Initiated as a publicity stunt by Alexander Cushing, the Harvard-educated owner and only resident of the struggling ski resort, the bid shocked the world by beating out some of the great ski resorts of Europe in International Olympic Committee IOC voting in The only problem was that the area was hardly prepared to host an international sporting event. At the time it boasted only one chairlift, two tow-ropes and a fifty room lodge.
Now the newly-formed California Olympic Commission had five short years to build a fully-functional, Olympic-ready facility in the mountains near Lake Tahoe. So undeveloped was the location that at the close of the Winter Games, the area had no local government to accept the Olympic flag from the mayor of previous host Cortina d'Ampezzo. An IOC member from California had to accept the flag on area's behalf. Bringing the Winter Games to California meant harnessing the luster of Tinseltown.
This would involve programming the opening and closing ceremonies, the victory ceremonies for each event, and the Olympic torch relay. Walt was no stranger to the skiing world; Mount Disney in the Sierras was named in his honor after he helped finance the Sugar Bowl resort in , and twenty years later he unveiled his own man-made mountain when the Matterhorn Bobsleds debuted at Disneyland. For the Winter Olympics, he recruited from within his own organization to build a committee that would undertake a then-unprecedented level of Olympic pageantry.
Supervising the musical aspects of the production were Choral Director Dr. After a meeting with the Music Educators National Conference in March , the Committee was granted permission to work with the California and Nevada Music Educators Associations to recruit musicians and singers from public high schools in those states.
The response was overwhelming. When applications were distributed in Fall of , more than thirty bands and seventy choral groups applied to be part of the Olympic ceremonies. After listening to hours of mailed-in auditions, Hirt and his committee selected eighteen bands and thirty-seven choruses from the two states. A musical program was chosen for the event, and in December Hirt and Sawhill gathered at UCLA to record a demo of the choral and instrumental numbers to distribute to participating schools.
Groups practiced first individually, and then in one of four regional rehearsals held in Reno, San Francisco, Fresno and Los Angeles. There was no free ride; students had to raise money back home to fund their trip to the unincorporated area near Lake Tahoe. All told, 3, students—1, band members and 2, choir members—participated. Youth participation was critical to the success of the Games; acting as official flag-raisers, messengers, and crowd control during the event were Explorer Scouts under the leadership of Scoutmaster William King.
This effort extended to the all-important torch relay, which brought the Olympic flame by foot more than six hundred miles from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—site of the Olympic Summer Games—to an unincorporated area near Lake Tahoe. More than seven hundred high school runners from the California Interscholastic Federation took part, joined by a number of former Olympic champions.
The athletes were each assigned one-mile sections of the route, where they practiced by toting eight pound shot-puts. Meanwhile, a rush was on to create an Olympics-worthy resort out of the wilderness. It was estimated that two thousand visitors a day arrived in the summer of to tour the construction site, and Walt himself made several visits to coordinate the entertainment efforts. Previous Olympics had lodged guests and athletes in local hotels and homes, but the remote location of the area necessitated the construction of custom-built housing for participants.
Thus, the very first Olympic Village, consisting of four dormitories, was created. Artificial ice was used for the first time in Olympic history for the skating events; waste heat from the refrigeration plant was used to heat buildings, melt snow from roofs, and provide hot water. Other innovations included new timekeeping equipment capable of measuring time to the hundredth of a second; IBM supplied fifteen technicians and two RAMAC computers to tabulate results and output data in English and French.
The network eventually broadcast thirty-one hours of coverage during the games, and when officials needed to consult tape of an event to determine whether a skier had missed a slalom gate it inspired the concept of instant replay. Designing Decor. To learn about snow sculpting techniques, Hench visited the Dartmouth College Winter Carnival and Ice Festival in February of as well as a similar event in Quebec; he then designed the statues, which were in turn created by Floats Inc.
Nine of the statues were female: four skiers, three figure skaters, and two speed skaters. Among the twenty-one male statues were nine skiers, seven hockey players, three speed skaters, and two figure skaters. Two larger, twenty-four-foot statues, one male and one female, were created to flank the Tower of Nations. The Tower, another Hench design, stood seventy-nine feet tall and twenty feet wide. Final tally? We're going to rate that at: Super Yikes. Writing this article made me a little glum because I would have preferred to share a more positive answer.
My apologies. But I do still think it's valid that hosting an Olympic Games is an admirable undertaking, and it does put a city on the map, that's for sure. Plus, residents are often jazzed during, and after, the games, which is always a nice aspect to consider. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.
Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Do the Olympic Games generate profits? Sydney, whose volunteer guides and stewards were widely accepted to have been crucial to the success of the Games, had 47, Given the failure of G4S to provide enough paid workers to act as security guards, indeed, Olympic bosses must be tempted to wonder whether those roles, too, should have been offered to volunteers.
In the incongruous setting of "McDonald's university" — an anonymous room in the north London corporate HQ of the burger chain — several dozen people are taking part in a training day. These are some of the Games Maker elite, the 10, who will lead smaller teams of volunteers throughout the Olympics and Paralympics. The training of volunteers — some 1. According to Chris English, who is co-ordinating the training programme on behalf of McDonald's: "This wasn't about putting an 'M' on everything.
From our point of view this was about saying, we're a good employer, we believe in investing in people, and we work to give our people opportunities through training. The involvement of the company in the Games remains controversial, with critics pointing out that the Olympic Stadium will sit almost alongside the largest fast food restaurant in the world.
Tomlin bats away criticism: "McDonald's are renowned for training, for engaging with their communities. The fact that there are views and opinions about their product range isn't really something that I was focused on.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trainee leaders are as excited as anyone at the opportunity ahead. Nilesh Badiani, a civil servant from Wembley Park, will be co-ordinating transport between central London and the Olympic Park for athletes, officials and the media.
But while many successful Games Makers struggle to contain their excitement, the recruitment process has not been without its critics. Some would-be volunteers have complained that the lack of accommodation provision, or help with transport for those working very late shifts, made it impossible for them to take part.
Others have expressed frustration with the recruitment process, which meant many had to wait for months to hear if they had been accepted, despite needing to book time off from work if they were successful. Tomlin acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges was in managing expectations in what was always certain to be a lengthy recruitment process.
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