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Olympic Legacies and the United States
Olympic Legacies and the United States
The Olympic Movement only recently enshrined the concept of legacy in its official charter1. The very recent insertion of explicit references to legacies by the International Olympic Committee(IOC) into Olympic Charters should not, however, mask the long-term interest of the Olympic Movement in the concept. From its modern resurrection in the 1890s the Olympic Movement has been deeply interested in heritage2. Baron Pierre de Coubertin and his founding compatriots were always interested in more than just creating an international sporting event. They wanted to invent an institution that would bequeath to the world legacies of human excellence in sporting performance, ethical comportment in human interactions, and international compassion in global relations3. Questions of whether or not they achieved any of these lofty goals aside, they from the beginning put an abiding interest in legacy at the heart of their enterprise.
Since the 1890s the Olympic Movement has created multiple legacies. The Olympics represents the largest sporting spectacle in the modern world, drawing more participants in more sports from more nations than any other event. The Olympics generates through television broadcasts the most widely shared common experience among the world’s peoples, an audience equaled only by the World Cup of association football-a competing spectacle that also represents one of the Olympic Movement’s major legacies. Beyond the realm of sport, the Olympic Movement has created the largest association of nations in the world, with more member-states than even the United Nations. The Olympics have succeeded the earlier world’s fair movement as the most significant international gathering of nations in the modern era. In international relations the Olympics have built a complex and often paradoxical legacy, promoting international cooperation at certain times on certain issues while fueling nationalism and exacerbating international conflicts at other moments4.
The United States has played a major role in the construction of Olympic legacies, some positive and some more controversial. The Olympic Movement has also left legacies for the United States, including a massive stadium in Los Angeles that is now almost a century old-an ancient edifice, by American standards-that has hosted two Olympics and impatiently seeks a third5 . To organise this exploration of the United States in Olympic legacies I will begin with the contributions of the USA to the broader set of Olympic legacies and then consider the legacies that the Olympic Movement has bestowed on the United States.
The United States has arguably exerted more influence over the modern Olympics than any other nation. Certainly Greece has its own claims to make in this arena as does France, where the founding father of the renovation emerged6. Some of the historical data that support American claims to influence include the fact the USA has hosted more Olympics than any other nation, with a grand total of eight. France ranks second with five, and then Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada with three each7. Another testimony to American influence comes from a source the IOC does not endorse but that the world press corps ceaselessly trumpets, medal counts. Since 1896 the USA has won 2653 medals. The now extinct Soviet Union stands in second on that list with 1204 (and will pre- sumably not add to that tally). Great Britain ranks a distant third with 802 medals8.
The history of medal counts underscores the paradox that the Olympics have long been stages from promoting nationalism as well as forums for international reconciliation. Since 1896 Americans have regularly interpreted Olympic victories as signs of national exceptionalism, insisting that when their countrymen won Olympic medals it signaled not that the USA simply had superior athletes but that it had a superior society that turned average citizens into world-beaters9 . While the USA is hardly alone in using the Olympics to tout national prowess, Americans have been doing it more consistently and more vociferously and over a longer time span than most other nations10. One of the long-standing traditions of US nationalism at the Olympics has been the refusal of American teams at opening parades to dip the national flag to dignitaries representing host nations as required by IOC protocol. Though initially most of the world conformed to IOC mandates and dipped, by the 1992 Olympic Winter Games almost every nation had Americanized their customs and refused to dip their flags. Only four of the sixty-four teams in Albertville dipped their national banners to President François Mitterand of France in a startling display of Americanization11.
The USA has not only left of legacy of using Olympic stages to cultivate national identity but has sought to Americanize the Olympic programme itself. US Olympic officials have long dreamed that the grand trinity of American national pastimes-American football, baseball, and basketball-would find a home at the Olympics. As early as 1896 the American press, claiming that football evoked the heritage of “a Homeric battle”, should become an Olympic sport.12 In 1932 at Los Angeles US organisers made American football a demonstration sport at the Los Angeles Games offering a display that thrilled locals but mystified foreign observers13. The ongoing global mystification about the parochially American version of football guarantees that it will probably never darken an Olympic stadium again. Still, the current chief of the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is the National Football League, Roger Goodell, continues to insist that the game should “absolutely” be an Olympic sport14.
