The Friendly Games

On Nov. 22, 1956, American athletes about to partake in the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics later that day were fed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. They were happy, excited, set to compete along with athletes from 71 other nations. All seemed well.

Little did any of them know how close the Melbourne Olympics had come to being a real turkey.

For years, Australia had kicked around the idea of hosting an Olympic Games, and in June 1946, a group calling themselves the VOC (Victoria Olympic Council) met in Melbourne. They were led by a man named Ronald Aitken and had a total of 13 Australian dollars in the bank. At that meeting, the VOC voted to apply for an Olympic bid, and when it was clear that the final decision was to push ahead, laughter echoed throughout the hall. Even those who had voted in favor of it knew it was an absurd idea.

In some ways, this was merely an extension of the somewhat laughable twist that had been the end result of Australia’s earlier Olympic-bid effort, led by a Sydney group. They had wanted to bring an Olympics there to coincide with the completion and opening of the now-famous Sydney Harbor Bridge, but when it was determined that the bridge would be completed in 1930 and the next Games weren’t until 1932, Sydney backed off and the Olympics went to Los Angeles.

Construction of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, of course, was delayed and the official opening was held in, you guessed it, 1932.

Once the VOC, representing the city of Melbourne and the state of Victoria, got rolling, it put together a legitimate campaign that included, in one incident that might now be considered a forerunner to Salt Lake City, a gift to each voting International Olympic Committee member. The gift, considered “extravagant,” was a book with the bid proposal bound in suede and lamb’s wool.

The vote was supposed to take place in London in 1948, and the Australians, as British subjects, thought their chances would be greatly enhanced there. But the vote was postponed to the next year, in Rome, and Melbourne sweated through three ballots before securing the bid, on the fourth, by a 21-20 vote. Ah, that lamb’s wool.

Losing cities in that vote included Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Detroit. That’s right, Detroit.

But getting the bid and putting on the Games were vastly different things. As late as 1953, Melbourne still had not decided on a main stadium. The Melbourne Cricket Grounds were assumed to be the likely site but were badly in need of upgrades. Also, were the grounds to be used, it would cost the MCG one full soccer season and two full cricket seasons, and you don’t mess with the Aussies when it comes to cricket. Other choices included Olympic Park, the Showgrounds and Princes Park.

The Australians, never without a wonderful sense of humor, delighted in this Keystone Kops sort of indecision by the local organizing committee, and one cartoonist captured it best with a drawing of five officials, riding in a car and looking left and right and all over as the car went under a sign saying it was Opening Ceremonies Day. Behind them was a torch-bearer, looking lost and confused and the caption read: “We just gotta find an arena . . .”

When the Australians finally decided on the MCG as the main stadium and site for opening and closing ceremonies, track and field events and some soccer matches, their problems were not over.

In April 1955, only 19 months before the rare Nov. 22-Dec. 8 Games were to begin--the first and only time the Summer Olympics have been held in a traditional wintertime period, even though November through February is summer in the Southern Hemisphere--Melbourne was visited by IOC President Avery Brundage. A top priority for Brundage was to visit the MCG, but when he arrived, the place was a shambles and there were only six workers on hand. Brundage had arrived on a day when Australia was in the midst of a labor dispute, but he was in no mood for excuses.

The next day, Australian newspapers reported Brundage’s reaction as a “mild atomic explosion,” and went on to quote him as saying that, all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia. That’s right, Philadelphia, where somebody had apparently convinced him that, were Melbourne to stumble, the City of Brotherly Love would be there to pick up the pieces. This time, no mention of Detroit.

Brundage’s “mild atomic explosion” turned out to be exactly what the Aussies needed. Scared straight, they stepped up the construction and were in good shape months before the Games were to begin.

But nothing would be easy for this first Australian Olympic effort.

Twenty-four days before the Nov. 22 start date, war broke out between Israel and Egypt over the Suez Canal. And six days later, on Nov. 4, Soviet troops invaded Hungary in an attempt to halt an anti-Communist uprising. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Brundage was quoted as saying that it was sort of a universal assumption that “All warfare stopped during the Olympic Games.”

