1932 Summer Olympics

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles began with an unusual bidding contest, because only one city entered. At the 23rd IOC Session in Rome in 1923, the committee received a single proposal. It came from a Los Angeles bid committee led by William May Garland. With no rival, the California city won by default. It then hosted the Games of the Tenth Olympiad from the 30th of July to the 14th of August 1932. This was the middle of the Great Depression. How does a city pay for an Olympics while the world economy sags? Where do the athletes sleep, and who keeps the crowds in order? And which familiar habits of the modern Games were born on these Californian streets?

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• 2. Paying the Bill

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  William May Garland, a local sports enthusiast and real estate developer, ran the organizing committee with a staff of 70 employees. Local corporate interests and business elites backed the effort heavily. The main financing came from a state measure, the California Olympic Bond Act of 1927. Voters approved it in 1928 as Proposition 2, with 73 percent of the vote. Ticket sales added to the pot, and so did 331,518 programs. The committee also took a share of the venue concessions, which a local firm ran at every site. Male athletes and coaches paid a daily charge to stay in the Olympic village, and corporate sponsors supplied another stream of revenue.

  The committee paid for dredging Alamitos Bay in Long Beach so crews could row, but most venues were rented or leased to it at no cost. It also paid for the village, a swimming pool, and temporary stands at the city parks and golf courses it borrowed. The Depression still thinned the guest list. Only 37 countries competed, compared with 46 at Amsterdam in 1928, and President Herbert Hoover did not attend.

  Newspapers of the day declared a profit by the closing ceremony, although the committee never reported the financial details of the Games. When a surplus was announced, the City of Los Angeles, the USOC and the State of California sued to claim it. In 1935, the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the surplus belonged solely to the committee. The Bureau of Internal Revenue put the possible surplus at around $1.2 million. The committee repaid the state bond and donated the remainder to a local community redevelopment agency. No final accounting was ever released, and local journalism later pieced one together. The donated money funded the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games.

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• 3. Borrowed Venues

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  Fifteen venues hosted the 1932 Games, and only the Swimming Stadium was built new. Workers put it up in 1932 beside the Coliseum, and it was meant to be temporary. Everything else already existed, which kept costs down in the wake of the Depression. The list included two golf courses, two city parks, three public highways and a city road.

  The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, built in 1923, served as the Olympic Stadium, with a capacity of 105,000. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, built in 1921, became a temporary velodrome for track cycling under the Union Cycliste Internationale. The Olympic Auditorium opened in 1924, in preparation for winning the Games. Builders then modified it to suit the boxing, weightlifting and wrestling federations. Long Beach Marine Stadium dated from 1925, when Alamitos Bay was dredged, and it was dredged again seven years later.

  The Westchester course, designed for the equestrian cross country event, was the most punishing route of all. U.S. cavalry officers John Burke Barry and Sloan Doak, both former Olympians, designed it. It started at the Riviera Country Club, which had opened in 1926 as the Los Angeles Athletic Club Golf Course. From there it ran through Santa Monica, West Los Angeles and the Olympic village, and across several rural highways. It finished at Sunset Fields Golf Club. The name Westchester stuck, even though the course never entered that neighborhood. Dressage took place at Riviera, and show jumping at the Coliseum.

  Shooting events used the pistol range of the Los Angeles Police Department in Elysian Park, the oldest city park in Los Angeles. The range stayed in place for police use afterward. The road courses went back to public use. The Olympic Auditorium hosted boxing and roller derby until June 2005, when it was bought to become a megachurch. Sunset Fields Golf Club was renamed Brentwood Country Club in 1941.

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• 4. Village and Streets

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  The Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles held a settlement for 2,000 people that is considered the first official modern Olympic Village. It was a group of buildings where men could sleep, eat and train. It also offered community services that no Games had provided before, including a hospital, a fire station and a post office. Women athletes were housed at the Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The village sat roughly where Montieth Park stands today, in the View Park-Baldwin Hills neighborhoods.

  A five-member traffic committee of police and traffic experts had to move everyone from the village to the competition. Automobiles dominated travel in the city, and 68 buses carried the athletes to venues. Police escorts cleared the way. Organizers urged spectators to take the red car trolleys of the Pacific Electric, once the largest rail network in the world.

  Police Chief Roy E. Steckel and four other committee members assigned 650 officers to traffic control every day of the Games. Officers worked 12-hour days and postponed their vacations. Another 150 university students helped direct traffic. The department employed 800 sworn officers in all. Its official site reports that the Games saw only two robberies, eight burglaries, 39 thefts and 10 auto thefts.

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• 5. Selling the Games

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  The emblem was created by Harry Muir Kurtzworth with the committee's in-house art department. It showed the coat of arms of the United States holding the Olympic rings. Around it ran the motto Citius, Altius, Fortius, meaning Faster, Higher, Stronger, plus a laurel branch. Red, white and blue dominated the design.

  Sunset Orange, Vivid Blue and Beige were among the colors Los Angeles assigned to sports, a first for the Games. Programs, badges, athlete identification and venue signs all carried these colors. Even the art festival, which is not a sport, received Mocha Brown. That festival awarded medals in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture for works inspired by sport.

  A Scottish Terrier named Smoky appeared as an unofficial mascot, the first in Olympic history. Commercial partners also arrived in force. Coca-Cola became the official soft drink, and Helms Bakery supplied Helms Olympic Bread as official baker. Omega debuted as official timekeeper, lending one watchmaker and thirty chronographs to officials. The Jeffries Printing Co. handled the printing. Hollywood's film industry joined in as well, bringing consumer culture to the Olympics.