Baseball had a little more success on the Olympic stage. The US managed to make it a demonstration sport at, of all places, Berlin in 1936. Had the Second World War not scuttled Tokyo’s 1940 Olympics, baseball would have served as a centerpiece of the Japanese spectacle15. Baseball returned to the Olympics as a demonstration sport at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and became a medal sport at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 before the IOC decided in 2005 to banish it from the Games. US critics of that decision insisted that a desire to limit American influence over the Olympics motivated the exile of baseball16. Basketball represents the only American national pastime to make a sustained impact on the Olympic Movement. It became a medal sport in 1936 and has been, at least from American vantages, a key component ever since. For decades the USA thoroughly dominated Olympic basketball, but since the 1970s it has become a more competitive and a more global event as well as an opportunity for the US-based National Basketball Association to garner new international markets17.
The limited success of US operatives in placing the three major American national games on the Olympic docket might lead to a conclusion that the Americans have not left a substantial legacy in shaping the sports the Olympics promote. Such a perspective would be shortsighted. In fact, from the inaugural modern Games at Athens in 1896 the American media has pushed track and field, or what the rest of the world in following the conventions of British English calls athletics, as the main Olympic showcase18. Certainly these events with their evocative connections to Greek antiquity had strong support among the early IOC and in many other nations19, but the American focus on them as the true Olympic tests of national prowess influenced international sentiment as well.
During the 1920s and 1930s a legion of American swimmers and divers transformed a sport that did not enjoy the imprimatur ancient Olympia into a glittering global extravaganza by transforming what US commentators had considered a “colorless” recreation into an aquacade that could make Olympians into global celebrities20. One after another, swimmers and divers went from Olympic pools to Hollywood stardom, first Johnny Weissmuller and then Buster Crabbe, Eleanor Holm, and Esther Williams, among others. The original Olympic aquatic celebrities created a tradition in which athletes from across the world become global brands, not just Americans such as Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps but stars from around the world including Dawn Fraser, Kristin Otto, Ian Thorpe, Alexander Popov, and Krisztina Egerszegi21.
Hollywood and the American media conspired to glamorise a winter sport as well as a summer game. Women’s figure skating has been a route to celebrity since Norway’s Sonja Heine went from dominating the ice rinks at winter games in the 1920s and 1930s to movie stardom in Los Angeles. The US entertainment industry has historically been even more inclusive with foreign skaters than foreign swimmers. Not only Americans such as Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill but skaters from other nations such as Ekaterina Gordeeva, Oksana Baiul, Barbara Ann Scott, Katarina Witt, and Kim Yu-Na have become popular culture icons with American as well as global cachet.
The Olympic link to the global celebrity and entertainment industries represents another legacy that the USA has left the movement. Hollywood played a major role in the staging of both the 1932 and 1984 Olympics that took place in the film industry’s hometown. Walt Disney, a key figure in the history of American show business, created the stages for California’s 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics. American media conglomerates have historically engaged in a “Disneyfication” of the Olympics22. Television revenues, especially those collected from the US television market, have made the IOC over the past half-century a tremendously wealthy and powerful global entity. Many of the corporate mega-sponsors who underwrite the Games are headquartered in the USA, or have major US divisions. These factors give the USA, the “golden goose” of world markets, tremendous influence in shaping Olympic productions on issues ranging from the times when events are scheduled to the inclusion of new, telegenic sports on the programme23.
The continuing Disneyfication, or Californization as it is often dubbed, of global popular culture reveals another major legacy of the USA in the Olympics. Beginning at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics a series of new action or lifestyle sports, as they are commonly called24, have been added to the Olympics. Los Angeles witnessed the debut of synchronised swimming, a sport inspired in part by the Hollywood aqua-musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Windsurfing also joined the Olympic line-up in 1984. More of these Olympic lifestyle additions followed, freestyle skiing, mountain biking, beach volleyball, snowboarding, triathlon, and BMX cycling. While these lifestyle sports are frequently seen as transnational inventions they were all incubated in California and signifying the on-going Californization of the Olympics25.
