Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World

Written by David Maraniss

Narrated by David Maraniss

From the New York Times bestselling author of Clemente and When Pride Still Mattered, the blockbuster story of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, seventeen days that helped define the modern world.


Legendary athletes and stirring events are interwoven into a suspenseful narrative of sports and politics at the Rome games, where cold-war propaganda and spies, drugs and sex, money and television, civil rights and the rise of women superstars all converged to forever change the essence of the Olympics.

Using the meticulous research and sweeping narrative style that have become his trademark, maraniss reveals the rich palette of character, competition, and meaning that gave rome 1960 its singular essence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780743572729

David Maraniss

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

Reviews for Rome 1960

[ericcostello-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In-depth look at the 1960 Summer Games, and in general, a very honest and balanced survey, which takes into account some of the scoring and judging controversies, as well as some of the behind-the-scenes wrangling. The farce of an attempted subornation of a Russian athlete for defection gets, perhaps, a little too much play, and some of the sports show up hardly at all. In addition, except for a sprinkling of athletes, it's mostly the American, Russian and German athletes that get the attention. Still, a generally better job than I have seen from the Olympic Century series of books (the entry for Rome I have not yet read, so I cannot directly compare it). I do have a complaint about the over-wrought title, which is rather overblown.

[tjwilliams_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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. 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.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. The United States sent its best athletes to Italy, yet a majority of those athletes were black and subject to severe discrimination back home. 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 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. 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.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. 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. The PRC continued its boycott of the games, refusing to recognize the ROC government while Brundage tried to remain neutral in the conflict, allowing the ROC to compete as “Taiwan,” but not as “China.”There is a wonderful amount of detail in this book, such as the likely botched ruling in the final of the 100-meter freestyle swimming final, which deprived American Lance Larson of a gold medal and a young Cassius Clay’s difficulties getting to Italy because of his pathological fear of flying. Rome 1960 will be a wonderful read for any lover of sport and for anybody interested in how society affects sports and how the Olympics can change the world.

[yeremenko_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is fitting this book mentions Jim McKay and his nascent Olympic TV coverage of 1960. This book is like watching an american broadcast. Only the greatest of the foreign athletes warrant any mention. The book seems at first look typical of the American psyche where they find heroes out of disaster. For example American historians of The Battle of the Bulge say ti was not a horrible screwup where the entire USA army was caught off guard by the only plan the Germans had ever used to attack western Europe, it was the moment of Patton the hero! And this book to a annoying degree focuses on Americans athletes, but to be fair it spends much of its time with the disappointing losses of the American men on the track.Overall though, this is a fine book. Maraniss is a great historian and he effectively, and patiently, puts each performance into the bigger picture of 1960. Another strong point is the sensible look at Cassius Clay. He does his best to sort the legend from reality and paoints a compelling picture of a brash kid, with talent, not the iconic hero that would become Ali.

[hhs9staff · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It tells the story of the 1960 Olympics. It focuses on Wilma Rudolph, Cassius Clay, and Rafer Johnson. These athletes and others are portrayed during the Olympics as the times are changing from a more innocent time, to a time affected by the Cold War and the social changes that the 1960s are bringing, not only to the US, but also the world. Very good read.Reviewed by:Stewart JohnsonSocial Studies Teacher