Also discussed is the conflict between The People’s Republic of China and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China administration, which had been declaring itself the true government of China while operating from Taiwan. Other major social issues brought to light in Rome were the first known uses of performance enhancing drugs and the last performance of a unified German team until 1992. While they were allowed to participate in 1960, it would be the apartheid regime’s last Olympic Games and the nation would not participate again until 1992.
The twentieth century’s other major racial struggle also reared its head when International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage continually rebuffed the attempts by South Africa’s black population to force the recognition of the South African Olympic Committee’s entrenched, institutional racism.
The success of America’s black athletes in the Olympics made it significantly more difficult for Americans like Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington to say things like “it is in the best interests of all Tennesseans to prevent the mixing of the races.” The United States sent its best athletes to Italy, yet a majority of those athletes were black and subject to severe discrimination back home. While Maraniss devotes much of his narrative to the individual events and their results, the meat of this story is in his argument that the Rome Olympics were placed at a crossroads of both the sporting world and global society as a whole, the biggest of these changes clearly represented by women’s track and field coach Ed Temple and his Tennessee State Tigerbelles, led by superstar speedster Wilma Rudolph.
Maraniss has written on sports before, penning biographies of both Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, but Rome 1960 looks at the broader cultural impacts the Seventeenth Olympiad had on the world and the effect the world’s changing social mores had on the Olympics. In Rome 1960, Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss brings his marvelous prose back to the world of sports and chronicles the Olympic Games at the center of global change.
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