Californization represents a part of broader trend in the commodification of the Olympics to which the USA has made numerous contributions. Olympic sponsorship first blossomed at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics when a local bakery became the “official” bread-maker of the Games26. American corporations such as Coca-Cola have long used the Olympics as an advertising platform for their products27. Beginning at Los Angeles in 1932, American Olympic boosters commodified the Games themselves, staging the Olympics as branding moments to advertise their cities and lifestyles. In the process, the Americans invented the modern bidding process whereby municipalities and nations lobby the IOC to win hosting rights. When during the 1960s and 1970s the Olympic Movement faced the prospect that the Games had become economic “white elephants” that threatened to bankrupt hosts, a development that left only Teheran and Los Angeles as suitors for the 1984 Olympics, the California winners of the Olympic sweepstakes reconfigured the financial model for staging the games. Los Angeles turned a massive profit and re-energised the Olympics as an attractive commodity sought by the world’s leading metropolises28. When, in 1996, the Olympic Movement celebrated its centennial, American boosters pushed the legacy of commerce over the legacy of antiquity and garnered the 1996 Games for the headquarters of Coca Cola29.
As with the legacy of nationalism, the United States cannot claim sole ownership of the legacy of commercialism in the Olympic Movement, but it can justifiably claim a leading role in these trends. The impact of the USA on the Olympics for more than a century has been profound and far-reaching, shaping the sports that comprise the programme, the economic imperatives that drive it, the commercial endeavors that surround it, and the ways in which the Olympics are understood and interpreted.
If the United States has shaped the Olympic Movement in important ways, the Olympics left some lasting legacies in the USA. The iconic palm trees that line Los Angeles streets were first planted for the 1932 Olympics and then rehabilitated for the 1984 Olympics. The Los Angeles Coliseum remains from those two Games and now seeks a third Olympic performance. Los Angeles, the second largest city in the USA, has not for more than a decade had a franchise in the nation’s most popular spectacle, the NFL. Instead, Los Angeles builds its sporting identity largely around the Olympics. Whether or not the IOC recognises it, Los Angeles considers itself the permanent back-up site should any host city fail to meet its obligations and imperil the Olympic cycle30. Certainly the Olympics have left a profound legacy in California.
Californization has proven a two-way street. California has become the centre of American passion for the Olympics, providing by an enormous margin more resources, training facilities, coaches, and athletes per capita than any other state in the United States. California patriots have observed recently that if the state had decided to compete as its own “nation” in the Olympics it would rank in the top two or three in the world in the over-all medal count31. Beach volleyball, invented in suburban Santa Monica in the 1920s and now played in Olympic venues, has made California an Olympic power and symbolises California’s passion for Olympic sports of all sorts. Californians rejoiced that all four competitors in the finals of women’s beach volleyball at London 2012 hailed from the “Golden State”, making the gold medal contest not only the Olympic but the California championship32.
The Olympic Movement’s legacies in the USA extend far beyond California. With the exception of basketball, none of the Olympic sports currently on the programme rank among the top tier of American sports in terms of participation, spectatorship, or other measures of popularity. However, every four years the American public takes an enormous interest in disciplines that routinely only find small niches in US sporting life, from volleyball, cycling, and gymnastics, to speed skating, bob-sledding, and even Nordic skiing. By a multitude of measures the Olympics are far and away the international sporting event that captures American imaginations. The USA has traditionally been more interested in its own parochial championships, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the annual mayhem of “March Madness” that culminates in an intercollegiate basketball crown, even NASCAR’s Sprint Cup title, than in international events. Soccer’s World Cup represents a pleasant diversion for most Americans but hardly inspires the national passion that accompanies the event in many of the world’s nations. International tennis, golf, yachting, athletics, and other championships provide amusing trifles but do not inspire devotion. While the recent development of the World Baseball Classic elevated the profile of what began as a US national pastime in Latin American and Asian nations, US fans have offered only a tepid embrace of the event33. The Olympics are another matter, exciting tremendous enthusiasm for international sport in the United States.
As the single most important international sporting event in American culture, the Olympics have left a critical legacy in providing cultural and political narratives about the role of United States in the world. American Olympic teams have been involved in struggles of racial, ethnic, class, and gender barriers in US society. In the early 20th century Americans celebrated their “melting pot” teams comprised of what European critics labeled immigrant mercenaries. Similar proclamations about American Olympians resound as the 21st century begins34.
