Rome, their political delegates were about to walk out of a special meeting of the Organization of American States in San Jose, Costa Rica. An emergency session of the OAS had been convened in an unsuccessful effort to ease growing tension between Castro’s Cuba and the United States.
This was more than two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis and eight months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, yet the issues debated in Costa Rica on the same day the Olympics opened in Italy foreshadowed all the difficulties to come. The Eisenhower administration, alarmed by Soviet intrusion into the Western hemisphere, demanded at the OAS conference that the Cubans summarily reject and renounce a recent Kremlin promise to provide Castro with military aid, including missiles. The Cubans refused, calling the Soviets their friends. At the same time, they accused the U.S. of plotting to overthrow the Castro regime, a charge the Americans roundly denied.
Next came Denmark, dressed in scarlet jackets and white slacks, minus the team cyclists who would compete in the first gold medal event of the Olympics the next morning. And now Abebe Bikila and the Ethiopians. Most of them had been alive when Mussolini had last invaded their country. As A. J. Liebling described for readers of The New Yorker, “A dozen or so straight, tall, thin men marched past the reviewing stand, and their standard bearer lowered their flag, with its green, yellow, and red stripes, in salute.” Liebling could only wonder what they were thinking about. “They were received with polite applause,” he determined from his seat in the press section.
Fiji came with five men, the flag bearer draped in a burlap skirt. Scattered applause for the Philippines (spelled with an F in Italian) and the blue-clad Finns, and now in marched Taiwan, or Formosa, or so the placard said.
The key political fight of the Olympics was being decided at last. Only hours earlier, the American embassy in Rome had received one last call from the Republic of China’s ambassador, who was still hoping that his nation might avoid being called Taiwan or Formosa at the Olympics. “He expressed great appreciation for the efforts made at the American embassy, and he had certain suggestions regarding attentions that might be paid to Mr. Avery Brundage,” a State Department memorandum said of the ambassador later that day, not detailing precisely what those “attentions” to the IOC president might entail.
When the embassy’s duty officer “asked whether it was necessary to march in the opening parade in order to compete in events,” the ambassador replied that he was not sure. The athletes themselves did not want to march, he said, but the delegation’s Olympic officials thought they should. To the end, the U.S. was pushing its ally to take the strongest possible political stand. It might be better not to march “even though this risk could prevent later participation,” the American embassy official advised, arguing that “the Opening Ceremony would focus attention on names of competing teams, and, second, if the designation was accepted without resistance, it would hurt future battles on that issue.”
Yet hours later, with the capacity crowd watching inside the stadium, including several officials from the U.S. embassy, and an exponentially larger potential audience on television and newsreel, here came a banner introducing athletes from Formosa. In a little-noticed gesture of political pride, members of the delegation wore sport coats with insignias that depicted the Nationalist Chinese flag. And as the group moved down the track and passed in front of the official reviewing stand, a team official marching directly behind the country banner unfolded an unmistakable symbol of discontent: a handmade sign that read UNDER PROTEST. He marched with the sign for about a hundred yards before folding it and stuffing it in his pocket.
What reaction did this modest political demonstration inspire? The government-monitored press in Taipei, which had editorialized against participating in the Olympics under any name except the Republic of China, declared that “the people of free China were greatly impressed by the radiophoto picture” of the protest sign. A U.S. diplomatic account from the scene reported glumly that aside from a few cheers in the crowd, the protest was barely perceptible and provoked little comment. It most certainly provoked Avery Brundage, who had been watching from the stands next to the president of the Italian Republic, Giovanni Gronchi. Brundage was “very disagreeably surprised” to see the protest sign, as were all leaders of the Olympic Movement, he said. He considered the gesture “inelegant, political minded, and an offense to the dignity which should prevail in the Olympic Games.” Rather than bringing support to the cause, he later wrote in a scalding censure letter to the Taiwanese, “we think that by this way of action you have lost the last sympathy you might have had among the sportsmen of the world.”
