Depression-Era Los Angeles Invented the Modern Olympics
On July 30, 1932, Los Angeles opened the Xth Olympiad in the depths of the Great Depression — and quietly reinvented how the Olympic Games are staged forever.
Two days after federal troops burned the Bonus Army's shantytown in Washington, Los Angeles threw the biggest party of the Great Depression.
On July 30, 1932, the Games of the Xth Olympiad opened at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — a stadium enlarged just two years earlier to hold more than 100,000 spectators, now packed to the rafters. President Herbert Hoover stayed in Washington, where the country was coming apart; Vice President Charles Curtis did the honors in his place. Hollywood turned out in force — Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Joan Crawford in the stands — and radio announcer Bill Henry was master of ceremonies. Thirty-seven nations marched into the Coliseum, down from forty-six at Amsterdam four years earlier: the Depression and the sheer distance to California had kept many away.
What those who came witnessed was nothing less than the invention of the modern Olympics. Los Angeles introduced the first true Olympic Village — a single community housing all the male athletes together (the women, in a sign of the times, were put up in a hotel). It introduced the three-tiered victory podium, with the athletes' national flags raised and the winner's anthem played at ceremonies held right at the venue, moments after each event ended. It set the compact sixteen-day schedule every Summer Games has followed since. It brought automatic timing and the photo-finish camera to the track.
The athletes rose to the stage. Eighteen-year-old Mildred "Babe" Didrikson won gold in the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles and silver in the high jump, setting world records along the way — women were limited to three events, or she might have won more. American swimmer Helene Madison took three gold medals in the pool. And Japan's Kusuo Kitamura, just fourteen years old, won the 1,500-meter freestyle, becoming the youngest male individual champion in Olympic history.
When the sixteen days were over, the numbers astonished everyone: more than a million spectators had passed through the turnstiles, and the Games had turned a profit of over a million dollars — in the bleakest year of the Depression.
That is why Los Angeles 1932 matters more than its modest fame suggests. Nearly every ritual we now take for granted at the Olympics — the village, the podium, the anthem, the flag rising, the fortnight format — was invented there, in a half-empty world, by a city determined to put on a show. The Games have been running on Los Angeles's template ever since: when the Olympics returned to LA in 1984, and when they return again in 2028, they will be coming home to the place that made them modern.
The panoramic image shows the packed Memorial Coliseum on opening day, July 30, 1932, as athletes from all nations mass on the field. Public domain, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