Let me conclude with what to some of you may be a surprising failure of Olympic heritage in the United States. The USA has a fantastic scholarly repository of Olympic material, the LA84 Foundation, as a part of the legacy of the Los Angeles Olympics. But the USA does not currently have an Olympic Academy. For about a decade and a half beginning in 1977 the USOC and American academic institutions briefly and contentiously collaborated on an Olympic Academy. The project faltered and disappeared in the early 1990s35. As we proceed with your queries about the United States and Olympic legacies, we can ponder that question and others.
1. The 2003 edition of the Olympic Charter added a provision that commands the IOC “to promote a positive legacy from the Olympic Games to the host cities and host countries”. That provision appears as Article 14 under Rule 2-a set of codes articulating the “Mission and Role of the IOC”. International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter, in force as from 11 February 2011 (Lausanne: IOC, 2010), p. 14. http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Olympic%20Charter/Olympic_Charter_through_time/2010- Olympic_Charter.pdf
In the 2003 edition the “legacy” article is Article 13, under Rule 2. It reads a bit more broadly as well, demanding the IOC “takes measures to promote a positive legacy from the Olympic Games to the host city and the host country, including a reasonable control of the size and cost of the Olympic Games, and encourages the Organising Committees of the Olympic Games (OCOGs), public authorities in the host country and the persons or organisations belonging to the Olympic Movement to act accordingly”. International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter, in force as from 4 July 2003 (Lausanne: IOC, 2003), p. 12. http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Olympic%20Charter/Olympic_Charter_through_time/2003-Olympic_Charter.pdf
This legacy admonition, however, is a fairly recent addition to the official charter, a document first codified and published under that title in 1978 but which appeared under different titles as far back as 1908. Article 14 does not exist, nor does the word “legacy” or French equivalents such as figuré, littéraire, or héritage surface in the fifty-nine earlier versions of IOC charters published from 2001 all the way back to 1908. See, International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter, in force as from 14 June 2001 (Lausanne: IOC, 2001). http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Olympic%20Charter/Olympic_Charter_through_time/2001-Olympic_Charter.pdf. The IOC’s Olympic Studies Centre provides an online library of charters. http://www.olympic.org/olympic-charters?tab=1#1917.
2. J. A. Mangan and Mark Dyreson, eds., Olympic Legacies: Intended and Unintended–Political, Cultural, Economic, Educational (London: Routledge, 2010).
3. John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); David Young, The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); John A. Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1980).
4. It has thrived while the other transnational movements of its generation that aspired to a universalism that transcended national borders, including the world’s fairs, have floundered. Other transnational movements born in the same epoch include the Esperanto movement, the Scouting movement, international worker’s movements, the Red Cross, Wagnerism, and a host of other interest groups born in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. John Hoberman, “Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism”, Journal of Sport History, 22, 1 (Spring 1995): 1-37. Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). A solid introduction to the paradoxical conjunction of nationalism and internationalism in the Olympics can be found in Boria Majumdar and Sandra S. Collins, eds., Olympism: The Global Vision: From Nationalism to Internationalism (London: Routledge, 2008).
5. Mark Dyreson and Matthew Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City: Legacies of 1932 and 1984”, International Journal of the History of Sport 25.14 (December 2008): 1991-2018; Mark Dyreson, “The Endless Olympic Bid: Los Angeles and the Advertisement of the American West”, Journal of the West 47.4 (fall 2008): 26-39.
6. Alexander Kitroeff, Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics (New York: Greekworks, 2004); Konstantinos Georgiadis, Olympic Revival: The Revival of the Olympic Games in Modern Times (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 2003).
7. I would grant Greece three as well, for although the IOC does not recognise the so-called “interim” Olympics in 1906 at Athens, those Games were crucial to early development of the Movement.
Of the eight American Olympics, four have been Summer Games, St. Louis in 1904, Los Angeles in 1932 and 1984, and Atlanta in 1996-an Olympian centennial hosted, much to the chagrin of Greeks not in Greece but in a city in Georgia with a Greek name and a famous soft-drink purveyor that ranks as a leading Olympic corporate sponsor. Interestingly, though the Olympic Winter Games are generally associated more closely with the arctic climates and alpine terrains of Norway, Switzerland, Austria, and even Canada, the USA has hosted more winter Olympic carnival than any other nation – Lake Placid in 1932 and 1980, Squaw Valley in 1960, and Salt Lake City in 2002.
