Sport: The Olympics

In every way it was a wonderful foot race. In at least one way it told more about the 1960 Olympics than any other single event. For nearly three laps, the winner—a hawk-nosed, crane-legged fellow with a familiar, loping stride—stayed back with the pack in the i.soo-meter race. Then, with disheartening ease, he moved past the leaders and began to draw away. Rounding the last turn, he saw his coach waving a white shirt as a signal that he had a chance to break his own world record of 3:36. Thereupon Australia’s Herb Elliott, 22. sprinted down the middle of the track and broke the tape at 3:35.6.

Elliott’s performance was the equivalent of a 3 152.6 mile. But every bit as remarkable was the fact that across the finish line after Elliott flashed a Frenchman, a Hungarian, a Swede, a Rumanian and the U.S.’s Dyrol Burleson—every one of them under the 1956 Olympic record of 3:41.2 set by Ireland’s Ron Delany. who this year took one look at the tough competition and decided not to run.

In a strong sense, the finish of the 1,500-meter race dramatized the central point of the 1960 games: win or lose, never before had so many athletes from so many nations achieved such a high pitch of competitive accomplishment. Among the top events of the Olympics’ final week:

¶In the 400 meters. University of Oregon’s Otis Davis. 28, seemed too inexperienced to stand up to the world’s best. An itinerant athlete, he had originally signed on at Oregon as a basketball player, turned to track only two years ago. With little sense of pace, he barely qualified for the U.S. track team. In the finals, Davis’ strategy was simply to stay with the field, then run every man into the ground. Coming around the turn, he accelerated past the leaders and headed for home at a clip that seemed to have him leaning backwards as his feet tried to run out from under him. Germany’s Carl Kaufmann made a gallant dive at the tape, but Davis won in 44.9 sec. to break the world record by .3 sec.

¶ In the pole vault, the U.S.’s outspoken Don (“Tarzan”) Bragg, 25, had made such an impression on the Italian press that one paper called him “the handsomest athlete in Rome and perhaps the vainest.” Holder of the world record at 15 ft. 9¼ in., Bragg caused a brief flurry when he flubbed his first try at the qualifying height of 14 ft. 5¼ in. But when the competition settled down, Bragg forgot his nerves, his gimpy right knee, and the fact that he had to hoist a heavyweight’s body of 6 ft. 3 in., 196 Ibs., then cleared 15 ft. 5⅛ in. to break the Olympic record by sf.

¶In weight lifting. Russia’s genial Alexander Kurynov. 26, had always venerated Hawaii’s two-time Olympic Champion Tommy Kono, 30. as one of the world’s great athletes. Matched against Kono in the middleweight division, the Russian research scientist quickly forgot his hero worship, scored one of the Olympics’ notable upsets by breaking Kono’s world record, surpassing him by 22 Ibs., with a total of 964½ Ibs. in three lifts, and taking the gold medal.

¶In the 400-meter men’s relay, California’s Ray Norton, 22, set out to atone for his humiliating, sixth-place finishes in both the 100 and 200 meters. Running the second leg, Norton was so anxious to get going that he sprinted right out of the exchange zone before he got the baton. Duke’s Dave Sime, the U.S. anchorman, later finished first by a flicker, but Norton’s foul disqualified the U.S. team, gave the gold medal to Germany. “I’m sick up to here with running,” said Norton, pre-Olympic favorite to win three gold medals. “When I get back home, I’m not going to move faster than a slow walk.”

As expected, Russia easily defeated the U.S. for the unofficial team title by mining a lode of gold medals in such sports as women’s gymnastics (5) and women’s track (6). Unexpectedly, the proud U.S. men’s track team won only nine gold medals (v. 15 in the 1956 Olympics), set chauvinistic officials to charging that the best event of American athletes was the marathon of wine, women and song. Lost in the furor was the obvious fact that the U.S. still easily dominated men’s track (runner-up Russia had five gold medals) and had, in fact, sprung major surprises of its own on the world by grabbing nine gold medals in swimming, three in wrestling and three in boxing. By far the soundest judgment on the U.S. performances at the 1960 Olympic Games came from Manhattan College’s canny George Eastment, a coach of the men’s track team: “We’re not a race of supermen, and it’s about time we realized that the rest of the world can produce athletes too.”