If the world had functioned according to Hoyle, Australians would be glued to their television sets by now. Some, myself among them, would be on the edge of their seats as the peloton swept up the Champs-Elysees in the final stage of the 2020 Tour de France, while the rest would be increasingly consumed by the Tokyo Olympic Games, just then in its final preparations. But the world didn’t.
And so, cycling tragics will have to wait another month for this year’s tour, while Olympic aficionados have much longer to fill in before the XXXII Olympiad rolls around, a year behind schedule. At this point, I must confess that my cycling-tragic status is quite provisional because I couldn’t stay on a bike if I was strapped to it. My attachment is due to my infatuation with all things French, especially the sublime countryside through which the Tour cleverly rolls along.
Nevertheless, over the years I have become familiar with some of the individual riders and certainly the SBS presenters, so much so that it almost seems their expansive coverage is aimed at non-cyclists like me. Yet I also know a little more about the ‘Hate Chris Froome’ fraternity and the ubiquitous post-Lance Armstrong dope mutterings and the physical intimidation of riders by ultra-nationalist spectators.
The Olympics, however, are another matter. It was one of the great experiences of my childhood to have gone to the Melbourne Games in 1956. I didn’t get to see that much but I did get to watch a few of the (now forgotten) greats of track and field when I went to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Tuesday, November 27, that year.
The stars of that day were an American runner named Bobby Morrow who won the second of his three gold medals, in the 200m sprint, and Australian Shirley Strickland, well on the way towards retaining the 80m hurdles title she won four years earlier at Helsinki, Finland. And another American, Al Oerter, won the first of his four successive discus gold medals that day, a very rare feat indeed.
Those 1956 Games, which also featured another three-gold winner in Betty Cuthbert and were the occasion for Australian swimming to take a giant step up onto the world stage, have been passed down to us as the ‘Friendly Games’. Yet at the time, they didn’t seem quite so friendly. For starters, Australia’s strict quarantine laws meant the equestrian events had to be held earlier in the year in Sweden. And that was before the politics.
Check out the internet and you’ll find plenty of blood from Hungary versus the Soviet Union in the water polo, but what is often forgotten is that several nations actually boycotted the games as a protest, not only at the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but also the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on the Suez Canal.
Further, the Soviet practice of employing its best athletes in its armed forces and the United States practice of awarding college sporting scholarships to its best, kept the perennial question of ‘shamateurism’ bubbling along nicely. So, in its way, Melbourne’s ‘Friendly Games’ anticipated the shadow cast over every games since Mexico 1968.
But that is by the by. My enduring impression of those games, as a starry-eyed 12-year-old, was the godlike aura of the Americans. As it happened, 1956 was the last time the US dominated the track before systematic doping by Soviet bloc countries evened the scales. Parry O’Brien, Harold Connolly, Lee Calhoun and Glenn Davis, among others, briefly became household names as the US won event after event.
And when our copy of Life magazine, the pre-television pictorial window on the world, arrived in the mail, it heralded that dominance with a front page photo of the track-suited trio of Davis, Eddie Southern and Josh Culbreath on the dais to receive their medals for the 400m hurdles, billed exultantly as “the first US sweep”. Talk about gods!
Many years later, the Sydney Morning Herald began a series of sentimental profiles of athletes who had once impressed or influenced various staff members in their formative years. It was a nice idea and I contributed one on Trevor Allan, who had captained the post-war Wallabies before playing rugby league in England and eventually returning to become a prominent sports commentator on local television.
I had once ‘met’ Allan as a tongue-tied four-year-old, but when I interviewed him, it seemed that he just couldn’t remember the occasion. Nevertheless, the article must have had a human touch because it drew some favourable comment. Encouraged, I decided to repeat the exercise and sent off a copy of the Trevor Allan article (to explain the context of my proposed interview) to the home of Olympic hurdler Glenn ‘Jeep’ Davis, in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio.
Before I could talk to him, however, I received a carefully wrapped package by return mail, enclosing my article, neatly folded, plus a booklet on his life prepared for the special eulogy given him by the then-governor of Ohio. Reading it, I had not realised what a great all-round athlete he had been, not only winning three Olympic gold medals, but setting world records, awarded US athlete of the year status, and so on. Yet, he had ended up running a driving school in his home town, mainly for the local kids.
My journalistic imagination went into overdrive: had the mighty fallen, had the winner of gold at two Olympic Games been unable to leverage his success into the gold bullion that many subsequent athletic stars have managed to grab? And did this mirror the decline of his own town where the once ‘rubber capital of the world’ had become just another relic of the US rust belt? The allegorical possibilities were pulsating.
Eventually, I spoke to Jeep on the phone, and I was bowled over by his deference, so very un-American. Perhaps the mighty had fallen; I don’t know, but if I had to pick one word from that lengthy conversation, it would be ‘regret’. For what, I don’t really know, but I could guess. But I also knew that to guess, and to pin the tag of ‘rust belt’ on him would be so cruel and pointless that it ought to shame me forever. I never wrote the article.
With hindsight, I believe that Glenn Davis was a gentleman of the old school and so very different from the sports ‘celebrities’ whose mouths and egos are sure to blot out the sun at the Tokyo Games, whenever they are eventually held. I, for one, won’t be watching.