8. An Italian Olympic site lists the USA with 2552 medals through 2012 while the USSR has 1204 – with no more, presumably, to come. Great Britain ranks a distant third with 802 medals, followed by France with 765. Even in the winter Olympics the USA has unexpectedly been a force, standing second with 253 medals to Norway’s 303. http://www.olympic.it/english/medal/id_overall.htm (accessed 10 March 2013). Wikipedia agrees on the winter count but overall gives the USA 2652 while keeping the USSR’s total at 1204. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table; http://www.olympic. it/english/medal/id_overall.htm (accessed 10 March 2013).
Part of American prowess is that since 1896 they have sent massive teams to every Games save one-the 1980 Moscow Olympics. And even as they boycotted they exerted a powerful influence on the Olympic Movement in leading a coalition of nations to eschew the Moscow Games which in turn led to a Sovietled boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. This boycott era marked one of the low points in the history of the Olympic Movement as forum for international reconciliation and tolerance-and the USA played a leading role in these failures. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
9. Mark Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); idem, Crafting Patriotism for Global Domination: America at the Olympics (London: Routledge, 2009).
10. Many nations have used the Olympics to project and refine national identity. The Soviet Union and East Germany during the Cold War built massive Olympic programmes to promote their nations. More recently, China has engaged in a similar campaign of Olympic nationalism. African, Asian, European and Latin American nations have used the Olympics to promote national agendas. Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix, Sport under Communism: Behind the East German “Miracle” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Susan Brownell, Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (Lanham, Md.: Rowan & Littlefield, 2008); Guoqui Xu, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895- 2008 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008); John Hargreaves, Freedom for Catalonia? Catalan Nationalism, Spanish Identity, and the Barcelona Olympic Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Arne Martin Klausen, Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event: The Case of the XVII Winter Olympic Games in Norway Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Richard Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Victor D. Cha, Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); John Bale and Joe Sang, Kenyan Running: Movement Culture, Geography, and Global Change (London: Frank Cass, 1996); Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young, eds., National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Few nations, though, have used the Olympics for the projection of nationalism as consistently over time-at every Olympics contested since 1896-or as fervently as the USA with the possible exceptions of Greece and Australia. Kitroeff, Wrestling with the Ancients; Konstantinos Georgiadis, Olympic Revival: The Re- vival of the Olympic Games in Modern Times (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 2003); Daryl Adair and Wray Vamplew, Sport in Australian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard Cashman, Sport in the National Imagination: Australian Sport in the Federation Decades (Sydney: Walla Walla Press/Centre for Olympic Studies, the University of New South Wales, 2002).
11. France’s team did not even bother to salute Mitterand. Only Bermuda, Canada, Croatia, and Monaco followed IOC protocol. American mythology claims an unbroken string of refusals dating back to the inaugural parade of nations at London in 1908. When the Soviet Union began to send teams to the Olympics in the 1950s their teams also refused to dip the hammer and sickle, claiming their own tradition of national exceptionalism. Interestingly, the unbroken string of refusals to dip proclaimed by American mythology actually dates not to 1908 but to the American refusal to dip the flag to Adolph Hitler at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin in 1936-but that is another and longer story. Mark Dyreson, “‘This Flag Dips for No Earthly King’: The Mysterious Origins of an American Myth”, International Journal of the History of Sport 25.2 (February 2008): 142-162; idem, “‘To Dip or Not to Dip’: The American Flag at the Olympic Games since 1936”, International Journal of the History of Sport 25.2 (February 2008): 163-184.
12. A New York Times commentator, saluting American prowess in track and field at the inaugural games, suggested a “modernized” program for the future that would include “a football match which, if it had no prototype in Olympia, vividly recalls a Homeric battle”. “The Olympian Games”, New York Times, 28 April 1896, p. 4.
13. The contest pitted two squads of college all-stars, one from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and the other from the University of Southern California, the University of California, and Stanford, in a soldout game in the Coliseum. Frank J. Taylor, “All Roads Lead to the Olympiad”, Sunset Magazine, July 1932, pp. 6-7; “Demonstrations–American Football and Lacrosse”, in X Olympiad Committee, The Games of the X Olympiad, Los Angeles: Woffler, 1933, pp. 739-747.