As the Parade of Nations continued, Brundage’s displeasure evaporated with the entrance of the unified German team, outfitted in light gray. Turning to his Italian host, Brundage boasted, “Those are East German athletes and West German athletes in the same uniform marching behind the same leaders and the same flag.”
“Impossible,” Gronchi said.
The response from Brundage, recounted in an autobiographical manuscript, sounded too perfect to be verbatim, but nonetheless reflected his idealistic, if naive and selective, perspective.
“While it might be impossible politically, in the nonpolitical Olympic Games, such surprising things can happen,” he told Gronchi. “Contestants on Olympic fields are individual athletes and not countries. Neither ideologies of different kinds nor political systems are at stake. In the Olympic Games, it is pure sport and sport only. German sport leaders are demonstrating their devotion to the Olympic idea in a way that will make sport history.”
Shirley Povich, veteran columnist for the Washington Post, thought he observed “a lift in the applause…when the two Germanys marched side by side under one flag. Ideologies shelved for this event at least.” A Soviet writer detected warm applause as well, noting approvingly that “viewers could not tell the difference among athletes dressed in light gray uniforms which one is from the west and which one from eastern Germany.” But the West German press was more measured. The team marched in looking “almost courtly with their neat gray suits,” noted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, saying the drabness of the outfits seemed to match both the personality of the team and the reaction of the crowd. “A bit of the charm and good mood presented by other nations was missing, so the applause remained only friendly.”
In other ways, things were less than they appeared. Marching four abreast behind flag carrier Fritz Thiedemann, a bowlegged equestrian champion from West Germany (“I mean, I did ask myself, ‘Can’t they find a flag carrier prettier than me?’”), the delegation looked larger to observers in the stadium than it was. The Associated Press reported that the Germans entered with the maximum allowable number, 245, but in fact there were far fewer. Most of the track stars, especially from the West, remained in Germany, held back because of the Roman heat wave. At the head of the formation were West German team leaders Gerhard Stoeck and Dr. Max Danz, walking beside their East German counterparts, Heinz Schöbel and Manfred Ewald. All seemed peaceful on the surface, noted a correspondent from Die Welt, a West German newspaper, “even though behind the Via Germania, in block 30 [Olympic Village quarters for the German team], political baggage has also been unloaded.”
The East Germans were aflame with reports that Hans Grodotzki, a distance runner, had received an anonymous letter in his room in block 30 “urging him to leave the German Democratic Republic forever by not returning there from Rome.” An account in Neues Deutschland said the “poaching” letter came from “Bonn’s henchmen” and included a map “printed by one of the West German revanchist lobby groups.” That the effort failed is no doubt why it ever made the East German news. The sender “failed to psychologically destabilize the young runner,” according to the report. Grodotzki was said to have given the letter to his team leaders, declaring, “Something like this leaves me completely unshaken.”
GREAT BRITAIN arrived in blue blazers and gray trousers, among the largest delegations as always, but fading fast in international sports, much like France. The Brits seemed to boast less talent among the athletes rounding the oval than they could muster up in the press section, where the squad of Times of London writers included Roger Bannister, the legendary four-minute miler, and Harold Abrahams, winner of the 100 at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, who would be immortalized two decades later as a main character in the movie Chariots of Fire.
Haiti, Hong Kong, India (here were the wrestlers in white and yellow turbans who lifted up little Paolo Pedinelli, plus the dashing middle-distance runner Milkha Singh, known as the Flying Sikh), Indonesia, Iraq (spelled Irak, hence the place in line), Iran, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Yugoslavia, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia. Pravda’s correspondents took note of the African delegations. This was a summer of independence in Africa, and much of the continent had become contested ground in the cold war. Fourteen nations were in the process of being born, and the Congo, with the colonial Belgians leaving at last, was exploding in civil war during the very days of the Olympics. “They exude strength,” the Soviet sportswriters Alexei Dykov and Vitali Petrusenko wrote of the Africans. “Together with their nations, the athletes, boxers, and gymnasts of Africa recently fought for independence. Now they march in the Olympics as equals among equals. It is not very important that they have little sports experience. Observers already forecast that the Rome Olympics will reveal many new talents among representatives of the black continent.”
