The United States was the host nation of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California. It was the nineteenth time that Team USA participated, having boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics. 522 competitors, 339 men and 183 women, took part in 217 events in 25 sports.
These Olympic Games were unique for the United States in that the host state was California, the home state of the country's president, Ronald Reagan, who himself opened the Games, becoming the first American president to open a Summer Olympics, and also any Olympic games in the United States. Reagan was governor of the state from 1967 to 1975.
However, it was not until the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that an American president opened a Winter Olympics in the United States.
Team USA won 83 Gold medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics, which is as of 2012, the record for most first place finishes in a Summer Olympics by a host nation.
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or summer:
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)
“Wind, the season-climate mixer,
In my Witches’ Weather Primer
Says, to make this Fall Elixir
First you let the summer simmer....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)