History
Work on the stadium, the Deutsches Stadion ("German Stadium"), began in 1912 at what was the Grunewald Race Course. It was planned to seat over 18,000 spectators. On 8 June 1913 the stadium was dedicated with the release of 10,000 pigeons. 60,000 people were in attendance.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, organization continued as no one expected that the war would continue for several years. Eventually, though, the Games were cancelled.
A winter sports week with speed skating, figure skating, ice hockey and nordic skiing was planned; the concept of this week eventually gave rise to the Winter Olympic Games. The central venue was to have been the Deutsches Stadion. Berlin returned to Olympic bidding in 1931, when it beat Barcelona, Spain for the right to host the 1936 Summer Olympics.
Read more about this topic: 1916 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)