14. Will Brinson, “Roger Goodell: American Football should ‘Absolutely be an Olympic Sport’”, http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/blog/eye-on-football/19719275/roger-goodell-american-football-should-absolutely-be-an-olympic-sport, (consulted 10 March 2013); Albert Breer, “Football in the Olympics is a Dream that could become a Reality”, http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82acf42b/article/football-in-olympics-is-a-dream-that-could-become-a-reality (consulted 10 March 2013).
15. “Mapping an Empire of Baseball: American Visions of National Pastimes and Global Influence, 1919-1941”, in Baseball in America and America in Baseball, Donald Kyle and Robert R. Fairbanks, eds. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), pp. 143-188.
16. Bob Hohler, “Olympic World Turns with Ever-Less American Influence”, Boston Globe, 20 February 2006.
17. In retrospect, the debut of original US “dream team” of NBA icons at Barcelona in 1992 was far more important to the development of American legacies in Olympic sport and global culture than the debut of baseball as a medal sport. For a history from an American angle of Olympic basketball see Carson Cunningham, American Hoops: US Men’s Olympic Basketball from Berlin to Beijing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). For an insightful analysis of basketball as an Americanizing agent in the processes of contemporary globalization see Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
18. Dyreson, Making the American Team.
19. Kitroeff, Wrestling with the Ancients.
20. The sportswriter Paul Gallico gave Weissmuller the lion’s share of the credit for the transformation of swimming from “colorless” to glamorous. The Golden People (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 223-224.
21. Mark Dyreson, “Crafting Patriotism–America at the Olympic Games”, International Journal of the History of Sport 25 (February 2008): 135-141; idem, “Johnny Weissmuller and the Old Global Capitalism: The Origins of the Federal Blueprint for Selling American Culture to the World”, International Journal of the History of Sport 25.2 (February 2008): 268-283.
22. For perspectives on the process see Alan E. Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage Publications. 2004); Jean Baudrillard, “Disneyworld Company”, Liberation, 4 March1996, http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/disneyworld.html (accessed 1 April 2013).
23. Robert K. Barney, Stephen R. Wenn, and Scott G. Martyn, The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002).
24. Belinda Wheaton, ed., Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity, and Difference (London: Routledge, 2004); idem, Lifestyle Sport: The Cultural Politics of Alternative Sports (London: Routledge, 2012); Robert E. Rinehart, Players All: Performances in Contemporary Sport (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Robert E Rinehart and Synthia Sydnor, To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
25. Those aqua-musicals starred Esther Williams, a swimming star who had the Second World War not interrupted the 1940 and 1944 Olympics would have been an odds-on favorite for multiple medals. Free-style skiing debuted as a demonstration sport in 1988 and a medal sport in 1992. The other lifestyle sports skipped the demonstration stage and went straight to medal status, including mountain biking and beach volleyball in 1996, snowboarding in 1998, triathlon in 2000, and BMX cycling in 2008. Mark Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption at the Olympic Games: Globalization, Americanization, and Californization”, forthcoming in the Journal of Global History, July 2013.
26. Robert K. Barney, Robert K., Stephen R. Wenn, and Scott G. Martyn, The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002).
27. Barbara Keys, “Spreading Peace, Democracy, and Coca-Cola®”, Diplomatic History, 28.2 (2004): 165-196.
28. Wayne Wilson, “Los Angeles, 1984”, in The Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement, rev. 2nd ed., John Findling and Karen Pelle, eds. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 207-215; Peter Ueberroth, with Richard Levin and Amy Quinn, Made in America: His Own Story (New York: William Morrow, 1985); Kenneth Reich, Making It Happen: Peter Ueberroth and the 1984 Olympics (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Capra, 1986).
29. Richard C. Yarbrough, And They Call Them Games: An Inside View of the 1996 Olympics (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000). Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Alfred Erich Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1999).
30. Cite references on LA as back up. Ironically, Los Angeles won its bid for the 1932 Olympics due to the gratitude of Baron de Coubertin and the IOC for volunteering to take over the 1924 Olympics after a series of economic calamities and natural disasters imperiled the efforts of Paris to host the Games. Paris recovered and the Games went on but a grateful IOC made certain Los Angeles got the 1932 Olympics. Dyreson and Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City Dyreson, “The Endless Olympic Bid”.
