Virtual Talk: “Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics that Stirred the World” with David Maraniss

The 1960 Rome Olympics: 18 days of theater, suspense, victory and defeat. Some of the most honored athletes in Olympic history competed there: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.  Change was everywhere.  The world as we know it was coming into view. Rome saw the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games and the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. East and West Germans competed as a unified team less than a year before the Berlin Wall. There was dispute over the two Chinas. The pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women emerging from generations of discrimination increased. An independence movement was sweeping sub-Saharan Africa, with fourteen nations in the process of being born. And, in the heat of the cold war, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections. Every move was judged for its propaganda value. Yes, those late-summer days at the dawn of the sixties had a much deeper meaning. The whole world was stirring with change.

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