coup that foiled the Olimpíada Popular. Some athletes fought fascists in the streets. Others fled to safer havens.57
Although the People’s Olympiad was canceled, the third International Workers’ Olympiad was succesfully staged the following year at Antwerp. Approximately 27,000 worker-athletes participated from seventeen countries. Some 50,000 people attended events in the stadium on the final day of the Games, and 200,000 made the final march through the city. At these Games, RSI athletes were allowed to participate as a united front against the ascendance of fascism in Europe. This labor solidarity—the Popular Front—was notable, and unique in the history of the Workers’ Olympiad. Although the sport festival did not live up to Barcelona’s ambitiously planned grandeur, it remained a significant accomplishment given the challenging period in which it was staged.58 The next International Workers’ Olympiad was scheduled for 1943 in Helsinki, but World War II prevented it from becoming reality.
Despite their success, the Workers’ Olympiads were largely marginalized by the mainstream media of the time, limiting their reach to the wider public. The fracture between socialists and communists also hampered their effectiveness. Within the Games, there was also a certain amount of tension between the commitment to break athletic records and the commitment to non-competitive mass participation; many worker-athletes who strove for record-breaking achievement were labeled “bourgeois” by their colleagues.59 James Riordan argues that overt politics may have undercut the political value of the Workers’ Games: “Many worker sport leaders failed to understand that a sport organization might be more politically effective by being less explicitly political.”60
Like the Women’s Olympiads, the alternative Workers’ Olympiads definitely had an impact on the IOC’s power brokers. The Avery Brundage archive contains brochures about the 1936 Barcelona People’s Olympiad as well as an invitation to the Amateur Athletic Union to come take part in those Games.61 Such terminology raised the IOC’s concerns that the organizers of the alternative Games were infringing on the Olympic brand. The IOC Executive Committee minutes from 1925 note: “The miss-use [sic] of the word ‘olympic’ was growing rapidly and among organization[s] using it were the ‘Olympic Games for Women’, ‘The Worker’s Olympic Games’, ‘Student’s Olympic Games’. Members from these organizations were present and told that the word ‘olympic’ was the property of the IOC and could not be used.”62 More recently, however, the Olimpíada Popular has been reincorporated into official Olympic history; the Olympic Museum in Barcelona features posters from the alternative competition and a brief description of the organizers’ goals.
The Olympics Pivot
Meanwhile, the “bourgeois Olympics” pressed on. The 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles brought a number of features that embedded themselves in Olympic tradition. The Los Angeles Games inspired the Baron to panegyric; he raved that crowds attending the opening ceremonies “had never before seen such a spectacle. They seem to have been greatly impressed by it, and the organizers, for their part, seem to have achieved the maximum of the desirable Olympic eurythmia on this solemn occasion.” The Games were “a glorious apotheosis on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”63
Ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics, Avery Brundage, then head of the American Olympic Committee, wrote to President Herbert Hoover asking him to offer remarks during the Games’ opening broadcast. “Knowing your great interest in healthful recreation and sport,” he wrote, “we are certain that you will not refuse unless there is conflict with your other engagements.” The window Brundage offered President Hoover was relatively slim: “Any time at your convenience between five and eight o’clock in the afternoon of October first, will be satisfactory.”64 Besides Brundage’s self-assurance, the specificity of the request revealed the burgeoning prestige and confidence enjoyed by the Olympic movement at that point, thirty-six years after the modern revival of the Games. Although President Hoover declined Brundage’s request, he sent Vice President Charles Curtis in his stead. In front of 105,000 spectators—at that time the biggest crowd to attend an opening ceremony in the history of the Games—Curtis declared the Olympics officially open. It took Los Angeles only three days to surpass the total number of five-ring fans in Amsterdam. The Games were attended by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Will Rogers.65
According to the Olympics scholar Alan Tomlinson, the 1932 Games signaled “a markedly political intensification of the event.”66 They were being put on during the Great Depression, and organizers took care not to stage the Games in a lavish manner while the world writhed in economic pain. Organizers made prudent use of existing buildings and structures. They downplayed the incipient commercialism of the Olympics while at the same time embracing it. The Official Report claimed that “not a single note of commercialism was allowed to permeate the consummation” of Olympism, but organizers quietly lined up sponsorship and service-provision deals.67 Such commercial pacts eventually became an integral part of the political-economic architecture of the Games.
Yet commercial contributions were meager compared to the enormous public funding that underwrote the Games. In 1927 the California legislature passed the California Tenth Olympiad Bond Act, which supplied $1 million to the Olympic cause, and the measure was ratified in a public referendum by a one-million-vote majority. But in 1929 the US was rocked by the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. Activists took to the streets to protest spending money on the Olympic spectacle while everyday Californians were suffering. Demonstrators in Sacramento raised protest placards reading “Groceries Not Games! Olympics Are Outrageous!” Feeling the political heat, California governor James Rolph remarked, “These Games are an impossible venture. What do they want, riots?” Still, Rolph did not push to cancel the Games—he had a political career to consider, and local business heavyweights were in the Olympic corner. Jittery citizens were assured that hosting the Games would bring jobs and tourism to the city—a trope that would become standard-issue Olympic rhetoric.
In retrospect there’s little evidence that the Games buoyed the local economy. But thanks to thrift, sponsorship, high attendance, and a spike in interest from Hollywood, the Olympics earned a profit of $150,000, most of which was plunged into servicing the debt on the $1 million bond and reimbursing the city and county for the facilities they anted up for the Games.68 The city paid a quieter price when the bond market wavered on public works projects, stoking a crisis that culminated in a recall election for the mayor. The New York Times proclaimed that “the public is thoroughly ‘fed up’ on these experiments in political economy.”69 Such “experiments”—where the costs of the Olympics are socialized, with the public taking on the bulk of the risk—ultimately became the go-to move for funding the Games.
In the words of the Official Report, the Olympics survived “the depths of a dark abyss of world depression.”70 For the first time, organizers built a formal Olympic Village where visiting athletes stayed during the competition, although female athletes were segregated at the nearby Chapman Park Hotel.71 The medal ceremonies and three-tiered platform we see today made their first appearance. Organizers also condensed the Games’ duration, limiting competition days to sixteen, a tradition that has essentially continued through to the present. The shortened calendar helped focus media and public attention. Organizers enabled the media in other ways. They set up a “Press Department” in December 1929, long before the Games began, to do the work of a modern sports information office. When the Olympics arrived two and a half years later, more than 900 journalists from around the world were on hand to cover them, and the Press Office was well seasoned in its job of helping them.
Coubertin still criticized the news media’s coverage, decrying “a press campaign with bitterness of tone and an unfairness of intent equaled only by the self-interested calculation that inspired it.”72 But social science content analysis demonstrates that media coverage actually presented a neutral or positive portrayal of the Games.73 The “lizards” Coubertin claimed
