running toward the Olympic cauldron. of Ethiopia at the games •
Yūji Koseki composed the theme song of the opening ceremony. •
Yoshinori Sakai, who lit the
Olympic flame, was born in
Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the day
an atomic bomb was
dropped on that city. He was chosen for the role to symbolize
Japan's postwar reconstruction and peace. •
Kumi-daiko was first exhibited to a worldwide audience at the Festival of Arts presentation. •
Judo and
volleyball, both popular sports in Japan, were introduced to the Olympics. Japan won gold medals in three judo events, but Dutchman
Anton Geesink won the Open category, defeating
Akio Kaminaga in front of his home crowd. The
Japanese women's volleyball team won the gold medal, with the final being broadcast live. • The
women's pentathlon (
shot put,
high jump,
hurdling,
sprint and
long jump) was introduced to the athletics events. • Reigning world champion
Osamu Watanabe capped off his career with a gold medal for Japan in freestyle wrestling, surrendering no points and retiring from competition as the only undefeated Olympic champion to date at 189–0. • Soviet gymnast
Larisa Latynina won two gold medals, a silver medal and two bronze medals. She had held the record for most Olympic medals at 18 (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) which stood until broken by American swimmer
Michael Phelps in
2012. •
Czechoslovak gymnast
Věra Čáslavská won three gold medals, including the individual all-around competition, crowning her the new queen over the reigning champion Larisa Latynina. • Australian swimmer
Dawn Fraser won the 100 m freestyle event for the third time in a row, a feat matched by Soviet
Vyacheslav Ivanov in
rowing's single scull event. •
Don Schollander won four gold medals in swimming. •
Abebe Bikila (
Ethiopia) became the first person to win the Olympic
marathon twice. • 15-year-old
Sharon Stouder won four medals in women's swimming, three of them gold. • New Zealand's
Peter Snell became the third person (after British Albert Hill in 1920 and Australian Edwin Flack in 1896) to win gold medals in both the 800 m and 1500 m in the same Olympics. •
Billy Mills, an unfancied runner, became the only American, as well as the first Native American, to win the gold in the men's 10,000 m. •
Bob Hayes won the 100 metre title in a time of 10.06 seconds, equaling the world record, and set the current record for the fastest relay leg in the 4×100 m. •
Joe Frazier, future
heavyweight champion of the world, won a gold medal in heavyweight boxing while competing with a broken thumb. • This was the last Summer Olympics to use a
cinder running track for athletic events, and the first to use
fiberglass poles for
pole vaulting. •
Zambia declared its independence on the day of the closing ceremony of the 1964 Summer Olympics, thereby becoming the first country ever to have entered an Olympic Games as one country, and left it as another. This was celebrated in the ceremony itself by the team using a placard with "Zambia" instead of the "Northern Rhodesia" placard from the opening ceremony. Zambia was the only team to use a placard in the closing ceremony. • The start of operations for the first Japanese "bullet train" (the
Tōkaidō Shinkansen) between
Tokyo Station and
Shin-Ōsaka Station was scheduled to coincide with the Olympic Games. The first regularly scheduled train ran on 1 October 1964, just nine days before the opening of the games, transporting passengers in about four hours, and connecting the three major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. •
Ranatunge Karunananda who represented
Ceylon in men's
10,000 meters, continued to run alone even after the others had finished the race. Spectators first started to jeer at him. But when he came around a second time, there was silence. Finally he finished the race amid cheers and applause. Karunananda's Olympic story has been entered into Japanese school textbooks titled 'Uniform Number 67', 'Bottom Ranked Hero'. ==Sports==