Watch Maraniss talk about the Games' significance » 'The Cold War had a profound impact on blacks and women in the United States,' says Maraniss. The Soviets were determined to exploit the propaganda value of their athletes, promoting achievements at every turn - particularly at the expense of the United States, which was still grappling with how to showcase its African-American and women athletes when each group faced resistance at home. The Soviet Union, which had only joined the Olympic movement in the 1950s, had been embarrassed by its team's performance at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. The Rome Olympics also had political resonance, Maraniss adds.

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Jensen died hours later, the cause eventually traced to a blood-circulation drug.

The competition also included the first confirmed use of doping in the Olympics, when a Danish bicyclist, Knud Enemark Jensen, passed out during a road race in the scorching Italian sun. The Games showcased what would become the shoe wars - a German, Armin Hary, wore Puma during the race and Adidas on the medal stand in an effort to play both sides. (The American broadcaster, CBS, paid the princely sum of $600,000 for the American rights, a fee that wouldn't even buy the average 30-second ad on NBC in 2008.) It was also the first Olympics commercially televised in America - if on a limited basis, given that film had to be flown across the Atlantic each night for broadcast the next day. Maraniss observes the Rome Games were a coming-out party for a country, Italy, defeated 15 years earlier in World War II, and the rest of a rebuilding continental Europe. 'You see the ushering in of the modern world, for better for worse,' he says in an interview at CNN Center. Maraniss says the 1960 Games did mark a turning point in Olympic and sports history.

Maraniss acknowledges that the subtitle - the publisher's idea - is hyperbolic, but says he's happy to defend it.

Rome 1960 by david maraniss