Global Television and the Transformation of the Olympics: The 1984 Los Angeles Games

Abstract

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles witnessed a transformation in the economic, political and cultural dynamics of the modern Olympic movement. By the 1980s many observers worried that the Olympics tottered on the verge of extinction. Plagued by boycotts, terrorism and intractable national rivalries and beset by financial shortfalls, cost overruns and the expenditure of vast sums for ‘white elephant’ facilities, the list of potential suitors for hosting the games dwindled until only Los Angeles remained. The world had seemingly abandoned the Olympics as too costly and too controversial. Indeed, some forecasters predicted that Los Angeles would signal the death-knell of the modern games. Instead, the organisers of the Los Angeles Olympics transformed the economic, political and cultural dynamics of the games. Fuelled by television broadcasting funds and the billions of viewers that the medium brought to the spectacle, the Olympics in 1984 became a fundamental element in the emergence in the second half of the twentieth century of ‘global television’ – a vast new consumer culture that incorporated the world's nations into an amalgamated audience that shared experiences through their viewing habits. ‘Global television’ transformed the modern Olympic movement – a process that came into clear view in 1984 in Los Angeles.

Keywords::

• Olympic games
• television
• Los Angeles 1984
• globalisation
• commercialism

Notes

^1.Morrow, “Feeling Proud Again”; Ajemian, “Master of the Games.”

^2. For an interesting historical overview, see the volume based on the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery exhibit on the subject; Voss, Man of the Year.

^3.“Women of the Year”; “A Dozen Who Made a Difference.”

^4.“Prince of the Global Village”; Painton, “The Taming of Ted Turner.”

^5. For biographical and autobiographical details on Ueberroth's career, see Reich, Making It Happen; Ueberroth, Made in America.

^6.Reich, Making It Happen; Ueberroth, Made in America.

^7. For historical perspectives on the Los Angeles bid, see Dyreson, “The Endless Olympic Bid”; Dyreson and Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City.”

^8.“Man-of-the-Year: Ayatollah Khomeini.”

^9. “New York Still among 3 US Cities in the Running for '84 Olympics,” New York Times, August 3, 1977.

^10.“Oh, What a Party It Was.”

^11.Guttmann, The Olympics;Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games; Hill, Olympic Politics. See also, Wilson, “Los Angeles 1984”.

^12. While estimates of global audiences are at best educated guesses, as some nations keep precise tabulations of ratings while other nations do not have any practical systems for calculating viewership, most experts assert that the 1984 Los Angeles games mark the first time in which an opening ceremony drew more than a billion viewers, with some estimates that as many as two billion people tuned in to the event. Those numbers, as imprecise as they are, represent a 50–100% increase in viewership over earlier audience estimates in the 1960s and 1970s when the Olympics first became a component of ‘global television’. de Moragas, Rivenburgh, and Larson, Television in the Olympics, 207–18.

^13.Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption.”

^14. , “World Harmony”; “Johnny Weissmuller”; “Marketing Weissmuller to the World”; Crafting Patriotism.

^15. For detailed views supporting this assessment, see the two fine essays in this collection, Wilson, “Sports Infrastructure, Legacy”; Wenn, “Peter Ueberroth's Legacy.”

^16.Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings; Keys, “Spreading Peace, Democracy.”

^17.Wilson, “Sports Infrastructure, Legacy”; Wenn, “Peter Ueberroth's Legacy.”

^18.Dyreson, “Aggressive America”; Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings.

^19.Preuss, The Economics of Staging the Olympics; Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings. For a fascinating critique of these developments, see Boykoff, Celebration Capitalism.

^20.Xu, Olympic Dreams; “Castles in the Sand”; Fred Weir, “Sochi Cha-Ching: Putin Defends Most Expensive Olympics Ever," Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 2013”; “Sochi or Bust”; Lukas I. Alpert, “The Winter Olympics: Olympic Venues With a Czarist Flair', Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2014”; Catherine Rampell, “A Global Party's. Expensive Hangover,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 2014.

^21.Wilson, “Sports Infrastructure, Legacy”; Wenn, “Peter Ueberroth's Legacy.”

^22. , “The Battle of Shepherd's Bush”; “Olympic Games Doomed”; Rule Britannia.

^23.Krüger and Murray, The Nazi Olympics.

^24.Collins, The 1940 Tokyo Games.

^25.Keys, Globalizing Sport.

^26. George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” Tribune (London), December 14, 1945, as cited in Orwell, The Complete Works, 442.

^27. For insightful overviews of these developments, see Guttmann, The Olympics; Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games; Hill, Olympic Politics. See, also, Torres and Dyreson, “The Cold War Games.”

^28.Booth, The Race Game; Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World.

^29.Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch.

^30.Edelman, “The Russians Are Not Coming!”

^31.Rider, “Filling the Information Gap.”

^32.Torres, “Argentina and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.”

^33. , “The Seoul Olympics”; The Two Koreas.

^34.Llewellyn, “Circumventing Apartheid.”

^35. Note how dated the Japan sections of a text, such as Myers, A US Foreign Policy, seem three decades later.

^36.Brownell, “Why 1984 Medalist Li Ning.”

^37.Schultz, “Going the Distance.”

^38. See, for instance, the inspirational videos featuring Benoit as a champion of women's athletic and cultural liberation on Nike's corporate website: http://nikeinc.com/joan-benoit-samuelson (accessed August 10, 2014).

^39.Hunt, Drug Games.

^40.Gleaves, “Manufactured Dope.”

^41.Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption.”

^42. For interesting insights into the development of synchronized swimming and ‘aqua-musicals’ see Noble, “Prettiest Things Afloat”; Blount, “And Now for the Resurrection”. Additional insights can be found in Esther Williams's autobiography (Williams, The Million Dollar Mermaid). See, also, Bean, Synchronized Swimming.

^43.Williams, The Million Dollar Mermaid; “Esther Williams, Champion Swimmer and Movie Star, Dies at 91,” Washington Post, June 6, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/esther-williamschampion-swimmer-and-movie-star-dies-at-91/2013/06/06/8f0781e4-d833-11e1-91e1-eed6436f6d13_story.html (accessed August 1, 2014).

^44. Kenneth Reich, “Olympic Water Polo, Diving Proposal OK'd', Los Angeles Times, October 8 1977”; Ross Newhan, “Swimming in Dodger Stadium,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1978; Kenneth Reich, “IOC, Not Los Angeles, Will Control ‘84 Olympics, Killanin Says’, Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1978”; “Olympic Notes”, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1980.

^45.Williams, The Million Dollar Mermaid; “Esther Williams, Champion Swimmer.”

^46.Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption,” 256–78.

^47. On the various nomenclature, action, extreme and lifestyle sports, see , Understanding Lifestyle Sports; The Cultural Politics.

^48.Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Dyreson

Mark Dyreson is a professor of kinesiology and history at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several books and articles on the history of modern study, a fellow of the US National Academy of Kinesiology, and academic editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport, and the co-editor of the Sport in Global Society: Historical Perspectives book series published by Routledge Press.