In the fall of 1963, major Midwestern television and radio stations received prerecorded tape from Detroit. It contained the victory speech of Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, who ended the speech in exclamation: “Detroit — The 1968 Olympic Games are yours!”
It was scheduled to be played on October 19, 1963, just three days after the International Olympic Committee voted on the host of the 1968 Olympics.
The tape never aired.
1963 was Detroit’s best — and last — real chance to host the Games, but its Olympic race began much earlier. An Olympic flame rose alongside the city itself, at a time when Detroit was the City of Champions.
Whispers of a potential Detroit Games began in 1920, but serious ideas germinated in 1936. In that year alone, the Lions, Tigers and Red Wings all won championships, and Detroit-based boxer Joe Louis was the undefeated, No.1 ranked heavyweight contender. April 18, 1936, was declared “Championship Day,” a holiday still celebrated today.
Even amid the Great Depression, the sports-mad city was desperate to flaunt its winning ways, and they had their eyes on the world’s biggest sporting stage.
Detroit began building its Olympic case that same year — an effort that, unbeknownst to the city, would last for nearly three decades, cost millions of dollars and, in the end, mirror the downward spiral that was to come for the Motor City.
Leading each bid was Detroiter Fred Matthaei Sr., who was the chairman of the Detroit Olympic Committee and also a prominent figure in the Amateur Athletic Union, the organization that selected the American Olympians.
A self-made auto industry entrepreneur, he had the sort of radical, competitive optimism required to persevere through decades of rejection: Not only did he represent Detroit’s industrial might; he personified their Olympic ambition.
For decades, Matthaei bid — and failed. The Olympics for 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1964 marched on — just not in Detroit.
But while these decades may have been failures for Matthaei, they couldn’t have been better for the city of Detroit.
Over the course of World War II, Detroit became known as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” At the onset of the war, companies like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler rapidly converted their automobile factories into war production plants. The demand for tanks, airplanes, jeeps and artillery bolstered Detroit’s economy, and prosperity only grew after the war. America needed cars, and Detroit had the infrastructure and skilled labor to give it to them.
The “Motor City” heavily recruited Black workers, and its burgeoning job market fueled the Great Migration from the South. 50,000 African Americans moved to Detroit from 1941 to 1943, and by 1950 there were over 300,000 African Americans living in the city.
The years that followed proved Detroit a breeding ground for great cultural and artistic minds. The Motown” sound mixed elements of gospel, jazz and pop music to create a new, soulful sound. Artists like The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson challenged songwriting conventions and addressed issues of racism and inequality.
The Detroit Walk to Freedom, a seminal moment in Civil Rights history, took place in Detroit on June 23, 1963. The event climaxed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s delivery of an early version of his “I Have A Dream” speech to an estimated audience of 125,000.
The city had its foot on the gas pedal. City officials felt that if there was ever a time that Detroit would get the Olympics, it was then. In the summer of 1963, Matthaei and Cavanaugh went all-in on Detroit’s bid for the 1968 Games.
According to David Maraniss, author of “Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story,” Matthaei formed hundreds of committees overseeing Detroit’s official bid to the International Olympic Committee. He had a bigger budget too — a whopping $200,000 — ten times the $20,000 he worked with just four years before.
Now 70 years old, he felt that this was the city’s best chance ever, and perhaps his last chance to complete his life’s work. He had one summer to get it right.
The IOC assembled on October 16, 1963, in the small town of Baden-Baden, Germany. There, they voted on the host of the 1968 Olympic Games between four candidate cities: Buenos Aires, Detroit, Lyon and Mexico City.
“Detroit sent a sixty-person delegation and created an exhibit that included ‘a 12-foot long model of a redesigned Michigan State Fairgrounds, with a $25-million, 110,000-seat stadium,’ alongside ‘dramatic photos of Detroit and Michigan athletes in action.’ The Detroit exhibit displayed a panorama of the United States and the city that ‘slid across two TV-like screens,’” De Montfort University associate professor Heather Dichter wrote in her 2021 book, “Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games.”
Detroit shipped 3.5 tons of material for their lavish showcase, including this map for the city’s construction plans and proposed Olympic stadium.
The presentation was interrupted by applause 12 times, with even some foreign journalists clapping in approval.
“Every IOC member was in his seat — or should I say, almost literally, at the edge of it,” wrote Charles F. Adams, Detroit ad man who helped shape the presentation, in his book, “The View from Baden-Baden: One Man’s Account of Detroit’s Olympic Bid.”
Adams described the mood at a luncheon hosted by Detroit after the presentation: “The verdict was unanimous: the presentation had moved them. It was the best presentation they’d ever seen. Optimism and friendliness filled the room. We were buoyant.”
Lyon and Mexico City presented after lunch, and then the 58 IOC members left to deliberate on their votes.
“Mr. Matthaei seemed filled with confidence,” Adams wrote. “We waited downstairs where a European reporter assured me we were all but in, and that he had his Detroit story half written.”
After an hour, the chamber doors opened, and the results were announced.
Buenos Aires: 2. Lyon: 12. Detroit: 14. Mexico City: 30. Detroit lost the vote in just one round.
Had Mexico City picked up just one fewer vote, they wouldn’t have had a majority; a second round of voting would have been called, where Detroit was hoping to pick up more votes.
But there wasn’t any more voting. The “City of Champions” lost. The Motor City was derailed, its Olympic ambition flaming out.
Matthaei’s best effort of his career wasn’t good enough for the IOC. He would soon resign as chairman of the Detroit Olympic Committee, the city’s Olympic dreams leaving with him.