Eventually, 11 countries withdrew from participation, and that list included China, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Spain, Switzerland and The Netherlands. A portion of the Dutch team was already in Australia, and they were called home.

The Australians, their sense of humor and sense of perseverance still serving them well, never wavered.

As it was earlier this year for the Sydney Games, the torch was lit in Greece, some 13,000 miles away, and eventually made its way by plane and boat to the shores of Australia. The first torch-bearer was an Australian-born Greek, who passed it to an Australian Aborigine.

But even the torch had its controversy. Its passage through the sheep pastures of Queensland stirred the farmers with fears of a spark igniting their fields, and burning away their livelihoods. So, much of the way through the farmlands, the torch-bearer was flanked with cars full of fire extinguishers.

As the torch, and the Games, got closer, a reporter from a Melbourne newspaper called the Argus, Ken Moses, was asked to send stories to the States that would help describe Australia and some of its attractions. One of his stories encouraged potential visitors to get their orders in early for one of the alligator souvenirs being collected by an Australian named Alexis Ihandros, who, Moses wrote, captured alligators seven feet long.

“He grapples with them in the water,” Moses wrote, “then lugs them to the bank and dispatches them.”

And we all thought Crocodile Dundee was an original idea.

Moses also answered questions from American readers. A sample:

Question: Do they wear hats in Australia?

Answer: Yes, if they want to. They also wear shoes and have interior toilets.

From the start, Australians had labeled the Melbourne Olympics “The Friendly Games,” and that was exactly the tone on the afternoon of Nov. 22, when Greece’s team made its traditional first entrance. A young rower named Mervyn Wood carried the torch into the stadium, and a 19-year-old distance runner named Ron Clarke was the final torch-bearer. Clarke, of course, would go on to become one of the world’s great distance runners, eventually owning 17 world records, but on that day in Melbourne, he was so unknown that The Times’ Paul Zimmerman, longtime sports editor and track expert, spelled his name, in his opening ceremony story, Ron Clark.

The Olympic oath was read by 1,500-meter specialist John Landy, who was revered in Australia despite having a career of near-misses. Landy had been the second man to go under four minutes in the mile, following Roger Bannister’s 3:59.4 in May 1954 with a blistering 3:57.9 two weeks later. But Bannister had done it first and is most remembered.

In another race, Landy stopped to help fallen countryman Clarke, and went on to win the race in a time that clearly showed that, had he not made that stop, would have brought him a world record.

Landy read the oath, but the crowd, encouraged to read along with him, was left confused, because Landy had been given a different version than the one printed in the program.

A week later, in the 1,500 final, Landy lost out in the gold-medal run to the finishing kick of Irishman Ron Delaney. Landy, who finished third, rushed to the fallen Delaney at the end of the race, fearing Delaney had been injured. It turned out Delaney was merely bent to the ground, praying.

The actual athletic competition turned into a newspaper dream. There were story lines all over the place.

Australian swimmers Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser became household names, in households all over the world. Rose won three gold medals in Melbourne and Fraser won two golds and a silver in Melbourne and eventually had an Olympic career that totaled four golds and four silvers.

Another Aussie star was sprinter Betty Cuthbert, 19, who took three golds. But no Australian male won a gold medal in track and field, leaving somebody to establish that first on home soil in Sydney.

There were some quirks. One of the sports contested was “clay pigeon shooting,” and the marathon, won by Alain Mimoun of France in a race that finally sent the fabled Emil Zatopek toward retirement, began with, of all things, a false start.

The equestrian event was held in the Melbourne Olympics, but nowhere near Melbourne. Because of strict quarantine laws for horses coming into Australia, organizers compromised and held those events in June, in Stockholm. Sydney Olympic officials were so acutely aware of how badly that had reflected on the overall view of the Melbourne games that, in preparing their bid for the 2000 Games, built in a budget to pay for the shipping of all horses from all over the world for the Sydney equestrian events.