  American pianist Walter Bradley-Keeler composed "Hymne Olympique" for the Games. The IOC made it the official anthem until the current Olympic anthem was created in 1958.

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• 6. Winners and Controversies

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  Colombia made its first Olympic appearance in Los Angeles, and the Republic of China competed for the first time after a failed attempt in 1924. In all, 1,332 athletes took part. Football was absent. After Jules Rimet proposed a professional World Championship in 1929, FIFA dropped the sport from the Games to promote its new World Cup. Football returned in Berlin in 1936.

  Babe Didrikson won gold in the javelin and the hurdles, two events that debuted for women. In the high jump she entered a jump-off for gold, but officials ruled her technique illegal. That left her with silver. Women could enter only three events, so she could not try the discus, the long jump or the relay. Based on her earlier results, she would have won the 200 meters and the pentathlon easily, had those been contested. They debuted in 1964.

  Paavo Nurmi of Finland was suspended by the IAAF over alleged violations of amateur rules. Finns accused Swedish officials of devious tricks and cut off athletic relations with Sweden. Finland did not agree to return to the Finland-Sweden international until 1939. On the track, Eddie Tolan won both the 100 and 200 meters. Stanisława Walasiewicz of Poland won the women's 100 meters. After her death in 1980, it was discovered that she was intersex and would be ineligible under modern rules. Officials also made a mistake in the 3,000 meter steeplechase, which ran 3,460 meters, one lap too long.

  Field hockey drew only three nations. The host nation lost 1-24 to India and 2-9 to Japan, yet still won bronze. Romeo Neri won three gymnastics golds. Helene Madison took three swimming golds, while Japanese swimmers won all but one men's title. Kusuo Kitamura, winner of the 1500 meter freestyle, remains the youngest male swimmer ever to win Olympic gold.

  Takeichi Nishi, known as Baron Nishi, won the individual show jumping gold with his horse Uranus. It remains Japan's only equestrian gold. He died in 1945 as an officer defending Iwo Jima, and he appears in Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima. Dunc Gray won Australia's first cycling gold with a world record of 1m 13s in the 1000 meter time trial. The Dunc Gray Velodrome, built for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, carries his name. In the team jumping event on the 14th of August, no team got three riders around the course, so no medal was awarded.

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• 7. Ceremonies and Firsts

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  A crowd of 101,022 filled the Coliseum for the opening ceremony, a record that stood until the Sydney Games of 2000. A 300-person orchestra played and a choir of 1,200 sang. Garland welcomed visitors on behalf of California and Los Angeles. Vice President Curtis then declared the Games open: "In the name of the President of the United States, I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Los Angeles, celebrating the tenth olympiad of the modern era." The ceremony lasted two hours, with 2,000 athletes, coaches and officials from 37 nations. Some 800 journalists held press passes, 200 of them from abroad.

  For the first time, every event fit into 16 days across three weekends. No earlier Summer Olympics had lasted fewer than 79 days. Organizers fit 117 events in 14 sports into that window. Broadcasting was limited, since television was not available until 1936. The committee offered live radio rights to NBC and CBS, but both refused the fee. Most of the world saw highlights afterward in theater newsreels.

  Before 1932, medals were handed out at the closing ceremony, and early medalists wore evening dress. Dignitaries stood still while athletes filed past. Los Angeles introduced the first true victory podium. Medalists' flags were raised and the winner's anthem played, immediately after each event at the Coliseum. Timing improved too. These were the first Games to use stopwatches and a photo finish camera. The watches had a split-seconds function that recorded both total time and lap times.

  The closing ceremony on Sunday, the 14th of August 1932, followed an afternoon of equestrian jumping. A crowd just under 100,000 stayed for it. The parade of nations began at sunset. IOC president Billet-Latour called on the "youth of the world to assemble in Berlin" in four years. The Dutch Olympic committee president, Major George van Rossem, handed the Olympic flag onward through the IOC president to Los Angeles Mayor Porter. The orchestra played the farewell song "Aloha ʻOe" and then taps, and the flame went out. Porter was to keep the flag safe until Berlin.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  Tenth Street, a major thoroughfare, was renamed Olympic Boulevard in honor of the Games. Palm trees are not native to Los Angeles, yet more than 25,000 were planted along city boulevards in 1931. Palms are now synonymous with the city.

  When the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn before the 1958 season, the Coliseum became their first Los Angeles home. In 1959 it hosted the second All-Star Game of that year and games 3, 4 and 5 of the World Series. The Dodgers moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962. The Los Angeles Rams played there from 1946 to 1979, and it hosted what became known as Super Bowl I in 1967. The Chargers used it in 1960 before moving to San Diego. The Rams returned from 2016 to 2019 while SoFi Stadium was built. USC Trojans football still plays there.

  The Rose Bowl gave its velodrome track to the Tournament of Roses Association. Between 1932 and 1984, the bowl was expanded three times, from 83,000 seats in 1931 to 104,594 in 1972. It hosted Super Bowl XI in 1977, when the Oakland Raiders beat the Minnesota Vikings 32-14. The Los Angeles Galaxy played there from 1996 to 2003.

  Both stadiums served again in 1984. In 2028 they will become the first stadiums ever to host three different Olympiads. Los Angeles Harbor, Long Beach Marine Stadium and the Riviera Country Club will host events again, too. Riviera had hosted the 1948 U.S. Open and the PGA Championship in 1983 and 1995. In 2028 Los Angeles becomes the third city to host the Summer Games three times, after London and Paris.

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