A President, A Starlet and One Stubborn Man: How the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid Put Winter Sports and Team USA on the Map

 Located roughly three-hundred miles northwest of New York City, between the state’s capital of Albany and the Canadian capital city of Ottawa; nestled among picturesque pine trees in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, the tiny village of Lake Placid was an unlikely place to host the 1932 Winter Olympics.  

Taking place during the darkest days of the Great Depression in the early 1930’s, in an era before television, the III Olympic Winter Games (as they were officially called) were unlikely to popularize winter sports in particular, and the Olympic Games in general in the United States at a time when most Americans were struggling day to day simply to feed themselves and their families.  

But thanks to the tireless efforts, and stubbornness, of one man; to the intervention of a future American President, unique and modern innovations with regards to the Olympic Games themselves (many which have stayed with us to this day) and to a group of talented, courageous and unique American winter athletes, popularizing winter sports in America and putting Team USA on the map at the Winter Games is exactly what the 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York did!

The one man who, more than any other single person or driving force, brought the Winter Olympics to Lake Placid in 1932 was Godfrey Dewey.

Dewey as Manager of U.S. Ski Team 1928

Author and skiing historian John Allen describes Godfrey Dewey in his 1994 work on Olympic history called Olympic Perspectives as, “[I]n most ways unsuited for managing a world event, but he had one outstanding characteristic…a meddling stubbornness to see things through his own way.”

A stubbornness to see things through.  Stubbornness is the one single word almost everyone used to describe skier, manager, sports venue designer and President of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee Godfrey Dewey.

Born in 1887, Godfrey Dewey was the son of Melvil Dewey who is famous in history as the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System for library organization.  It was Godfrey’s father Melvil, who also created an organization in 1895 called the Lake Placid Club centered around the picturesque village in upstate New York for which it was named.  The Lake Placid Club was an exclusive organization dedicated to hiking, camping and outdoor winter sports and it was Melvil Dewey’s athletic club that first served to attract many of the east coast’s well-to-do aristocrats to the charm and beauty of the tiny town of Lake Placid.

At the end of the 19th century Lake Placid, New York became the first continuously operating winter resort solely dedicated to family friendly winter sport and relaxation in the United States.  And thanks to his father’s interest in Lake Placid the young Godfrey Dewey became one of America’s most accomplished skiers.

Godfrey Dewey would go on to manage the U.S. Ski Team at the II Winter Olympic Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1928 and during those Olympics Godfrey Dewey would be the flagbearer for the United States at the opening ceremonies.  He would be inducted into the United States Ski Hall of Fame in 1970 and would go on to play an active role in the running of Lake Placid as a winter resort for his entire life.

But it was while at the Second Winter Olympic Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, that the idea of having Lake Placid, New York, be a host location for the Olympic Winter Games first took root in the mind of Godfrey Dewey.

In order to make his Olympic dreams a reality Godfrey Dewey, and the town of Lake Placid needed one thing--Money.

To get it, he turned to an unusual source in the cash strapped times of the Great Depression: then New York state Governor and future President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR at the 1932 Winter Games

Godfrey Dewey was able to persuade Governor Roosevelt to use state funds for the constructions of a quarter million dollar bobsled run as well as an indoor rink for ice skating and hockey.  Roosevelt hoped that the publicity generated by having a small town in New York State host the Winter Olympics in 1932 would help boost his popularity in that year’s Presidential Election.  Though, with ninety years of hindsight, one is left to wonder why FDR would have ever needed any boosting in the first place against the immensely unpopular Depression Era President Herbert Hoover?

Anyway, as it was, in return for his political patronage, Governor Roosevelt received the honor of officially opening the III Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, on February 4,1932 on behalf of the United States of America at the newly constructed outdoor Lake Placid Olympic Stadium which had just been built only weeks prior to the event next to the town’s high school thanks in large part to a town tax that had been paid by the approximately 5000 residents of the town of North Elba, which contains the winter resort of Lake Placid within its borders.  Roosevelt’s Olympic opening remarks were the first ever broadcast live over radio.

Political wrangling and questionable fundraising decisions aside, the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, were and still are a stunning Olympic success story.

