that pervaded the Cold War period.”45
The meets also furnished a way for the United States to combat Soviet critiques that used America’s endemic racial discrimination to undermine the country’s democratic appeals. A National Security Council task force on international communism surmised that the United States could offset this propaganda by allowing nonwhites to represent it on the international stage. “We should make more extensive use of nonwhite American citizens,” the group advised; “outstanding Negroes in all fields should be appealed to in terms of the higher patriotism to act as our representatives.”46 The coed events would also contrast Soviet charges that US women were unfairly fettered to the domestic sphere.
The US Information Agency (USIA) saw US-produced global TV broadcasts as potentially improving America’s international repute.47 Wide World’s track meet coverage contributed to these efforts. But ABC also knew the competitions’ resonance with Cold War tensions would draw an unusually broad audience to the fledgling program. It leveraged the annual events’ narrative potential to transform them into “the cornerstone of televised track in the United States.”48
Wide World billed the 1961 US-USSR track meet from Moscow’s Lenin Stadium as the peak of its first season and the culmination of three previous track meets it had featured up to that point. McKay opened the program by mentioning the broadcast’s position as the first US-made sports TV production from the Soviet Union: “For the first time, an American television network has brought its own television cameras into the Soviet Union. The occasion: classic track and field competition between the United States and Russia.” ABC transported fifty staff and twenty tons of equipment—including two Ampex videotape machines, five camera units, and a twenty-five-hundred-watt portable generator—to document the two-day event and edit it down to ninety minutes. It also spent $100,000 on the broadcast, an increase of about $60,000 over the typical cost of its international productions, to set the meet apart.49
“In those days,” Arledge reminisced in a documentary commemorating Wide World’s fortieth anniversary, “you didn’t fly into the Soviet Union with 20 tons of equipment and expect a friendly greeting. Lenin Stadium and the Soviet Union in 1961 was the inner center of the enemy.” ABC’s crew and equipment were almost unable to gain entry into Russia. The Russians were so slow to approve the network’s travel that Arledge posted a staff member at the USSR’s Washington, DC, embassy to wait for the decision and pressure the Russians to make it. When word did not come, Arledge gambled by sending the program’s personnel and gear to Amsterdam, from where they would be able to arrive in Moscow quickly once the approval was levied, which eventually happened just in time to cover the meet.
McKay described invasive security protocols once they did get to Moscow and portrayed the city as a drab place devoid of the liveliness one might expect from a major international metropolis.50 The ABC crew deplaned in an empty hangar and was transported into Moscow proper by army trucks. While driving into the city, they passed a World War II tank trap left intact to signal how close Nazi forces advanced toward Moscow before the Russian military defeated the invaders. In no uncertain terms, the monument signaled the communist center’s unfriendliness to outsiders—a sentiment that was not lost on the ABC Sports crew. McKay likened their hotel—where authorities assigned him, Arledge, and another producer to share a single room—to “a great house that had been inherited by someone who didn’t have the funds to keep it up.”51 Their bags arrived separately after being searched, and McKay suspected the KGB had tampered with his shoes, which mysteriously fell apart as he was leaving town. These portrayals paint Moscow as a peculiar and hostile locale—certainly the most foreign of the faraway locations Wide World had visited. “The only real signs of life and enthusiasm we found on that trip to Moscow were at the scenes of the event,” McKay remembered.52 He observed that Russian authorities went to great lengths to make Lenin Stadium appear state of the art and well maintained—in contrast to the otherwise unkempt city—since it would be on display for a US audience.
Capitalizing on this Cold War unease, ABC promoted the broadcast as both a political and a technological feat. “Russia & U.S. thaw down to a simple track,” read an advertisement the network placed in the New York Times. “The first sports event ever to eventuate from Moscow over Yankee teevee!” (figure 1).53
FIGURE 1. This New York Times advertisement for ABC’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR track meet emphasizes the Cold War tensions that informed the event.
McKay set the scene at Lenin Stadium by explaining the differences that separate how Soviet and US fans consume sport. “Inside are more than 70,000,” he announced. “Most of them paid, some of them, however, are here on an incentive basis. They put out a little more in their factory or their farm this week, and thereby got free tickets.” But the remainder of ABC’s presentation stressed sport’s potential to generate unity amid antagonistic dissimilarity. As is customary at international sporting events, the teams entered the stadium side by side before their respective national anthems played. To accent this pageantry’s collaborative overtones, ABC camera operator Mike Freedman lay on the field with a “creepy peepy” to showcase the US and Soviet teams passing overhead. The low-angle shot, which framed the athletes against the sky, emphasized the track meet’s grandeur and echoed the diplomatic assurances that had been made in ABC’s ad in the New York Times.
Complementing Freedman’s camera work, ABC recast various potential points of discord as opportunities for cross-cultural affinity. As the weather soured toward the end of the meet, McKay cheerily noted the frequency with which US events are similarly disrupted. “What started out as a beautiful day with the temperature at 85 [degrees Fahrenheit] has turned into a real summer Sunday evening thunderstorm. It happens halfway around the world just like it does in Kansas and Missouri,” he said along with shots of rain-soaked Russian spectators and ABC’s tarp-covered equipment. The instance could easily have been used to paint Moscow and Lenin Stadium in an unfriendly light. Rather, ABC employed it to stress the similarities that united Americans and Russians. The Soviet fans may procure their tickets differently, but they ultimately display the same passion for their games and face the same obstacles common in Middle America.
ABC’s telecast deliberately elided several disagreements surrounding the competition. The AAU requested that the men’s and women’s events be scored separately—as is customary in America. The Soviets, however, wanted the scores combined—as is routine in Russia. Possessing a superior men’s team, the United States would win the men’s and lose the women’s meet with divided scoring. However, the Soviet women’s team was so dominant—a point Western commentators often used to attack communism’s deleteriously hardening impact on Russian women—that it would give the USSR an overall victory were the scores combined. Though the meet did officially score the men’s and women’s teams separately—ensuring victory for the American men and the Russian women—several Soviet newspapers persisted in reporting an overall USSR victory, which irked many US-based commentators and struck them as typical of the country’s tendency to defame their homeland.54 “I realized,” Arledge said of the scoring quarrel, “I was experiencing the Cold War in microcosm, and that this kind of obdurate, uncompromising dispute, in which both sides in their own environment were right, characterized what went on in much more important spheres.”55 While the US and Soviet officials quibbled about how the event would be scored, ABC focused on the meet’s capacity to transcend such comparatively petty trifles.
Instead, Wide World joined in the AAU’s defense against Soviet critiques of US racism and gender relations by focusing in large part on sprinter Wilma Rudolph—already a star who earned a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics—and broad jumper Ralph Boston. It had featured Rudolph and Boston, both of whom attended the track and field powerhouse Tennessee State University,