The Pakistanis appeared in forest green coats and white turbans, ready to take their difficult geopolitical struggle with India onto the hockey field, where the two neighboring nations dominated a sport taught to them by the imperial British. Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rhodesia, Romania (like the Bulgarians, all friendly, waving handkerchiefs to the crowd), San Marino (the Apennine mountain state, with ten athletes, all pistol shooters and cyclists, out of a populace of fewer than thirty thousand, the highest athlete-per-capita ratio at the Games), Singapore. The Spaniards entered to loud applause.
Eddy Gilmore, covering for the Associated Press, then noticed that “suddenly, a strange quiet came over the vast crowd. Almost before you knew it, it happened.”
What happened was a sighting of Rafer Johnson, carrying the U.S. flag, stepping from the shadows of the tunnel at the northeast entrance, marching into view. His movements were rhythmic, precise. In his blue blazer, white pants, red-striped tie, and white straw hat, the decathlete looked cool and calm, but he never felt more nervous, or more alive. Some ceremonial events appear glorious but have no deeper meaning; this one, to Rafer Johnson, was “as important as the competition itself.” Never before had a black athlete walked in front as flag carrier for the U.S. Olympic team. Since the moment he reached Rome with the track team after that raucous overnight train ride through the Alps, he had been the most interviewed, most photographed athlete in the village. “Keep in step,” he said to himself now. “Don’t drop the flag.” He cradled it like a baby, one observer thought, like “something fragile that he must not drop.” Johnson’s life flashed through his mind as he moved along. He thought about his mother watching back home in California and the road he had taken to this moment.
The Johnsons came west from Texas in 1945, when Rafer was nine, and eventually settled in Kingsburg, where his father, Lewis Johnson, found a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The San Joaquin Valley town was about as flat, hot, and white as America gets. In the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, where Rafer came from, he almost never saw a white person. In Kingsburg, the Johnsons were the only black family in town and one of only two in the area. They lived in a small one-story “section house” near the railroad tracks and in the shadows of a local cannery. A legend arose later that they lived in a boxcar—not quite, although the narrow house looked like one. In the summers, Rafer and his siblings worked the fields near the cannery, picking grapes, plums, and peaches. With one exception, he felt very much embraced by the predominantly Swedish farm community, where “everyone knew everyone.” That lone exception was the police chief, a racist who reflexively suspected the Johnsons when anything went wrong. “Every time something was taken, something was stolen, a bicycle missing, they came to our house looking for it,” Johnson recalled. “We weren’t taking anything, and we weren’t doing anything.” That only stopped after Lewis Johnson had a heated confrontation with the chief.
But the prevailing sensibility in Kingsburg, a community that showered attention on its children, was a boon to Rafer, who excelled in school and in sports. “The parents would build the fields and drive young people back and forth to different competitions [in farm towns scattered around the valley]. They were the coaches. It was a wonderful community for young people.” Rafer’s best sport was football, but he also starred in basketball and track and field. Much of his athletic skill came from his mother, Alma, who could outrun him until he was a teenager. His mother was also Rafer’s role model, the person he most admired. “I can’t think of anything I ever did or any place I ever went or any accomplishment I ever had that she was not either there or in my thoughts or we had some conversation about what was happening or going to happen,” he said later. “I can’t think of a time when she was not a part of what was going on with me.” His father, though a hard worker, drank too much and could be hard to handle during his off hours. “There would be weekends when he could start drinking, and the whole weekend would be lost. There were very few Monday mornings when my father was not at work, but there were a lot of weekends when the family suffered because of his drinking problem. At athletic events, sometimes, honestly, he could be a little disruptive. My mother was able to keep him calm for the most part, but there were times when she couldn’t control him, and no one else could.”
