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of its 1965 season in an advertisement that claimed the unprecedented broadcast would “add a new dimension to imaginative sports coverage techniques.”⁷⁵

      Wide World used the Early Bird satellite, which launched into orbit less than three months prior, for the July 31 telecast. It piloted the nascent technology with live coverage of the Le Mans and the Irish Derby Sweepstakes horse race earlier in the season. The Le Mans broadcast encountered glitches that temporarily blocked ABC’s image feed and forced the network to put up a standby card and present only its audio commentary. ABC’s broadcast of the Irish Sweepstakes the following week, however, went smoothly and allowed Wide World to work out what kinks remained before Kiev.

      Wide World again planned to produce the meet with its own personnel and gear. But Arledge discovered that it could only be aired live if ABC agreed to share Russian equipment and relinquish some control over the production, even though, as he pointed out, it would not even be televised in Russia. “We knew we would rather cover the meet live without having complete control of production than tape it and fly it back,” he recalled with a hint of lingering disappointment.⁷⁶ Arledge collaborated with Russian television authorities to guarantee the coverage would give equal attention to the American and Soviet competitors. He noted, however, that the Russians’ inferior facilities made the already difficult production more challenging than it would have been were he given free rein to use his own equipment and staff. ABC initially planned to use an experimental Russian satellite, in addition to the Early Bird, that fed pictures from Moscow to Helsinki and then to the United states, but the Russian technicians were unable to tie the feed into a suitable foreign ground station. ABC instead devised a dual system of satellites and landlines that would be able to get around its host nation’s limited facilities.

      The process of building the collaborative, intercontinental live broadcast—which Arledge detailed in a Wide World yearbook ABC published in 1964 and 1965—was remarkably intricate. The image and sound tracks were shuttled via separate landlines from Kiev, where McKay was commenting live on the scene, to Rome, where ABC conscripted the assistance of Radiotelevisione Italiana. Bill Flemming contributed from a rented studio in Rome, where an ABC director had the sportscaster alternate between the live feed and taped segments to guarantee a seamless broadcast and fill in any gaps. Had they lost the audio from McKay but retained the video from Kiev, for instance, Flemming could still provide commentary from the Italian studio. From Rome, the program was delivered via satellite to Andover, Maine, then to New York City, where ABC had another standby studio and archived material ready in case it lost the picture. Finally, it was fed to the rest of the United States. “Technically there were about 100 different places where things could have gone wrong,” Arledge wrote. “It was amazing that nothing did.” ABC further advertised this unprecedented technological feat by including in its 1965 yearbook a map that traced the television feed’s circuitous route from Kiev to American living rooms.

      Alongside the map, it placed a Riger sketch of five-thousand-meter competitors Bob Shul and Pyotr Bolotnikov sharing a sportsmanlike embrace after Bolotnikov beat the favored American. Arledge indicated that ABC’s collaboration with Soviet TV mirrored the runners’ fellowship—a display he likened to Khrushchev and Harriman’s unexpected hug two years prior. Despite their low-grade technology, “the Russians,” he noted, “with a few exceptions of hometown enthusiasm, did very objective coverage and showed Americans as well as Russians, following all details of our plan.”⁷⁷

      Arledge identified the live broadcast as “a forerunner of the direction international television must take.”⁷⁸ More important, he claimed the achievement demonstrated sports television’s sociopolitical utility. “It gives us an opportunity,” he said, “to help the people of the world understand one another through the medium of television and through the medium of sports.”⁷⁹ Arledge suggested the live broadcast fostered an even more intimate communion between the United States and the Soviet Union than Wide World’s previously tape-delayed presentations. “The world had really become a pearl in the broad hand of communication,” he concluded.⁸⁰ As he made apparent, it was ABC Sports—not simply TV—that realized this political potential. The network braved Cold War anxieties to establish a global sports telecommunications grid that brought together geographically, culturally, and politically disparate groups with an unprecedented degree of intimacy.

      Amid his utopian reverie, Arledge briefly mentioned that Wide World was publicizing the upcoming Thunderbird Golf Championship, which was scheduled to air on ABC after the track meet, from Kiev. The promotion further illustrates television’s wondrous potential to transcend space, as American viewers received a reminder about an upcoming US-based program from a different continent. Arledge, however, also gestured toward the irony of advertising an event that took place at suburban New York City’s posh Westchester Country Club—a locale he described as a “bastion of capitalism”—from a communist state. “It is undoubtedly the first time that a major golf championship has ever been promoted from the Soviet Union,” he observed.⁸¹ The live promo, Arledge implied, transformed the Soviet Union into an unwitting participant in US commercial television and the capitalist culture that supports it. While the US-Soviet collaboration heralded live television’s potential to bond radically different groups, Arledge indicated that these technologized unions are ultimately driven by and serve US-based corporate interests. This ABC coverage assured viewers that TV’s globalized “hand of communication” is a thoroughly American appendage.

      By the time of its Kiev broadcast, critics had installed Wide World as a TV program of exceptional quality—a sophisticated contrast to since-canceled ABC programs like The Untouchables and Bus Stop. Variety claimed that even though ABC’s network competitors held rights to “most of the ‘marquee’ sports,” Wide World gave the younger and still less prominent network equal respectability. The program, Variety enthused, “lead[s] the field” of sports TV and stands “as a proving ground for technical innovation.”⁸² The globe-trotting show, according to Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, elevated the medium that Minow disparaged a little over one month after its debut. “The Saturday sloth,” Hoffer wrote of sports TV’s implied male viewer, “was often disturbed in his anticipation of the ski-flying championships by a historical travelogue on Oslo that was—how else can we say it?—literate.” Wide World creates scenes, effused the Los Angeles Times, “that would make Michelangelo flip his easel.”⁸³

      The anthology program, added TV critic Hal Humphrey, “has done a lot toward de-isolating Americans who cared for nothing but baseball or football.”⁸⁴ Arledge, in fact, claimed Wide World was driven more by an effort to broaden sports fans’ horizons than to generate revenues. He separated himself from his bottom line–oriented peers—a strategy he frequently employed to stress his comparative thoughtfulness and artistry—by boasting, “I can put stuff on the air I know isn’t going to get a rating. We can do things just because we think they should be done.”⁸⁵ Accordingly, ABC marketed the show as “not only entertaining, but educational” and referred specifically to the US-USSR track meets to make this claim.⁸⁶ France’s Cannes Television News Festival recognized Wide World’s edifying cosmopolitanism by awarding the program its 1966 prize for live TV. The most prominent recognition of Wide World’s value came with the 1966 George Foster Peabody Award it received in the category of International Understanding. It was the first Peabody given to a sports program. The accolade—which Wide World collected shortly after its live broadcast from Kiev—suggests the US-USSR meets stimulated the program’s acknowledgment as an exceptional representative of TV’s capacity to foster global connections and cross-cultural affinity.

      Wide World’s US-USSR track meet coverage ended after Kiev. The Soviet Union boycotted the event from 1966 through 1968 in protest of the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.⁸⁷ When the meets resumed in 1969, CBS purchased away ABC’s television rights.⁸⁸ The Cold War, however, continued to serve an important role on Wide World, which featured various other US-Soviet competitions and continued to visit locales that were off-limits to most Americans. The program made seventy trips to communist nations between its debut and the toppling of the Berlin

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