Discovering Japan

The opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics was held on this day in 1964. The choice of a final torchbearer in Tokyo was a moving one, Yoshinori Sakai, a Japanese track athlete born on August 6th, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was detonated on Hiroshima.

The Tokyo Olympics would become known as the TV Games, because of the enormous effort that Japan put into televising live events in color. It was the first television program to be broadcast across the Pacific Ocean to the U.S.

The most amazing feat at the Games probably belongs to Russian gymnast Larissa Latynina. Competing in her third Olympics, she won two gold medals and four medals total, bringing her career medal total to 18, an Olympic record that still stands today.

The big star for the U.S. was swimmer Don Schollander, who won four gold medals, the first American to win four golds since Jesse Owens in 1936. On the women’s side, Aussie Dawn Fraser won the 100m free for the third straight Olympics. From having been at the Sydney Games, I can tell you that Dawn Fraser is still a huge icon down under, gets like a Ted Williams kind of ovation whenever they trot her out, which tells you something about how the Aussies feel about swimming. Imagine what kind of ovation Don Schollander would get if he got announced at the Garden some night. Mothafuckas would be like “Don Tollefson is here… who cares if Don Tollefson is here?”

Other big names from the Tokyo Games include Bullet Bob Hayes, who won the men’s 100 with a world record 9.99, a record subsequently disallowed because it was wind aided. American Billy Mills surprised everyone by winning the 10,000m, the only U.S. runner in history ever to win that race in the Olympics. Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila became the first man to win the Olympic marathon twice. He first won it at the 1960 Games in Rome, shocking audiences by running barefoot, and becoming the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

Last but certainly not least, I close this missive on a most No Masian note. The U.S. only won one gold medal in boxing at the Tokyo Games. Smokin’ Joe Frazier, all of 20 years old, decimated the heavyweight division, just four years after a certain someone had won the light heavyweight gold in Rome.