TAIPEI – Two sports legends from opposite sides of the globe. They were the fiercest rivals in the decathlon, the world's toughest athletics event, and their showdown at the 1960 Rome Games remains one of the iconic moments in Olympic history. And unbeknownst to many, they were also best friends, trained together under the same coach, helped and encouraged each other, and jokingly referred to themselves as the “Two United Nations.”
What a great story, it has the potential to make a great documentary film.
But it took me and my co-creator, author and former Wall Street Journal Asia reporter John Critch more than 15 years to produce the film, and now Decathlon: The CK Yang and Rafer Johnson Story is finally finished and available to stream online.
What motivated us?
Above all, I think what was good about this story of friendship and struggle was its strength, and the unique and appealing personalities of the two main characters.
Yang Chuan-Kwang was an indigenous Amis native of Taiwan, and grew up in a poor family in the mountainous region of eastern Taiwan. However, he had extraordinary athletic ability. At the Taiwanese national team selection for the Asian Games held in Manila in 1954, he beat his teammates in almost every event, so his coaches strongly encouraged him to participate in the decathlon. Despite not knowing the rules at all, he won the gold medal in Manila and was called the “Iron Man of Asia.”
Rafer Johnson also grew up poor, the son of a sharecropper in Texas. As a teenager, he excelled in sports and could have become a professional football or basketball player, but gave up those lucrative careers to pursue the decathlon. While at UCLA, he set a world record in 1958 and became the first African-American to be elected student body president. In fact, his success in sports made him a symbol of black achievement in the early days of the American civil rights movement.
That same year, 1958, the Taiwanese government sent CK to train at UCLA with the goal of winning a gold medal in Rome. Laffer had the same goal, but he and CK became fast friends and a sort of support system for the duo. CK was quirky and always joking around, while Laffer was serious and earnest, both intent on winning in Rome, but generous enough to help each other along the way.
Image courtesy of Decathlon Films LLC
Their showdown, chronicled in the documentary, was arguably the most tense and exciting decathlon in Olympic history. Decided until the final seconds of the tenth event, Leifer narrowly won the gold medal. CK won the silver, becoming the first athlete with a Chinese surname to win an Olympic medal. At the end of the competition, they collapsed into each other's arms, a moment forever remembered as one of the most incredible photographs in sports history.
But life after Rome wasn't easy for either athlete. CK set a world record in 1963 and was the overwhelming favorite to win gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, but he was drugged by a teammate who defected to China and CK didn't win a medal. And Leifer became close friends with Senator Robert Kennedy and was at his side when RFK was assassinated in 1968, tackling the gunman and disarming him.
The tragedy hit them both hard, but the friendship they maintained helped them weather it and recover: CK attended Lafer's wedding in 1971, and Lafer was with him at his deathbed in 2007.
Such powerful stories of friendship, competition, sportsmanship, loyalty and love are rarely found today, especially in the cutthroat world of big-time sports.
CK was a symbol of Taiwan in its ongoing fight against Communist China, while Leifer was a symbol of the civil rights movement at a dangerous time in the U.S. Consider the political pressures these two men faced: 64 years later, the issues that affected these two men back then – tensions between Taiwan and China and the fight for social justice in the U.S. – still dominate news headlines.
Moreover, as longtime American journalists, John and I are just a few years younger than Leifer and CK and have spent much of our careers in Asia, so this story felt especially resonant to us.
So the forces that shaped their lives are still powerful today, and it seemed to me that this wasn't just any old sports story, but a story that was relevant to the modern day.
But making this into a documentary was no easy feat. Our search for archival materials took us across Taiwan and the United States, combing through private and government archives, declassified documents, hours of home video provided by the Johnson family, and other relevant materials.
Image courtesy of Decathlon Films LLC
John Critch had videotaped a five-hour interview with CK in 2006 – the last interview Jan gave before his death – but it wasn't until he discovered an old CD of Laffer narrating an audiobook of Laffer's autobiography, recorded more than 20 years ago, that he was able to add his own voice to it.
We teamed up with Taiwanese-Canadian director Frank W. Chen, whose last film, The Wang Chien-Ming Story, is available on Netflix, and tells the story of a Taiwanese baseball player who was a star pitcher for the New York Yankees before an injury abruptly ended his career. Frank immediately appreciated the story of Leifer CK, but then Taiwan was cut off from the world for over two years, and COVID-19 slowed our progress.
Still, we believed this inspiring story was worth sharing, and we persisted, aiming to make it happen around the time of the 2024 Summer Olympics. As Leifer's widow, Betsy, told me, “It's important that people remember. People should know about Leifer and CK. There's a lot in there that applies to life right now.”
And that's probably the main reason John and I stuck with this project for so long: in Leifer and CK's story there's sports drama, there's political drama, there's personal triumph and tragedy. But above all else, what gives this film its power is the story of a lifelong friendship.
As former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, one of Leifer's best friends, told me, “Two different cultures, two different nationalities, they were at the pinnacle of the most grueling sporting competition in the world, and at the end of it, they loved each other.”
Mike Chinoy is co-creator, co-writer and co-producer of Decathlon: The C.K. Yang and Rafer Johnson Story. He is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Southern California's U.S.-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 of China.
