"Zamechatelno!"

By night, the heat was oppressive. By day, it was impossible. Gulping salt tablets, the world's best athletes did their best to ignore the temperature and set out for glory in the 1960 Olympic Games. Grinding along in 100DEG heat, Denmark's Knud Enemark Jensen suddenly tumbled from his bicycle in the 100-kilometer race and died hours later of sunstroke. The death, the first in modern Olympic competition, shocked every athlete in Rome.

In the opening days of the Olympics, the competition was as hot as the weather. The top events:

P: In the men's 100-meter freestyle. California's lanky Lance Larson. 19. slammed into the wall like a torpedo and seemed to touch out Australia's handsome John Devitt, 23. the world record holder. Still gasping for breath, Devitt congratulated Larson and was accepting condolences from Aussie teammates when he learned he had won after all. Though the timers all put Larson ahead, two of the three judges claimed they saw Devitt's hand slap the wall first. Since the judges' decision is what counts, the victory went to the Aussie. To make the facts jibe with their opinions, officials simply changed Larson's clocking of 55.1 to 55.2, the same time turned in by Devitt. A U.S. protest was disallowed. Said Devitt frankly: "I felt Larson had won it."

P: Midway through the women's 200-meter breaststroke, Britain's leggy Anita Longsbrough, 19, turned on a rhythmic sweeping stroke that slowly overcame the 5-meter lead of West Germany's husky Wiltrud Urselmann, 18, brought her gliding home a winner in 2:49.5 to set both an Olympic record (by 2.5 sec.) and a world record (by .7 sec.).

P: In the women's 3-meter springboard dive, California's favored Paula Jean Myers Pope, a 25-year-old dental technician, looked more like an ugly duckling than a swan in her opening try ("I went over too far and the entry was bad"), never did recover and finished second to East Germany's cool Ingrid Kramer, a 17-year-old student who started diving five years ago when her father decided to make her into an athlete and pitched her into the pool. The loss was the first ever suffered by the U.S. in the event.

Such competition set even the Romans to doing as the non-Roman tourists did: they shrugged off the heat, plunged into gloriously chaotic traffic jams and struggled out to see the greatest show in sports. For a close-up view of the athletes, Romans lined an elevated highway that passed Olympic Village and peered at the girls through binoculars. Cracked California's 800-meter runner. Pat Daniels: "I feel like a monkey in a cage." One rubbernecker made it past frantic Italian guards at the gate of the men's quarters by simply stripping to his shorts and running in.

Inside the village U.S. girls eased weary legs by dipping them into churning washing machines for impromptu whirlpool therapy, astonished cooks by devouring such mixtures as hamburgers, spaghetti, marmalade and tomato juice. U.S. girl gymnasts captivated their Italian hosts by persuading their bus driver to take them to a beach instead of to a practice session amid the dusty. 1,700-year-old ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.

To relax before their big events, Russians spent hours selecting postcards, Arabs listened to rock-'n'-roll music, and Africans went on shopping sprees for Elvis Presley records. Athletes harried Olympic officials with fake phone calls about the imminent arrival of a gift of crocodiles from Ghana. Someone started the rumor that a British girl athlete was really a boy, thereby brought a flush of righteous royal red to the British press.

Joining in the off-hours fun was the great U.S. men's track team. But the days were spent in grim practice for the main events of the Games: the duels this week on the brick-red track of the Olympic Stadium. Decathlon Star Rafer Johnson (TIME cover. Aug. 29), proud flagbearer of the U.S. team in the opening ceremonies, spent up to six hours a day getting ready for his battle with Formosa's Yang Chuan-kwang, and Russia's Vasily Kuznetsov. Foreigners flocked to watch the workouts of another U.S. superstar: Boston University's High Jumper John Thomas, 19, holder of the world record at 7 ft. 3 3/4 in. When some Russians showed up to gawk, Thomas coolly put the bar at 7 ft. and sailed over with disdainful ease. Gasped the Russians: "Zamechatelno [wonderful]!"

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