October 19: Basketball Introduced as Olympic Sport
On 19 October 1933, basketball was introduced as a team sport for the 1936 Olympics which were to be sponsored by Berlin, Germany. A basketball tournament held during the 1904 St. Louis Olympics was considered a demonstration; not an event.
The 1936 Olympic basketball tournament was played on a sand court from 7-14 August 1936. The final game between the United States and Canada was played in the rain. Due to the poor conditions, the final score of the final game was 19-8.
The United States took the Gold Medal and Canada won the silver medal. Mexico took Bronze. Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, presented the medals to the winning teams.
The 1936 Olympic team was selected in a tournament that was played in Madison Square Garden. A team hosted by Universal Pictures won the event. However, before the start of the tournament, most people thought that the Long Island University Blackbirds would be the winners.
What happened to the Blackbirds? As Charlie Zegers explains, “The Blackbirds decided, as a team, to boycott the Olympics as a protest of Nazi Germany and its anti-Jewish policies.” According to Rafael Medoff, “The boycotters were not exactly showered with accolades. Sports columnist Frank H. Eck, for example, chastised LIU for causing ‘ill feelings’ by bringing the German Jewish issue into the discussion.“ “The Movement to Boycott the Berlin Olympics of 1936” provides further details about the unsuccessful effort to have the United States boycott the Olympic games.
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Like Triumph of the Willens, Riefenstahl’s Olympia is also brilliantly filmed and edited. One scene shows the American and Italian basketball teams practicing in the Olympic Village. However, the most famous scene in Olympiad is the diving scene that ends the film.
–Seven L. Berg, PhD
Photo credit: United States Olympic basketball team, 1936.
Although Today in History is primarily student written, there are some days when we do not have a student author. You will enjoy another student entry tomorrow.
Nik Stavreski 
Benjamin Puninske 
Nick Rotter 
Jennifer Kuebler 
Eden Gibbs
It is strange how two events that are almost polar opposites of one another can happen during the same year. On 19 October 1933 basketball was finally introduced as an official team sport for the upcoming Olympics in 1936; however, during the very same year Germany also withdrew from the League of Nations, an intergovernmental organization which was founded after the First World War had concluded during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. This in turn made the 1936 Summer Olympics feel like a real competition between Countries, due to Hitler’s rise to power, rather then just another Olympic season.