The 1960 Winter Olympics and the TV Deal That Changed Everything

In nineteen forty-nine, a man named Wayne Poulsen bought land in a valley at the north end of Lake Tahoe that most people in the ski world had never heard of. He called it Squaw Valley. Then he spent a decade lobbying the International Olympic Committee to hold the nineteen sixty Winter Games there instead of at the established European resorts that everyone assumed would get them.

He won.

The Eighth Winter Olympics opened at Squaw Valley in February of nineteen sixty, and the sporting part of the Games is largely forgotten now. What is not forgotten, by anyone who studies how the modern Olympics became a commercial institution, is what happened before the opening ceremony.

CBS paid fifty thousand dollars for the right to broadcast the Games on American television. It was the first time a television network had ever paid for Winter Olympics broadcasting rights. IBM provided the first computerized scorekeeping and results system in Olympic history. Walt Disney was hired to direct the opening and closing ceremonies. None of these decisions were made in European IOC offices. They were made in the offices of American media and technology companies, at a ski valley in the Sierra Nevada that barely existed a decade before.

The commercial model that Squaw Valley established in nineteen sixty, television rights as the financial engine, entertainment spectacle wrapped around athletic competition, became the template for every Winter Games that followed. It is still the template. Squaw Valley did not become the most famous ski resort in the world after the Olympics. But the Olympics became the commercial institution we now know because of what was negotiated here.

The valley has a different name now. The mountain has not changed.