The Nineteen Sixty Winter Olympics and Walt Disney's Doves
Near Tahoe City, California
A few miles up the valley to the west, a small ski hill pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history. In nineteen fifty-five, a developer named Alexander Cushing put forward this remote spot, then called Squaw Valley, as a candidate to host the nineteen sixty Winter Olympics. At the time it had exactly one chairlift, one lodge, and essentially one resident, Cushing himself.
Against all odds, his bid beat the Austrian city of Innsbruck by just two votes. Over the next five years an entire Olympic venue rose from the meadow. The opening ceremony, held on February eighteenth, nineteen sixty, was staged by none other than Walt Disney, who directed a spectacle of five thousand performers, fireworks, and the release of two thousand doves.
These games made history in other ways too. They were the first Winter Olympics carried live on American television, the first to use artificial ice for skating and hockey, and the first to include the biathlon and women's speed skating. The American hockey team stunned the world by winning gold.
Today the resort has been renamed Palisades Tahoe, but the mountain that once hosted the world still rises just beyond this valley.