When Rafer was a junior in high school, and the best athlete on the Kingsburg Vikings, track coach Murl Dotson drove him down to watch a decathlon meet in nearby Tulare, the hometown of Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias. It was a transformative moment. Mathias was the hero of the valley, someone Rafer aspired to follow. Although there were no decathlons in high school, young Johnson returned from Tulare determined to compete in as many individual events as possible and build up his skills so that someday he might succeed Mathias with the title of the best all-around athlete in the world. Seven years later, here he was in Rome, approaching his dream, leading the Americans into the Stadio Olimpico.
Behind him, after a wedge of team officials, came row after row of American athletes. The walker from Buffalo, the javelin thrower from Newark, the gymnast from Van Nuys, the wrestler from Ponca City, the boxer from Louisville, the equestrian from Camden, the small-bore rifle shooter from Chicago, the fencer from New York, the sprinter from Tuscaloosa, the cyclist from Muskegon, the miler from Portland, the canoeist from Akron, the basketball player from Cabin Creek, the swimmer from Urbana, the weight lifter from Detroit, the shot-putter from Santa Monica. The youngest of the swimmers, Donna de Varona, had just turned thirteen. The oldest of the yachtsmen, Robert Halperin, was going on fifty-three. Track aficionados in the stands looked for familiar faces, Olympic favorites.
Where was the sprinting medical student from Duke, Dave Sime? Back in the village, still recovering from strep throat. “Didn’t even watch it on television,” Sime recalled. “I was still laid out.” Ray Norton, the favorite for gold in the 100, was also back at the dorm, not wanting to aggravate a sore leg by making the long walk on cement from the village to the stadium. Rink Babka, the massive discus thrower, missed it too, though not by choice. Officials had issued him a sport coat far too small for his massive fifty-two-inch chest, and a new one had not arrived in time. But lanky John Thomas was there, the phenom from Boston U., considered a mortal lock for the high jump. And that little guy nearby was Ike Berger, the featherweight weight lifter, all 132 pounds of him, who only that morning in practice had bettered his own world record for the two-hand clean and jerk by hoisting 3361/2 pounds. There came Cassius Clay, the ebullient light-heavyweight boxer, but many of his teammates in the lower weight classes, who would start competition that night and the next day, stayed back in the village. “They wanted me to march,” Nikos Spanakos, the American featherweight, said later, “but I told the coach to go fuck himself and stayed in.”
As the athletes streamed from the “tunnel, dark and cold, out into the blazing bright sunlight,” Anne Warner, one of the California swimmers, was amazed that they were marching in unison, right foot forward at the same time—Bo Roberson’s drilling seemed to have worked. Terry Dischinger, the basketball forward from Purdue, was stunned by the enormous ovation that reverberated through the stadium as the Yanks strode in. “It sounded like thunder coming out of those stands.”
American sportswriters traditionally scorned overt signs of emotion in the press box, but few could keep their stoic game faces now.
“When the American flag swept around the far turn of the Olympic stadium, and behind it came marching what had been up to that time the largest delegation that the 100,000 spectators had seen, a great cheer roared out and thousands of people sprang to their feet,” Don Maxwell, editor of the Chicago Tribune, reported in his daily letter from Rome. “Hats were waved, and I am sure there were tears in many eyes.”
More rapture from Fred Russell of the Nashville Banner, who described the parade as “the lasting thrill” of the entire Olympics: “When the United States flag came by in the parade of nations, the spine tingle caused a few misty eyes in the press box.”
The moment struck Eddy Gilmore as at once moving and politically meaningful, a reaffirmation of America’s role in the modern world. “Call it corny, but it brought tears to your eyes. It made your heart beat a wee bit faster. It took your breath away. And all at once, this spontaneous demonstration seemed to justify lend-lease, the Marshall Plan, and all of the millions American taxpayers have poured out on other parts of the world. Sure, Americans love to be liked. And brother, they were liked today.”
