TAIPEI – Two sporting legends from opposite sides of the globe. The fiercest rivals in the world’s most demanding athletic event, the Decathlon – their duel at the Rome Games in 1960 still one of the iconic moments in Olympic history. And also – unknown to many – the closest of friends, training together under the same coach, helping and pushing each other, jokingly calling themselves “the two-man United Nations.”
What a great story. What a potentially terrific documentary film.
Yet it took me and my co-creator, the author and former Asian Wall Street Journal reporter John Krich, more than 15 years to get it made. Now, finally, “Decathlon: The CK Yang and Rafer Johnson Story” is done and streaming online.
What kept us going?
I think, above all, it was the power of this tale of friendship and struggle along with the uniquely compelling personalities of the two main protagonists.
Yang Chuan-kwang was Amis, one of Taiwan’s indigenous people. He grew up poor in the mountains of eastern Taiwan. But he had remarkable athletic skills – so much so that when he tried out for Taiwan’s team for the 1954 Asian Games in Manila, he beat all his teammates in almost every event, prompting his coaches to insist he commit to the Decathlon. Even without knowing all the rules, he won gold in Manila and was dubbed “the iron man of Asia.”
Rafer Johnson grew up poor, as well, the son of a sharecropper in Texas. As a teenager, with his athletic prowess, he could have played professional football or basketball, but he gave up such potentially lucrative paths for the Decathlon. While at UCLA, he set the world record in 1958, and also became one of the first African Americans elected as student body president. Indeed, his sporting success made him into a symbol of black achievement during the early days of the US civil rights movement.
In the same year, 1958, Taiwan’s government sent CK to train at UCLA, with the goal of winning gold in Rome. Although Rafer had the same goal, he and CK became best friends, a kind of two-man support system: CK, whimsical, always joking around, Rafer, earnest and serious, both committed to winning in Rome, but each big-hearted enough to help the other along the way.
Their duel, chronicled in our documentary, remains arguably the most tense and exciting Decathlon in Olympic history. It came down to the last seconds of the last of the ten events. Rafer barely won gold. CK, in winning silver, became the first person with a Chinese surname ever to win an Olympic medal. At the end of the event, they collapsed in each other’s arms, a moment immortalized in one of the greatest photographs in sporting history.
But life after Rome was not easy for either man. Although in 1963, CK set the world record, and at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he was the overwhelming favorite to win gold, he was drugged by a teammate who then defected to China. CK failed to win a medal. And Rafer, who’d become close friends with Senator Robert Kennedy, was at RFK’s side when he was assassinated in 1968, tackling the gunman and seizing his weapon.
The tragedies hit both men hard. But their friendship, which they maintained, helped each of them cope and recover. CK was at Rafer’s wedding in 1971. Rafer was at CK’s deathbed in 2007.
Such a powerful story of friendship, competition, sportsmanship, loyalty, and, indeed, love, is rarely found these days, especially in the cutthroat world of big-time sports.
Consider the political pressure that both of these men faced – CK as a symbol of Taiwan in its ongoing battle with Communist China, Rafer as a civil rights icon in a dangerous time in the US. Fast-forward 64 years to the present and the issues that shaped the two men then – Taiwan-China tensions and the fight for social justice in the States – continue to dominate the headlines.
Moreover, long-time American journalists John and I, from a generation only slightly younger than that of Rafer and CK and having spent much of our careers in Asia, found that this story particularly resonated.
So, it seemed to me that the forces which shaped their lives are still powerful today, making this not just another old sports saga, but one with contemporary relevance.
But turning this into a documentary was no easy task. The search for archival material took us to Taiwan and across the US, poring over the relevant materials from private and government archives, declassified documents and hours of home videos generously supplied by the Johnson family.
John Krich had videotaped five hours of interviews with CK in 2006 – the last interview Yang did before his death. But it was only when we discovered an old CD of Rafer narrating the audio book of his autobiography, done well over 20 years ago, that we were able to add his own voice as well.
We teamed up with Taiwanese Canadian director Frank W Chen. His last film, which is on Netflix, was “Late Life: The Chien-ming Wang Story,” an account of a Taiwanese baseball player who briefly had been a star pitcher for the New York Yankees before hie career was cruelly cut short by injuries. Frank immediately appreciated the Rafer-CK story, but then Covid intervened, as Taiwan shut itself off from the rest of the world for more than two years, slowing our progress.
Still, we persisted, convinced that this inspiring tale was worth sharing and aiming to make that happen around the time of the 2024 Summer Olympics. As Rafer’s widow Betsy told me, “It’s important for people to remember. They should know about Rafer and CK. It has so many things in it that apply to life now.”
And that is probably the main reason why John and I stuck with this project for so long. The tale of Rafer and CK has sporting drama, political drama, personal triumphs and tragedies. But above all, it is the story of a lifelong friendship that gives the film its power.
As former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who was one of Rafer’s closest friends, told me, “Two different cultures, two different nationalities. The two of them, at the peak of their game – the toughest athletic competition in the world – and at the end of it, they loved each other.”
Mike Chinoy is the co-creator, co-writer and co-producer of “Decathlon: The CK Yang and Rafer Johnson Story.” He is a non-resident senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute, a former CNN foreign correspondent and the author of five books, most recently Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.