LONDON — Around dusk on Thursday, Dec. 6, 1956, a Chinese-Australian youth of 17 walked through the streets of Melbourne to hand-deliver a letter he'd just penned. With the Melbourne Summer Olympics two days from completion, he reached Olympic Committee headquarters on Little Lonsdale Street and pushed his letter through the mail slot.
On a late afternoon in May almost 30 years later, a researcher in a basement in the National Library of Australia in Canberra grew weary navigating the vast correspondence of W. Kent Hughes, the Melbourne Olympic chairman who had died in 1970.
The researcher found a letter written in "a large sort of looping hand, with all these strange diagrams in colored pencils."
On a February afternoon in 2008, John Ian Wing orders a Foster's at a pub in Earl's Court, London. An agile 68-year-old dual citizen of Australia and Britain who looks much younger, he's been a carpenter, a contractor, a Playboy Club employee, a restaurateur and a retiree.
He's also a born Chinese-Australian who did not attend this year's Beijing Games, even though his anonymous letter from a Thursday evening in 1956 wound up renovating the very contour of ensuing Olympics.
"It was part of my life, and the closest of my friends never knew," said Wing, 51 1/2 years after his letter broached the idea of athletes marching into a closing ceremony as one intermingled "nation."
As an observant insomniac with a bustling mind, Wing often stared out his apartment window atop his family's Melbourne restaurant, Kwong Tung Cafe. Through afternoons and evenings, he'd study the behavior out on Bourke Street.
He also devoured movies about cowboys and Tarzan, plus magazines about athletes, especially the great distance-running Olympians Paavo Nurmi of Finland and Emil Zatopek of Czechoslovakia. At 12, listening to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics on the radio, he thought it odd that the closing ceremony seemed a threadbare formality, with just "a speech and lower the flag."
Then he forgot the thought.
Four years later, Melbourne's Olympics began on Nov. 22 with the promise of both friendliness and spite.
Egypt, Iraq and Libya had withdrawn because Britain, France and Israel had attacked Egypt. The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland had withdrawn because the Soviet Union had invaded Hungary. China had withdrawn because Olympic officials allowed Taiwan to use the name Formosa. Countries instructed athletes not to talk to certain other athletes.
