for the Kennedy administration and a Kremlin expert—was in Moscow negotiating with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the Partial Test Ban Treaty, an agreement designed to decelerate the US-Soviet arms race. In a gesture of goodwill, and despite their reportedly tense talks earlier in the week, Khrushchev invited Harriman to join him at the track meet in a private viewing box. Khrushchev opted to attend the meet with Harriman rather than see off a Chinese delegation that had been visiting Moscow. “Normally,” McKay claimed, “Khrushchev would have been [at the airport] with school children and flowers and protestations of Socialist solidarity…. Instead, on this particular afternoon, he decided to go to a track meet with the American.”66
In a dispatch to the United States, Harriman reported that “tears seemed to well up in” Khrushchev’s eyes “when our two flags were being carried side by side around the track with the two teams walking arm-in-arm.”67 Khrushchev’s emotions continued to run high as the politicians watched Brumel break his own high jump record, an achievement that moved an overwhelmed Khrushchev to embrace Harriman in euphoria. Wide World’s presentation announced Khrushchev’s attendance and cut to his box immediately after Brumel’s jump to show his reaction. The image it displayed was uncharacteristically hazy—the kind of shot that would normally end up on the carefully edited program’s cutting-room floor. But it was indispensable to Wide World’s appeals to the track meet’s ability to soothe tensions between states that were otherwise at odds. Arledge, in fact, later named the grainy shot “the single most important image I have ever broadcast.”68 “Their nations had come to the brink of annihilation,” he added of Khrushchev and Harriman, “and it wasn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that they’d had the fate of the world in their hands all that week…. But now because of the simple feat of a man jumping over a bar, they were hugging each other. That, for me, was ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”69 Harriman claimed that Khrushchev’s jolly mood continued after—and likely because of—Brumel’s spectacular jump. The Soviet leader invited Harriman to join him for dinner. “He was most cordial throughout,” Harriman reported, “and attempted to impress upon me his desire for closer collaboration in a wider field” and a “future shorn of much of the existing tension and suspicion” between the United States and Russia.70 “Track races, [Khrushchev] commented, were far better than arms races.”71 Harriman reported that the meet accelerated these improved relations between the political adversaries—a diffusion ABC exhibited and indirectly aided.
ABC built on the peacekeeping the 1963 meet bespoke by naming Brumel Wide World’s second Athlete of the Year. Given Wide World’s American audience, the program’s decision to recognize Brumel advertises its worldliness while suggesting it places athletic excellence over nationalism. It also promotes the annual US-USSR meets as key events on its schedule. The Soviets were so flattered by Brumel’s decoration that they permitted him passage to New York City for the ceremony ABC held in his honor. With USIA director Carl T. Rowan delivering the keynote address and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in attendance, the ABC-curated ceremony doubled as a conspicuous display of diplomacy that reinforced Wide World’s position as an entity capable of mediating genial international exchanges. ABC Sports even produced a short commemoration of Brumel’s honor that it aired on the following week’s edition of Wide World.72
Wide World’s 1965 US-USSR track meet from Kiev—the final US-USSR meet the program aired—continued this diplomacy, amplified the annual competition’s status, and reinforced ABC Sports’ reputation for pushing the aesthetic and technological envelope. It was the first live TV broadcast from the USSR—an achievement Arledge named “a milestone in television and quite possibly the most important advance in sports telecasting in history.”73 Because of the time difference, ABC displaced its regularly scheduled weekend morning lineup to make room for the historic telecast. It consequently expended the additional promotional resources necessary to alert viewers to the program’s unusual time slot and banked on their being intrigued enough by the meet’s established popularity and live presentation to watch the episode outside of Wide World’s normal schedule. “The satellite will change people’s viewing habits,” Arledge wagered. “They won’t care that the event is not coming over at 2pm Saturday; they’ll rather watch a live track meet from Russia at 11am.”74 ABC publicized the global spectacle as the highlight of its 1965 season in an advertisement that claimed the unprecedented broadcast would “add a new dimension to imaginative sports coverage techniques.”75
Wide World used the Early Bird satellite, which launched into orbit less than three months prior, for the July 31 telecast. It piloted the nascent technology with live coverage of the Le Mans and the Irish Derby Sweepstakes horse race earlier in the season. The Le Mans broadcast encountered glitches that temporarily blocked ABC’s image feed and forced the network to put up a standby card and present only its audio commentary. ABC’s broadcast of the Irish Sweepstakes the following week, however, went smoothly and allowed Wide World to work out what kinks remained before Kiev.
Wide World again planned to produce the meet with its own personnel and gear. But Arledge discovered that it could only be aired live if ABC agreed to share Russian equipment and relinquish some control over the production, even though, as he pointed out, it would not even be televised in Russia. “We knew we would rather cover the meet live without having complete control of production than tape it and fly it back,” he recalled with a hint of lingering disappointment.76 Arledge collaborated with Russian television authorities to guarantee the coverage would give equal attention to the American and Soviet competitors. He noted, however, that the Russians’ inferior facilities made the already difficult production more challenging than it would have been were he given free rein to use his own equipment and staff. ABC initially planned to use an experimental Russian satellite, in addition to the Early Bird, that fed pictures from Moscow to Helsinki and then to the United states, but the Russian technicians were unable to tie the feed into a suitable foreign ground station. ABC instead devised a dual system of satellites and landlines that would be able to get around its host nation’s limited facilities.
The process of building the collaborative, intercontinental live broadcast—which Arledge detailed in a Wide World yearbook ABC published in 1964 and 1965—was remarkably intricate. The image and sound tracks were shuttled via separate landlines from Kiev, where McKay was commenting live on the scene, to Rome, where ABC conscripted the assistance of Radiotelevisione Italiana. Bill Flemming contributed from a rented studio in Rome, where an ABC director had the sportscaster alternate between the live feed and taped segments to guarantee a seamless broadcast and fill in any gaps. Had they lost the audio from McKay but retained the video from Kiev, for instance, Flemming could still provide commentary from the Italian studio. From Rome, the program was delivered via satellite to Andover, Maine, then to New York City, where ABC had another standby studio and archived material ready in case it lost the picture. Finally, it was fed to the rest of the United States. “Technically there were about 100 different places where things could have gone wrong,” Arledge wrote. “It was amazing that nothing did.” ABC further advertised this unprecedented technological feat by including in its 1965 yearbook a map that traced the television feed’s circuitous route from Kiev to American living rooms.
Alongside the map, it placed a Riger sketch of five-thousand-meter competitors Bob Shul and Pyotr Bolotnikov sharing a sportsmanlike embrace after Bolotnikov beat the favored American. Arledge indicated that ABC’s collaboration with Soviet TV mirrored the runners’ fellowship—a display he likened to Khrushchev and Harriman’s unexpected hug two years prior. Despite their low-grade technology, “the Russians,” he noted, “with a few exceptions of hometown enthusiasm, did very objective coverage and showed Americans as well as Russians, following all details of our plan.”77
Arledge identified the live broadcast as “a forerunner of the direction international television must take.”78 More important, he claimed the achievement demonstrated sports television’s sociopolitical utility. “It gives us an opportunity,” he said, “to help the people