31. Richard Hoffer, “The Golden State”, Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1992, pp. 34-40; Michael Silver, “Dream State”, Sports Illustrated, 5 July 2004, pp. 36-42; Michael Farber, “Fun in the Sun”, Sports Illustrated, 5 August 1996, pp. 88-95.
32. Mark Purdy, “Triple Crown-Beach Queens”, San Jose (California) Mercury News, 9 August 2012.
33. Michael Farber, “The Global Pastime”, Sports Illustrated, 11 March 2013, p. 18.
34. In the 1920s and 1930s Americans celebrated the rise of a “new woman” who enjoyed increased political rights and social status through the victories of a generation of female Olympic stars. The 1930s also gave the US an optimistic narrative of improving race relations, most spectacularly in the performance of Jesse Owens and his “black auxiliaries” in front of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi supporters at Berlin. At Mexico City in 1968 African American athletes with black-gloved fists offered a powerful counter-narrative about improving race relations that forced many to rethink comfortable assumptions about progress toward a more egalitarian society. In the Cold War that developed after the Second World War Olympic narratives captured hopes and fears about rivalries with the Soviet bloc, from Harold Connolly and Olga Fitkova’s unlike romance that eroded ideological barriers to Lake Placid’s “Miracle on Ice” in 1980 that reassured an anxious nation about its own vigor. See, Dyreson, Making the American Team, idem, Crafting Patriotism; idem, “Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire? American Women Olympians and the Politics of Consumption”, Journal of Contemporary History 38.3 (July 2003): 435-460; William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1986); John Gleaves and Mark Dyreson, “The ‘Black Auxiliaries’ in American Memories: Sport, Race, and Politics in the Construction of Modern Legacies”, International Journal of the History of Sport, 27.16-18 (No- vember/December 2010): 2893-2924; Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and their Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Olga Connolly, The Rings of Destiny (New York: D. McKay, 1968); Cesar Torres and Mark Dyreson, “The Cold War Games”, in Research in the Sociology of Sport: Olympic Journeys, Volume III, Kevin Young and Kevin Wamsley, eds. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), pp. 59-82.
35. My institution, Penn State University, played a leading role in this short-lived project, particularly since John A. Lucas, one of the first historians of the Olympic Movement, was a long-time faculty member here. The project left behind a collection of academic proceedings available, among other places, from Penn State’s archives. Olympic USA: A Team Effort: United States Olympic Academy XV, June 27-29, 1991, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado; Olympic Education: Breaking Ground for the 21st Century, United States Olympic Academy XIII June 21-24, 1989, Olympia, Washington; Proceedings: USOA XII, June 15-18, 1988, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania; The Olympics: Serving All People and All Nations: Proceedings of the United States Olympic Academy XI, June 17-20, 1987, Indianapolis, Indiana; USOA X: Olympism, the Olympic Games and the Worldwide Olympic Movement, June 10-14, 1986, U.S. Olympic Complex, Colorado Springs, Colorado; Educating for a Better World-Now!: Proceedings, USOA VIII, 1984 Eugene, Oregon and Los Angeles, California; Olympism, A Movement of the People: United States Olympic Academy VII, May 30-June 3, 1983, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas; Purposes, Principles, and Contradictions of the Olympic Movement: Proceedings of the United States Olympic Academy VI, 1982, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Expanding Olympic Horizons: The Published Proceedings of the United States Olympic Academy V, June 8-12, 1981 Colorado Springs, Colorado; The Olympic Ideal, 776 B.C. to the 21st Century: Proceedings of the National Olympic Academy IV, May 29-June 1, 1980 Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; The Spirit of Sport: National Olympic Academy III, June 1979, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; Sport and Olympism, A Way of Life: Abstracts of Papers Presented, National Olympic Academy II, June 1978, Illinois State University; Perspectives of the Olympic Games: Proceedings of the First United States Olympic Academy, University of Illinois-Chicago Circle, 1977.
DYRESON Mark, "Olympic Legacies and the United States", in: K. Georgiadis(ed.), INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY, 53th International Session for Young Participants (Ancient Olympia, 11-25/6/2013), International Olympic Academy, Athens, 2014, pp.99-111.
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