The best way to enjoy David Maraniss' “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World” is to ignore its hyperbolic subtitle and plunge like a 10-meter platform diver into the games themselves.

BOOK REVIEW 'Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World' David Maraniss; Simon & Schuster, 478 pages, $26.95

Changed the world? More than the 1936 Berlin Olympics with Hitler, Jesse Owens and Leni Riefenstahl? More than 1968, when hundreds of demonstrating students were killed in Mexico City, and the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised clenched fists on the victory stand; or 1972 and the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich, Germany; or the terrible foreshadowing that was the terrorist bomb at Atlanta in 1996?

Maraniss writes that in Rome in 1960, “the forces of change were everywhere,” and he points to doping scandals, the emergence of television and the increasing presence of blacks and women. But when wasn't change everywhere?

What Maraniss has – what any writer on the Olympics has – are great personalities, heart-warming human-interest stories and the unmatchable make-or-break drama of athletic competition.

Writing for American readers and lacking the “Wide World of Sports” mentality, Maraniss concentrates on events in which athletes from the United States predominated. Still, no one recounting the Rome Olympics can ignore one of its very best stories, the triumph of the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila in the marathon.

Nobody had heard of him when he arrived in Rome as part of the 12-man Ethiopian team. When he showed up for the race without shoes, one marathoner turned to another and said: “There's one guy we don't have to worry about.” But the bare-footed Bikila outdistanced them all, winning by 25 seconds and setting a new Olympic record. (Proving his victory wasn't a fluke, he won again four years later in Tokyo, bettering his Rome performance.) Bikila's rewards were worldwide fame, the Chevalier of the Order of the Star of Ethiopia, presented to him personally by Emperor Haile Selassie, and a meeting with Gina Lollobrigida.

The Olympics are made for stories like this, though it's not always easy to write about them. Too many underdog Davids overcoming obstacles and vanquishing heavyweight Goliaths can turn any narrative into corn, and Maraniss does not always avoid falling into a chowder of inevitable cliches. Where he does shine – appropriately for an author who has written biographies of Bill Clinton and Roberto Clemente – is in the overlap of sports and politics.

The Cold War suffused the 1960 games. Both the Russians and the Americans were looking to score propaganda victories, and Maraniss reports on questionable judging, possible thrown matches, spies following athletes to secret rendezvous, misplaced patriotism on all sides and a general atmosphere of suspicion and ill will.

At the center of it all was Avery Brundage, the imperious, authoritarian president of the International Olympic Committee. Brundage was a genuine idealist, with a purist's notion of sport as an activity divorced from politics and commerce.

Probably, as Maraniss suggests, he was fighting an impossible battle, one he was bound to lose. Maraniss calls 1960 “the beginning of the end” for the old genteel and gentlemanly ideals of sport, and as we ponder the distance the Olympics have traveled, from Baron Pierre de Coubertin's founding vision to Rome in 1960 and now to the carefully controlled spectacle planned for Beijing, we are left to wonder just what, precisely, the “games” have become.

2008 New York Times News Service