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:
“In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)