What happened?
Mexico City’s bid was impressive. According to Dichter, they had the cheapest lodging for athletes and an Olympic stadium fully prepared for competition. They had also gotten a jump on Detroit before bidding had even begun.
Mexico City used their Olympic stadium to host the 1962 Modern Pentathlon World Championships, and they invited all 58 members of the IOC to see their facilities. As noted by Dichter, the all-expenses-paid trip technically wasn’t against the rules, but “it wasn’t exactly what the city should have been doing.”
This tension between fairness and personal interest was personified by the then-president of the IOC: Avery Brundage.
Brundage was Matthaei’s natural foil: They were both born in Detroit, athletes in their youth, self-made entrepreneurs and figures in the Amateur Athletic Union. The two actually kept up a regular correspondence, in which Brundage encouraged Matthaei’s consistent bidding.
“I hope that you will not relax your interest, since in this changing world the opportunity for consideration might come sooner than you expect,” Brundage wrote to Matthaei on July 25, 1939, after Detroit lost its bid to Rome.
But Stefan Szymanski, University of Michigan professor of sport management and director of the documentary “Detroit’s Olympic Uprising,” said that Brundage’s letters were disingenuous at best.
“Brundage clearly sort of hated Detroit,” Szymanski said. “So he did anything he could to undermine Detroit’s bids over the years. He lied about it all the time, but he was pretty plainly scheming to stop Detroit getting the Olympics.”
Before Brundage was the president of the IOC, he was the president of the US Olympic Association. There, he earned the moniker “Slavery Avery” due to his harsh treatment of athletes and well-documented bigotry. According to Szymanski, Brundage treated African American runner and long jumper Jesse Owens “very badly.”
Despite winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Games, Brundage removed him from the American team because Owens asked to be paid for his work. Owens’ Olympic career was cut short, and Szymanski said he was “forced to do humiliating things like participating in circus races against horses to make money.”
Brundage was more than willing to weaken the American Olympic team for personal reasons, and Owen’s Olympic success may have even played a role in his dismissal. The IOC president was a Germanophile and an antisemite, according to Szymanski, and even met with senior Nazi officials in 1935. Szymanski said that Brundage came back to America feeling that there was “no problem” with Nazis’ treatment of Jewish athletes and that there was “nothing really going on.”
Owens dominated his events at the 1936 Games, defying Nazi ideologies of white supremacy — ideologies ascribed to by Brundage himself.
“The weird thing is,” Szymanski said, “there were four Axis powers in the Second World War — Germany, Italy, Finland and Japan. All four of them got the Olympics during the time that Detroit was bidding: the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ that never got it.”
But Brundage’s bigotry wasn’t his alone; Detroit’s issues with race affected their 1963 bid, too. Perhaps this story was, like all Greek tragedies, a failure from within.
Detroit’s rapid automobile production caused its economic boom, an era powered by Black workers coming from the Great Migration. But some of the very forces that powered the city’s Olympic ambitions were beginning to cause its downfall. When Black workers arrived, they found housing segregation and social exclusion.
It was nearly impossible for Black people to get favorable housing loans, and the presence of racial minorities in a neighborhood meant that white money lenders would lower their property value. The process became known as redlining, and contributed to large-scale white flight from Detroit to newly constructed suburbs.
Between 1950 and 1960, 500,000 white people fled the city.
According to Maraniss, the city’s depopulation was accelerated by the growth of personal car ownership, a trend supported by Detroit’s dominant auto industry. Freeways connecting the city to the suburbs uprooted traditional, predominantly Black neighborhoods.
On October 9, 1963, the Detroit Common Council voted 7-2 against the Open Occupancy Ordinance, which sought to end practices of redlining and housing discrimination in the city. Its failure further stoked racial tensions; as the distance between white Detroiters and Black Detroiters grew geographically, hostility grew between Black communities and law enforcement.
So began a summer of protests, including weekly picketing at the DPD, organized marches — and letters penned by Detroiters to the IOC.
In one letter, Detroit bus driver Lloyd Dolby wrote: “The Olympic Games represent fair play … fair play has not become a living part of Detroit and America … This country is not capable of accepting the many colored people from all parts of the world because it has not settled the difference toward the Negro.”
According to Maraniss, word spread about these letters at the IOC’s meeting in Baden-Baden at exactly the worst moment: directly before Mexico City took to the stage.
After Detroit’s Olympic failure, tension between police forces and Black Detroiters continued to rise. On July 23, 1967, one year before the 1968 Olympics, they exploded.
Five days of mayhem and bloodshed ensued in what came to be known as The Detroit Uprising. 43 dead. 700 injured. 7,200 arrested. Damage estimates ranged from $250 million to $500 million.
It’s impossible to diagnose exactly why Detroit never served as host of the Games, or why the IOC didn’t vote for them in 1963. It’s almost certain, however, that the Olympics wouldn’t have healed Detroit from its societal issues.
For Mexico City, hosting the games only exacerbated public unrest; On October 2, 1968, just 10 days before the Games were set to begin, the Tlatelolco Massacre took place.
As many as 300 were killed as authorities fired into a crowd of unarmed student protestors and activists. Thousands more were injured or jailed in the event.
Despite an era of civil unrest, American sprinters John Carlos and Tommy Smith produced the most iconic image of the 1968 Games.
“Sport is a fairly precise mirror of our society,” Szymanski said. “Whatever you see going on in sport, you see going on in the wider world, and the two reflect each other.”
