The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics
Before there will be an LA28 there was LA84... and LA32
Let’s start the countdown to LA28! The Games of the XXXIV Olympiad will open in Los Angeles’s Memorial Coliseum on July 14, 2028—and I’m fired up. Not just because I’ve written a forthcoming book about the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics (though that plays a part if I’m being honest). I’m excited because the Games will be hosted right here in California and because LA84 inspired me to become a lifelong runner, even if my own Olympic dreams ended with the Junior variety.
In the lead up to LA28 I’ll be sharing stories about LA32, the Tenth Olympiad. Based on years of research in Los Angeles and around the country, I’ll write about the pioneering athletes and their record-setting performances; the city and the venues that played host to the Games; and the logistics of planning an event in the Roaring Twenties that was hosted in the depths of the Great Depression. Much (too much?) has been written and said about the Nazi propaganda-filled 1936 Berlin Olympics but the lesser-known 1932 Games were the first truly modern spectacle. They were, quite simply, the Golden Games.
In the Greenwich Mean Time
Allow me to begin this first post with a bit of a digression. I am not what anyone would mistake for being a social media guy—unless you count my 50 Strava followers and my rather dated LinkedIn profile—but I started poking around TikTok, Instagram and YouTube recently to see what pop content already exists about the 1932 Olympics. I didn’t find much and what I did see was often superficial or inaccurate. As I considered various topics for this first post, I was drawn to a recent video by a popular LA vlogger and podcaster that has attracted tens of thousands of views across multiple platforms. From the jump he claims, inaccurately, that LA will become the first third time Olympic host “in the western hemisphere.” Cue the scores of puzzled comments, especially if read with an English accent.
London is very much in the western hemisphere and very much hosted the Olympics in 1908, 1948 and 2012 to become the first three-time Olympic host city. I lived in London for five years and fondly remember carrying my eldest daughter around the Royal Observatory in Greenwich where the Prime Meridian marks the zero-degree line of longitude separating east from west. Yes, an alternative school of thought makes the Americas alone synonymous with the Western Hemisphere but tell that to anyone (hint: that’s everyone) marking time from GMT.
Paris is also a three-time Olympic host (1900, 1924 and 2024) and although no one but Robert Langdon’s character in The Da Vinci Code would argue which side of the Prime Meridian the City of Light sits on (it’s the east), Parisians stubbornly stuck with their own “Rose Line” until Uncle Sam called an international conference in 1884 to settle the matter in Greenwich’s favor. Having said that, France, and the whole of Europe is very much of the Western World. Who remembers learning about Rome and Athens as the cradles of Eastern Civilization? No one.
So What History Will LA28 Make?
My point isn’t to quibble about which hemisphere these two other great world cities are in but to highlight how there’s no need to qualify LA’s historic three-time hosting in this confused manner. LA, as several Olympic historians have put it, is The Olympic City. It’s already the only two-time Summer Olympic host in the Americas and will be the first city on the Pacific to host for a third time. But there are two more important points that will make LA28 special:
First, while the 1932 Games were truly modern in their athletics and pageantry, the same cannot be said of the first time Paris and London hosted. The 1900 Games, just the second after Athens and the first held in the birthplace of the Modern Olympics founder and Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, were held in conjunction with the World’s Fair. They dragged on for nearly six months and were more festival than sporting competition. Athletes represented their clubs and universities not their countries and many didn’t even know they were competing in the Olympics (tug of war anyone?).
The same can largely be said for the 1908 London Olympics when Great Britain accounted for more than a quarter of all participants and only 22 nations attended including just five from outside Europe. Even the London 1948 Olympics, dubbed the “Austerity Games” with war time rationing still in place, lacked much of a punch. Yes, Paris and London are three-time hosts, but only Los Angeles will claim to hosting three modern athletic spectacles that today’s audience would immediately recognize as Olympic. The 1932 Games included the first Black, Asian, and female athletic stars, the first photo finish, and the first doping accusations. From the first fully functional Olympic Village and now-standard 16-day program to the iconic medal ceremony complete with podiums, national anthems, flag raisings and, often times, tears, LA32 put the modern in Modern Olympics.
Second, and most importantly, where the earlier Olympic venues in Paris and London have been torn down or not fit to host recent events, LA28 will prominently feature the Memorial Coliseum as it did in both 1932 and 1984, hosting the opening ceremony and the track & field competition among others. London’s White City Stadium and even the old Wembley are no longer, but the iconic Coliseum links us to an Olympic past that others cannot match.
Next time we’ll learn more about the Grand Old Lady, but until then here’s a short clip of the 1932 opening ceremony. Let the Games begin!
First doping accusations in 1932... very interesting... Good stuff Mr. Hanna, looking forward to reading more!
This is just what the doctor ordered for those of us coming down from the high of the 2024 Paris Games, looking ahead expectantly to the 2028 Los Angeles Games - enriches the experience.