As Sochi’s controversial Winter Olympics starts, its detractors are listing why it should never have been chosen. It has subtropical climate with unreliable snow, it is prone to floods, it is in an unstable and terrorism hit part of the world, and so on. But they should keep one fact in mind – Sochi might be the least likely city to host a Winter Olympics, but it is not the least likely city ever to bid for one.

That distinction rests with Karachi. The idea of this Pakistani city ever hoping to host an Olympics, let alone a winter one, seems unbelievable, yet the bid is listed in Olympic archives and in news reports. In 1955, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met in Paris to decide on the hosts for the 1960 Games, Karachi was a contender for the Winter Games (a report in the Times of India said Karachi bid for both Summer and Winter Games, but only the Winter bid is part of wider archives).

It is true that Karachi then was not yet the terrorism battered and crumbling metropolis of today, though there was still the matter of millions of Partition refugees living in dire straits. But it has no traditions of winter sports, which is hardly surprising since it is a tropical city on the Arabian Sea and the coldest it ever recorded was on 21st January, 1934 when temperatures fell to 0º C, but not below. Sochi may worry about lack of snow, but Karachi never has any. (Pakistan does have a winter sports team, for some reason under the auspices of the Air Force, but in the mountainous north of the country).

Why the city ever envisaged a bid is a mystery. We checked with people in Karachi who might know, but no one seems or wants to remember why. Was it an audacious idea dreamed up after too many late night whiskies? Karachi has no shortage of sharp businessmen in property and construction who, as Sochi’s scams have shown, are always the biggest real beneficiaries of the Olympics, so was it meant to raise the city’s profile and property prices? Or, most plausibly, was it one-upmanship with India, which had hosted the first Asian Games in New Delhi in 1951? Not surprisingly, the IOC doesn’t seem to have even considered the bid details; the records simply note that Karachi was immediately eliminated with no votes and they moved on to the serious candidates.

But one fact makes the Karachi bid just a little less implausible: the actual winner that year was barely less likely. Karachi might have no snow, but Squaw Valley in California essentially did not exist.

Far from being a host city, Squaw Valley wasn’t even a village, but just a chair lift to get skiers up the slopes and a 50-room lodge for really dedicated skiers. At the end of the previous Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956, when the Olympic flag was to be handed over to the mayor of the next host city, an American IOC member had to accept the flag since Squaw Valley had no mayor.

Avery Brundage, the IOC’s powerful president, was appalled. “It is not easy to transform a picnic site into a high class winter resort in four years,” he blasted Alexander Cushing, a lawyer and one of the few residents of Squaw Valley, who had singlehandedly dreamed up the bid. Brundage had thought the bid so ridiculous he hadn’t even bothered to oppose it in its early stages, and then when he realised it might win, it was too late and he was bound by the neutrality he felt he had to observe as a previous head of the US Olympic Association that was backing it.

If Brundage had known even more at that time, he might actually have stopped the event. For example, most of the land at Squaw Valley was not owned, as the IOC thought, by Cushing, but by his former business partner, Wayne Poulsen, a Pan-Am pilot and avid skier who had first seen Squaw Valley’s potential, and who Cushing had not bothered to take on board when he launched the bid. Or, for that matter, the fact that Cushing himself hadn’t been particularly interested in the Olympics, and had just filed a last minute bid when he heard that nearby Reno, Nevada was planning a serious bid.

Cushing felt it was a good way to get publicity for a place that even most US skiers didn’t know about. But a local politician heard of the bid and decided it was a good way to get tourists to California’s still little known north. The state was rich at that time, just reaching its boom years, and it was easy to persuade the Governor and legislature to give Cushing a guarantee of $1 million if they won. This was more than any other state was putting on the table, and Cushing further used the fact of the guarantee, while keeping the amount vague, to make it sound like California was writing a blank cheque (in the event, the state gave $3 million more).

With the American nomination in place Cushing headed to Paris where he changed tactics. He was a Harvard man, with many elite East Coast connections, and he used them in full to charm the European aristocrats who tended to dominate the IOC in those days. He used the fact that no one there had actually seen Squaw Valley to paint it in the most glowing terms, as the perfect natural location that was a blank slate for customised Olympic development.

Cushing turned flaws into virtues – the limited hotels meant that athletes would not have separate suites for each nation, but would all stay together as “brothers in sport.” And he played his rivals against each other: after Karachi was eliminated the remaining contenders were Germany’s Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Austria’s Innsbruck and Switzerland’s St. Moritz, all long-standing rivals for ski tourism who ended up voting to keep each other out, and letting the complete outsider win. Brundage was right to be apprehensive, but in the event the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics was a success.

Cushing pulled it off by forcing even his sceptics, like Brundage, to help him for fear of losing face. California provided extra funds and also forcibly acquired Poulsen’s land from him (Cushing had smartly put most of his own money not in land, but in facilities like the ski lifts – he was, he said, in “the uphill transportation business”).

Desperation allowed the organisers to take unpopular decisions – when it was clear there wouldn’t be too many teams for the bobsled event they simply refused to build the expensive bobsled run, forcing the event to be suspended. They built a refrigeration plant to ensure ice for the skating events, and then used the warmth it generated to heat the venues. And they happily took on corporate help. Walt Disney staged the opening and closing ceremonies and IBM provided computers to tabulate the results, a first for the technology company and an association with the Games it would keep up for the next 40 years.

Most important of all, the Squaw Valley organisers sold TV rights to broadcast the Games to CBS for $50,000. TV broadcast of the Olympics had happened earlier and at Melbourne in 1956 the Australian government even charged a fee for telecast, but this was the first time rights were aggressively sold in a far-reaching change for the future. Use of TV also lead to an accidental innovation.

During the slalom races officials wanted to check if a skier had missed a gate and asked the TV team to check the footage. Instant replay as a concept had only been developed a few years earlier, and this made TV companies realise the value of replaying very recent events.

Squaw Valley’s success, against all the odds, underlined how the Winter Games can be a catalyst for innovation at the Olympics.

Because they are smaller, involve a more homogenous group of (richer) nations and face less scrutiny than the Summer Games, they can experiment in ways the larger event cannot, but can learn from. Corporate sponsorship started at Cortina d’Ampezzo (Olivetti gave typewriters to visiting journalists and perhaps the great love many writers had for their neat little Olivettis dates from then!) The Winter Games showed how TV could be a huge money spinner, while TV realised that the highly photogenic winter events, which tend to involve either extreme speed (skiing) or artistry (figure skating) could find viewers even beyond regular participants in these sports. The Winter Games also played a key role in ending the amateur only status that the IOC, and Brundage in particular, had insisted on enforcing, disqualifying even such great athletes like Jim Thorpe and Paavo Nurmi.

Brundage mostly got his way at the Summer Games, but not with the Winter Games. Disputes over professional ice hockey players almost took the sport out of the Olympics, but the real clash came over skiing, perhaps because the equipment is expensive and skiers tend to have close ties to manufacturers.

To be continued…