Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics

by Michael J Socolow

Overview

The Berlin Olympics, August 14, 1936. German rowers, dominant at the Games, line up against America's top eight-oared crew. Hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide wait by their radios. Leni Riefenstahl prepares her cameramen. Grantland Rice looks past the 75,000 spectators crowding the riverbank. Above it all, the Nazi leadership, flush with the propaganda triumph the Olympics have given their New Germany, await a crowning victory they can broadcast to the world.

The Berlin Games matched cutting-edge communication technology with compelling sports narrative to draw the blueprint for all future sports broadcasting. A global audience—the largest cohort of humanity ever assembled—enjoyed the spectacle via radio. This still-novel medium offered a "liveness," a thrilling immediacy no other technology had ever matched. Michael J. Socolow's account moves from the era's technological innovations to the human drama of how the race changed the lives of nine young men. As he shows, the origins of global sports broadcasting can be found in this single, forgotten contest. In those origins we see the ways the presentation, consumption, and uses of sport changed forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252040702
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	10/14/2016
Series:	Studies in Sports Media
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael J. Socolow is an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate.com, and the Chicago Tribune.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Prologue: Olympic Regatta Racecourse, Grünau, Germany 1

Introduction 5

1 Rowing, Radio, and American Sports Broadcasting, 1925-36 21

2 "Let's Go to Berlin": The Olympic Trials, the Boycott Movement, and Broadcast Preparations 55

3 Berlin 1936 as Global Broadcast Spectacle and Personal Experience 87

4 Live from Hitler's Reich: Transmitting tire Games and the Listener's Experience 131

5 Six Minutes in Grünau: The Olympic Regatta as the High Spot of the Berlin Games 167

Conclusion: The Berlin Olympic Games and Global Sports Broadcasting 203

Notes 217

Index 263