Among the political and military dignitaries watching the parade that afternoon was General Lauris Norstad of the U.S. Air Force, who now served as supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. The quintessential cold warrior, Norstad had developed the air defenses for Western Europe against possible Soviet attack. Earlier that afternoon, he had arrived from Paris with his wife and three aides as the guest of Giulio Andreotti, the Italian defense minister and president of the Olympic Organizing Committee. After changing into civilian clothes at the Grand Hotel, the general was escorted to Stadio Olimpico just in time for the Opening Ceremony. The sight of the American delegation marching onto the track to resounding applause, with Rafer Johnson at the lead, struck Norstad as a reassuring political moment.
“What an impressive experience!” he later wrote to his friend, Charles J. V. Murphy, a prolific cold war journalist at Time with intelligence community affiliations. “Having heard and read so much criticism of the U.S. and its ways in the last few months, I was surprised and warmed by the enthusiasm for the U.S. which was demonstrated by the…spectators in the Olympic Stadium at the opening. By far the greatest and warmest applause was for the American contingent. Our group flag bearer and leader was Rafer Johnson, and he looked magnificent. I discreetly inquired from people of several nationalities about their reaction to this colored boy being in the lead, thinking that there might be some feeling that this was arranged for political purposes, but I found that the case was quite the contrary. It was generally believed that he had been elected by his teammates, but that even if he had been appointed by officials, it was in recognition of the fact that he was a very fine man and perhaps the world’s outstanding athlete. The reaction was very good.”
Johnson himself was not concerned about why he was chosen. He was proud to represent his country, knew that he had won the respect of his athletic peers, and thought that he could make no stronger statement in support of civil rights and the desegregation of American life than to be the leader of the U.S. delegation at a time when blacks were pushing for equality—and at a time when it remained within the realm of accepted discourse for a white official to refer to him as a “colored boy.” The most profound course of action black athletes in his situation could make, he believed, was “showing up, doing their best.” His sensibility, he explained later, was that he had to stay positive and keep his focus on what he could achieve. And, for the moment, to focus on carrying the flag. It was a matter of Olympic courtesy for nations to dip the flag when passing the reviewing stand, but the U.S. and the Soviet Union, competing for supremacy in the cold war world, maintained their own uncompromising traditions—never dip. For the Americans, this refusal to gesture had been a matter of law since 1942, when Congress passed the U.S. Flag Code, saying the flag should not be dipped to “any person or thing.” Johnson held the Stars and Stripes upright all the way, though he said later that he had not received instructions on how to carry it. “I didn’t dip,” he explained, “but no one told me not to do it.”
In a symmetrical irony, the team entering the stadium behind Rafer Johnson’s Americans was the all-white apartheid delegation from South Africa. Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Hungary (capital U no H), and then in marched the nation that had crushed the Hungarian revolution only four years earlier.
The Soviet flag bearer was Yuri Vlasov, the heavyweight weight lifter, a national hero in a culture that worshipped strength above other physical attributes. If the Soviets were to defeat their American rivals in the overall medal count, the weight lifters would play an essential role. The U.S. had dominated the sport in the 1950s, but now the Russians thought they had the edge with Vlasov, who had just broken American Paul Anderson’s world record, leading the way. “He is a young man, very cultured, very well read,” Pravda boasted of the engineering student. “Vlasov is the best example of the harmonical physical and mental development of Soviet athletes.” That he might have been, but some Americans clucked disapprovingly, calling him a showoff, as he marched into the stadium holding the hammer and sickle stiffly with a single outstretched hand.
Correspondents who choked up at the sight of the American team now transformed themselves into human applause meters to compare crowd reactions. “I suppose I am prejudiced, but I did not think the Russians got half the applause that the crowd gave our contingent,” Maxwell surmised for his Chicago readers. Jesse Abramson, the track-and-field expert for the New York Herald Tribune, agreed: “To be sure, an American ear detected a far warmer greeting and more decibels of applause when the Stars and Stripes appeared in the arena behind the banner Stati Unit America than when the Hammer and Sickle arrived behind the standard Unione Repubbliche Sovietiche Socialiste.” Fitting the applause differential into a cold war context, an AP report noted that Italy had the largest Communist party in Western Europe, yet the greeting its people gave the Soviets was “polite—but nothing more.”