But officials still fear the breakout of any equine disease in Australia, because certain strains could be devastating enough to wipe out an entire horse racing season in the country.

American athletes grabbed their share of the headlines in 1956. Al Oerter won the first of a record four consecutive gold medals in the discus at Melbourne. A hurdler from USC, Jack Davis, was second in his second consecutive Olympic 110-meter race, having gotten the silver in Helsinki in ’52. Davis was not only close both times--he has been quoted frequently as saying that he was certain he won in Melbourne--but he had the exact same time as the winner in each race.

Pat McCormick was a wonderful diver from Long Beach who was born on the second floor of a grocery store in Seal Beach and somehow found training at the L.A. Athletic Club and means to compete nationally and internationally. In Melbourne, she completed the first-ever repeat of gold medals in the springboard and platform diving.

McCormick entered the final two dives of her last event in fourth place and still has a vivid memory of her climb to her final, gold-medal-deciding, dive.

“I counted the steps,” she told interviewer Dr. Margaret Costa, “and I realized that my whole life revolved around the next few moments.”

McCormick, who still lives in the Los Angeles area, turned 70 this year and remains active in her own foundation.

There was the famous story of athletic romance, despite a 10-foot barbed-wire fence built by the Aussies to separate the men’s and women’s villages. Czech discus thrower Olga Fikotova and U.S. hammer thrower Harold Connolly found each other, each won a gold medal and they were soon married in Prague. The storybook romance ended in divorce in Los Angeles years ago, but Olga Connolly has remained here and been active for years in area youth work and Olympic movements.

And then there was the semifinal water polo game, matching teams from the warring nations of Hungary and the Soviet Union. According to newspaper reports, Soviet player Valentine Prokopov, away from the ball, swam toward Hungary’s Ervin Zador. It was late in the game and the Hungarians were leading, 4-0. Prokopov slugged Zador in the face, Zador climbed out of the pool with blood streaking down his face, and the Swedish referee called off the match. The next day’s paper had headlines proclaiming “Blood on the Water,” and the game has carried that label every since.

Hungary won the final game and the gold medal and afterward more than a dozen of the Hungarian players defected rather than return to their Communist homeland.

The closing ceremony provided yet another story line. Days before the end of the Games, a 17-year-old Chinese-Australian named John Ian Wang wrote to the Melbourne organizers and suggested that, rather than country-by-country marching, as had been the tradition, that a more spontaneous closing be held. He proposed that the athletes be allowed to mingle and march together and wave to the crowd and generally celebrate in as loose and casual a way as possible.

Like so much else that happened at these Games, the Australians took the suggestion, batted it around a bit, and, over lunch on the day of the closing ceremony, decided to go ahead with John Wang’s idea.

And so the closing ceremony has been loosey-goosey ever since.

Back in the United States, the ’56 Olympics were of interest, but they were also competing with so much else, including holidays and other sports. There was no nightly television--television was just becoming a factor in sports at that time--and even newsreel coverage was limited because the Australian organizers, likely related to Dick Ebersol, had cut the newsreel companies out of the right to run footage by ruling that the Olympics were not news, but entertainment.

In Los Angeles, The Times ran banner headlines many days and double-covered the event with Zimmerman and Braven Dyer. But Sports Illustrated, in its Nov. 26 issue, four days after the opening ceremony, was much more interested in what television was about to do to the world of sports and had, as its cover story, a piece on the upcoming UCLA-USC game.

The main story, written by a relative newcomer on the sportswriting scene who had an unusually quick wit and fresh metaphorical touch, read as follows: “. . . Television pokes an electronic hole in the fence at the nation’s top football game each week and lets 25 million freeloaders look in on the off chance that they might buy, for the privilege, an electric razor, a jar of headache pills, a set of tires, some greaseless hair tonic or even a hearing aid.”

The byline read: By James Murray.

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Research for this story was provided by the Amateur Athletic Foundation and David Wallechinsky’s “Complete Book of Summer Olympics, Sydney 2000 Edition.”