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Wide World as a permanent fixture at ABC.” Most important, the trip convinced Moore, who joined the Wide World crew in Moscow, to keep the program on the air despite its initially underwhelming ratings.⁶¹ Shortly after the meet, ABC renewed Wide World for a full fifty-two-week run starting in January 1962. The program’s extension into the autumn months would compensate for the absence of NCAA football broadcasts, which ABC lost after the 1961 season and did not regain until 1966.

      By the end of Wide World’s first season, Variety reported that the program that almost did not secure enough advertisers to make it on ABC’s weekend schedule had sponsors “backed up trying to get onto the show” for its sophomore season.⁶² Its 1962 Emmy Award nomination in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs was the first such recognition a sports program received and demonstrated Wide World’s rare ability to straddle the sport, news, and documentary genres. The New York Times expanded on this decoration by citing Wide World as “one of the programs adding prestige to the medium” as a whole.⁶³

      Wide World continued to bill itself as a site that mediates sport’s global meaning after its debut season. It hired a collection of expert celebrity commentators, including the British Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss, figure skater Dick Button, and swimmer Lynn Burke, who became the first female TV sports commentator when Wide World recruited her to participate in its coverage of the 1961 AAU Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships. As with its coverage of women’s sports, ABC was ahead of its competitors when it came to hiring female commentators. Though not an official policy, it typically only allowed women to comment on women’s sports—a form of segregation it did not impose on its male talent when covering women’s events that remains commonplace in sports media.⁶⁴

      Wide World also started giving out an Athlete of the Year Award in 1962 (see appendix 2). Like Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year—which the magazine based on Time’s Man of the Year honor—Wide World’s Athlete of the Year suggests the TV program has the authority to organize and assess sport’s significance. Its more inclusive title also advertises Wide World’s willingness to recognize both men and women athletes (though women received the honor infrequently) who participate in activities that Sports Illustrated often overlooked.

      Wide World paired this cultivation of expertise with an amplification of its formal and technological daring. It created a floating TV studio on a sixty-foot fishing trawler named the Whitestone to cover the 1962 America’s Cup yacht race off the coast of Rhode Island. “Equipment aboard included a fourteen-by-eight-foot control room, housing all necessary audio and video equipment and a video-tape recorder; two TV cameras, mounted on special platforms; and a micro-wave dish, set up on the Whitestone’s decks to pick up pictures from a camera in a helicopter, which also covered the race.” After ABC recorded each segment of the race from the trawler, the helicopter gathered the tapes and delivered them to Newport, Rhode Island. They were then flown to Providence, where a video unit was set up to feed the tape over rented phone lines to New York, and then to the rest of the country.⁶⁵ As with the 1961 US-USSR track meet, Wide World made sure its audience was aware of this state-of-the-art and arduous production process.

      In a different but similarly imaginative direction, Wide World hired Robert Riger to film, photograph, and sketch events. The de facto artist-in-residence humanized further the program’s aspirations and showcased a different perspective from ABC’s cameras. In particular, Riger developed a dual action camera that simultaneously shoots motion picture film and still pictures so scenes can be displayed in real time and later broken down into split-second intervals.

      Wide World brought these intensified practices to bear for its return to Lenin Stadium to tape the 1963 US-USSR meet, for which it again used its own equipment. Less than one year removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, relations between the competing nations were even icier than in 1961. At the time of the meet, W. Averell Harriman—ambassador at large for the Kennedy administration and a Kremlin expert—was in Moscow negotiating with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the Partial Test Ban Treaty, an agreement designed to decelerate the US-Soviet arms race. In a gesture of goodwill, and despite their reportedly tense talks earlier in the week, Khrushchev invited Harriman to join him at the track meet in a private viewing box. Khrushchev opted to attend the meet with Harriman rather than see off a Chinese delegation that had been visiting Moscow. “Normally,” McKay claimed, “Khrushchev would have been [at the airport] with school children and flowers and protestations of Socialist solidarity…. Instead, on this particular afternoon, he decided to go to a track meet with the American.”⁶⁶

      In a dispatch to the United States, Harriman reported that “tears seemed to well up in” Khrushchev’s eyes “when our two flags were being carried side by side around the track with the two teams walking arm-in-arm.”⁶⁷ Khrushchev’s emotions continued to run high as the politicians watched Brumel break his own high jump record, an achievement that moved an overwhelmed Khrushchev to embrace Harriman in euphoria. Wide World’s presentation announced Khrushchev’s attendance and cut to his box immediately after Brumel’s jump to show his reaction. The image it displayed was uncharacteristically hazy—the kind of shot that would normally end up on the carefully edited program’s cutting-room floor. But it was indispensable to Wide World’s appeals to the track meet’s ability to soothe tensions between states that were otherwise at odds. Arledge, in fact, later named the grainy shot “the single most important image I have ever broadcast.”⁶⁸ “Their nations had come to the brink of annihilation,” he added of Khrushchev and Harriman, “and it wasn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that they’d had the fate of the world in their hands all that week…. But now because of the simple feat of a man jumping over a bar, they were hugging each other. That, for me, was ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”⁶⁹ Harriman claimed that Khrushchev’s jolly mood continued after—and likely because of—Brumel’s spectacular jump. The Soviet leader invited Harriman to join him for dinner. “He was most cordial throughout,” Harriman reported, “and attempted to impress upon me his desire for closer collaboration in a wider field” and a “future shorn of much of the existing tension and suspicion” between the United States and Russia.⁷⁰ “Track races, [Khrushchev] commented, were far better than arms races.”⁷¹ Harriman reported that the meet accelerated these improved relations between the political adversaries—a diffusion ABC exhibited and indirectly aided.

      ABC built on the peacekeeping the 1963 meet bespoke by naming Brumel Wide World’s second Athlete of the Year. Given Wide World’s American audience, the program’s decision to recognize Brumel advertises its worldliness while suggesting it places athletic excellence over nationalism. It also promotes the annual US-USSR meets as key events on its schedule. The Soviets were so flattered by Brumel’s decoration that they permitted him passage to New York City for the ceremony ABC held in his honor. With USIA director Carl T. Rowan delivering the keynote address and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in attendance, the ABC-curated ceremony doubled as a conspicuous display of diplomacy that reinforced Wide World’s position as an entity capable of mediating genial international exchanges. ABC Sports even produced a short commemoration of Brumel’s honor that it aired on the following week’s edition of Wide World.⁷²

      Wide World’s 1965 US-USSR track meet from Kiev—the final US-USSR meet the program aired—continued this diplomacy, amplified the annual competition’s status, and reinforced ABC Sports’ reputation for pushing the aesthetic and technological envelope. It was the first live TV broadcast from the USSR—an achievement Arledge named “a milestone in television and quite possibly the most important advance in sports telecasting in history.”⁷³ Because of the time difference, ABC displaced its regularly scheduled weekend morning lineup to make room for the historic telecast. It consequently expended the additional promotional resources necessary to alert viewers to the program’s unusual time slot and banked on their being intrigued enough by the meet’s established popularity and live presentation to watch the episode outside of Wide World’s normal schedule. “The satellite will change people’s viewing habits,” Arledge wagered. “They won’t care

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