One hears what one wants to hear, as Pravda’s Alexei Dyakov and Vitali Petrusenko, stationed not far from their American colleagues, demonstrated in their description of the same scene. The greeting of the Soviet team was effusive, from their perspective, and laden with deeper meaning. “In the Italian clapping of hands we can hear not only the greeting of Soviet athletes but also the excitement for the last achievements of the Soviet Union in opening the cosmos.” (Only a week earlier, and three years after Sputnik, they had made another important breakthrough in space by launching into orbit a satellite carrying two dogs, a rat, four mice, and a jar of flies in a cabin designed for the future flight of man.) They even found a way to relate the ovation in Stadio Olimpico to the previous day’s welcoming letter from their leader back in Moscow. By their interpretation, the reception given the Soviets reflected “warm approval of the peace-loving politics of our government, which found such a bright expression in the greeting of Comrade Khrushchev to the Olympic youth.”
From the accounts of American observers, it was not the recent space menagerie or Khrushchev that observers were thinking about when the Soviets marched in, but the unexpected flair of their women athletes. The Western stereotype of the typical Russian woman was unflattering, and a Los Angeles Times correspondent repeated that image now by calling them “stalwart.” But most of his colleagues presented a decidedly different picture, lurching from the previous ridicule to outright leering. “Their girls looked like Parisian models in white silk dresses with pleated skirts and a most Parisian cut to their necklines,” reported Abramson. “Most obviously, the more muscular Amazons had been excused from the parade. Even Yves St. Laurent could not have masked the lines of the lady shot-putters from Russia.”
The Associated Press account took the theme even further: “There was a gasp of surprise when the Soviet girls came into the stadium. Shades of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev. Moscow had sent to Rome something that would not suffer comparison with New York’s Rockettes. The Russian gals: (1) Wore red pumps with pointed toes and needle heels two inches tall. (2) Wore billowing white skirts about knee length. (3) A neckline that was not exactly plunging but certainly poised on the diving board ready to jump. (4) They walked as though they had spent ten years of training in the Bolshoi Ballet, sort of floating through the air.”
Here was a Soviet variation of Ed Temple’s directive to his Tigerbelles at Tennessee State that he wanted “foxes, not oxes.” By some accounts, the Soviet transformation was in part in response to a plea from Temple’s track-and-field sidekick, Frances Kaszubski, the women’s team manager, who had once instructed her Russian counterpart, Zoya Romanova, to “send us dolls” when the Soviets first brought a team to the U.S. in 1959 for a dual track meet. For Temple and Kaszubski, the emphasis on appearance was part of a larger effort to gain respect for women athletes and lift them out of the old unfeminine stereotypes. For the Soviets, it seemed part of a concerted public relations offensive in the cold war. A. J. Liebling, always with a fresh take on things, saw it as another sign of the Westernization of the postwar world: “The Russian women were a great deal smarter-looking than they had been at Helsinki, and the men were more relaxed. When they marched in 1952, their faces were set; they had never before competed in the Games, and were not sure how they would do. Now they were confident and were having a good time…We are not getting to look more like the Russians. The Russians are getting to look more like us.”
Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam. Finally, as the bookend to the Greeks, here came the Italians, looking molto bello in their light blue jackets, white slacks, and white hats. The other delegations had quotas for how many could march, but the hosts entered in full force, nearly three hundred strong, and the roar for the home team was deafening. Livio Berruti, the fleet sprinter from Torino, felt overwhelmed by a spirit of equality and fraternity. As he marched around the stadium, warmed by the shimmering rays of the early evening sun, Berruti said later, it seemed as though all of Europe was walking with him, out of the shadows, away from the past.