Creative History

  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, courage...

  Fourteen nations competed in the first ever modern day Olympic Games held in Athens in 1896. In 1894 the newly created International Olympic Committee had unanimously chosen Athens as the site for the first modern Olympic Games as an homage to the city-states of ancient Greece whose original pan-Hellenic Olympiad in honor of the God Zeus had been held every four years, for over ten centuries beginning in 776 BCE and not ending until well into the 4th Century CE, when the by then Christianized Roman authorities finally put a stop to the Pagan tradition.   Of the fourteen nations represented at the games of the 1st Olympiad thirteen were from Europe with the lone exception being the team from the United States. The Olympic Games of 1896 were considered a great success.  At the time, the First Olympiad represented the largest international sporting event ever held and the Olympic Stadium in Athens, called the Panathenic Stadium, hosted a crowd of over 100,000 ...