Opening the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid

Even the fact that the town’s Olympic Organizing Committee was able to win its Olympic bid in the first place when faced with steep competition from California which sought to host the 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Big Pines in Los Angeles County, and constructed the world’s largest ski jump just for that purpose, is a testament to the stubbornness of Godfrey Dewey, the international political savvy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the dedication of the people of Lake Placid themselves.

Lake Placid 1932 were the first Olympic Games to utilize a three tiered “Victory Podium” on which medalists stood while being presented their Olympic medals.  And, as fate would have it, the first gold medal won at the 1932 Lake Placid winter games was won by American speed skater and Lake Placid native Jack Shea.

Shea, was the most successful American athlete of the 1932 winter games, and the first American to win multiple gold medals at the same winter Olympics.  He won gold in speed skating in the 500 meter and 1500 meter events in front of his hometown fans in Lake Placid.  Interestingly, four years later in 1936 when the Winter Olympics were held in Bavaria, Jack Shea would choose not to compete to defend his speed skating titles out of protest after a rabbi told him about the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany.  

Jack Shea with Gold Medal 1932

Another Olympic gold medalist who made headlines at Lake Placid in 1932 was American Billy Fiske.  Billy Fiske won his second gold medal as the driver for the United States Bobsled Team in 1932 four years after he had first led his team to gold in St. Moritz at the 1928 Winter Games.

Fiske, though, proved to be not just a hero on the Olympic bobsled run, but a hero outside of sports as well.  In 1939, when World War Two broke out in Europe, American Olympian Billy Fiske traveled to England and volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force.  He falsely claimed to be a Canadian citizen in order to gain permission to serve.

On August 17, 1940 in the skies over England during the Battle of Britain Billy Fiske became one of the first Americans killed in action in the Europe Theater of Operations during the Second World War.

Billy Fiske in RAF Uniform

The glory of the 1932 Olympic Winter Games at Lake Placid wasn’t limited simply to hometown heroes and patriotic Americans though.  The Games of the 1932 Winter Olympics certainly had their fair share of glitz, glamor and pomp and circumstance.

For one thing, the 1932 Winter Olympics were the very first Olympic Games sponsored by Coca-Cola and Coke became the official (and exclusive) provider of soft drinks in Lake Placid during the 1932 games.  To this day if anybody is drinking anything without alcohol in it at the Olympics--it’s made by Coca-Cola!

Sonja Heine, a Norwegian born figure skater won the second of her three consecutive gold medals in figure skating at the 1932 Lake Placid Games.  Sonja won Olympic Gold in women’s figure skating in Switzerland in 1928, the United States in 1932 and Germany in 1936.  She was a ten time World Champion in ladies figure skating and was considered the greatest figure skater to have ever lived during her career.

Given her beauty and popularity, after her skating days were over in the late 1930’s, Sonja Heine would go on to become one of Hollywood’s leading ladies and star alongside such actors as Cesar Romero and Tyrone Power and perform with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.  Between 1937 and 1948 Sonja Heine starred in several big budget musicals produced by Twentieth Century Fox, all of which proved to be stunning box office successes, and her handprint is immortalized on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame to this day.  She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1940 after Nazi troops occupied her homeland of Norway.  Sonja Heine remained an international celebrity until she passed away at the young age of fifty-seven in 1969.

Sonja Heine

In total, seventeen nations participated in the 1932 Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games.  Out of those seventeen nations the United States reigned supreme.   America led the medal count at the Lake Placid games of 1932, winning a total of 12 medals, including 6 gold.  It would be the last time that the United States of America led the medal count at the Winter Olympic Games for nearly eighty years until 2010 in Vancouver.

Today, Lake Placid is better remembered for having hosted the more recent games of the 1980 Winter Olympics.  The 1980 Winter Olympics are famous now (rightfully so) for the “Miracle on Ice” when an underdog United States Hockey Team unexpectedly defeated a heavily favored Soviet Team to win gold for America during the height of the Cold War.

However, perhaps today during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing we should also remember the stubbornness of Godfrey Dewey, the improbable patronage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the accomplishments of Depression Era athletes like Jack Shea, Billy Fiske and Sonja Heine whose achievements in putting winter sports on the map across the world way back in 1932 in the tiny village of Lake Placid, New York, was just as miraculous in its own right.