ABSTRACT
Los Angeles is, from its own vantage, the Olympic city. No city has bid more
frequently or more furiously for the Olympics. No city has made the Olympics as central to its core identity. The Olympics have left a more powerful legacy in Los Angeles than in any other city they have visited since 1896. Conversely, Los Angeles
has, according to its own chroniclers, left a more powerful legacy for the Olympic movement than any other modern host. According to its own local histories, Los
Angeles has twice saved the Olympic movement from fiscal disaster and cultural decay. [1] Even scholars concede the significance of Los Angeles to the modern
games. Los Angeles provided in 1932 the original blueprint for transforming the Olympics into one of the globe’s most important events. Five decades later in 1984,
Los Angeles revitalized the Olympics and provided a new template to keep the games relevant into the twenty-first century. [2]
The claims by Los Angeles that modern Olympic legacies begin and end in southern California reveals the commanding role of the games in the region’s
collective imagination. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Bill Dwyre, recounting an anecdote from the city’s urban mythology, illustrates the power of the Olympics in
the public memories of the metropolis. Dwyre contends that during the globally televised 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the acquittal of the white officers charged
with beating African-American motorist Rodney King, a small band of unarmed security guards fended off huge hordes of looters targeting the building housing the
Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, the repository of much of the city’s Olympic legacy. The defenceless watchmen performed the miracle by simply appealing to the hooligans’ sense of respect for the Olympic history that resided in
the museum’s bowels. ‘Even the looters understand,’ Dwyre proclaimed. ‘Los Angeles is an Olympic city.’ [3]
Another powerful sign that Los Angeles is indeed ‘an Olympic city’ resides in the history of the ubiquitous palm tree. Many love the image of Mediterranean paradise
that the arboreal palm canopy lining the city’s boulevards and open spaces evokes. Others loathe the fact that the tree, a non-native, invasive species that heightens the
illusions of paradise on which the city rests, has come to symbolize Los Angeles. Neither the palm’s defenders nor its detractors, however, dispute that palm-lined,
asphalt-paved streets symbolize the city. [4] Indeed, one urban critic, gripped by an overdeveloped sense of irony, suggests that a bullet-riddled palm tree represents the truest version of Los Angeles reality. [5] Los Angeles’ palm tree forests date to the
city’s first Olympics. In 1932, local boosters persuaded the city to spend more than $100,000 of the Olympic budget to plant 30,000 palms to spruce up the already
extensive urban sprawl that blighted the area. To get ready for the world once again in 1984, Los Angeles spent even more money to plant considerably fewer trees in a
new phase of its urban forestry, or, as some viewed it, urban fantasy project. [6] The Olympics and palm trees symbolize Los Angeles. They evoke images of
southern California for the area’s residents and for the multitudes of tourists who flock to the city. They stand as iconic representations of the meaning of Los Angeles in the minds of billions of the planet’s inhabitants who regularly view Los Angeles
through the lenses of television and cinema, two industries that make their world headquarters in the California metropolis. The palms and the Olympics are also
fundamentally linked. The palms appeared to gild the original Los Angeles games, and then five decades later were replanted to re-gild the city for its second Olympic
chapter. This gilding represents a deliberate attempt to manufacture an Olympic legacy for Los Angeles. The palms highlight two key components of Olympian
legacies. First, as the palm-planting plans illustrate, host cities manufacture legacies. Second, as the spread of the palm into a Los Angeles icon reveals, global audiences
mediate legacies. Well-manufactured legacies that endure capture the world’s imagination, even if they are as fictitious as the common notion that the palm tree is native to southern California. Out of such fictions has Los Angeles woven its legacy as
the Olympic city.
