Sport: The Miracle of '32

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If the organizers of the 1984 Olympics ever feel discouraged, worried about costs and the possibilities for confusion, let them take heart. Whatever befalls them between now and next July, whether act of man or nature, could scarcely be as bad as the troubles that bedeviled the promoters of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Yet that small band not only survived, it triumphed and made the Games of the X Olympiad profitable and one of history's best and most fondly remembered.

Everything was against them in that grim time. The entire world was staggering from the effects of the Depression, and many countries felt they could not even afford to send athletes to a place as distant as California. "Just where is your state?" a Portuguese bureaucrat politely asked William May Garland, president of the group of businessmen who ran the California Olympics. When Garland marked the spot on the map, the bureaucrat sadly replied, "That is a long, expensive way from here." Even the officials of the international Olympic committee were discouraging. "For your 1932 ambitions, it now does not look so certain," they told Garland two years before the flags were to be set fluttering at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Coupled with the sour economic situation was a darkening political climate. Adolf Hitler, who was not yet in power but spreading his poison in Germany nonetheless, succeeded in blocking funds to send German competitors abroad: good Germans, he said, should not be mixing with foreigners.

At home the news was equally depressing. As Sportswriter Al J. Stump noted in American Heritage, unemployed protesters marched through Sacramento, the capital of California, with signs saying GROCERIES NOT GAMES! and OLYMPICS ARE OUTRAGEOUS! In Southern California, some social reformers were also indignant. "They're big sports, all right," said one bitter member of a group called the Technocrats. "Bringing Germans and Japs to town! Down with their damned circus!" The heads of state or royalty of the host countries had opened the ceremonies at the nine previous modern Olympics, but President Herbert Hoover, confronted with the worst domestic crisis since the Civil War, decided to stay in Washington. "It's a crazy thing," he reportedly told his intimates. "And it takes some gall to expect me to be part of it." He sent instead his Vice President, Charles Curtis.