In 1936, the governor of Michigan declared Detroit to be the “City of Champions.”

The Red Wings had just won their first Stanley Cup. The previous year, the Tigers and the Lions had won their first World Series and NFL Championship, respectively. Joe Louis, who’d lived in Detroit since he was 12, was emerging as the leading contender for boxing’s heavyweight championship.

With such a sporting resume, city leaders thought, why not go a step further and host the Olympics?

Yet Detroit never got to host the epic sporting event, although not for lack of trying: The city bid for every Olympics from 1940 to 1972, including the 1968 Olympics, for which they were considered a top contender.

That failed bid for ‘68 is the subject of Detroit’s Olympic Uprising, a new documentary from U-M sport management professor Stefan Szymanski, U-M German studies and comparative literature professor Silke-Maria Weineck, and Detroit-based filmmaker Aaron Schillinger. (Kines’ Center for Race & Ethnicity in Sport, led by SM professor Ketra Armstrong, helped fund the project.)

The film will be shown on Fox 2 Detroit at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 3. It chronicles a heavily coordinated campaign in 1963 to win the ‘68 Olympics amid escalating segregation, discrimination, and police brutality toward Detroit’s growing Black community — problems that would climax several years later in the 1967 Detroit Riots.

“We wanted to tell this story through the idea of: What if Detroit had gotten the Games in ‘63?” Szymanski says. “What would have happened? Could it have changed the city’s trajectory for the better? Of course, with the knowledge that it could also have made things even worse.”

Szymanski, right, speaks at the premiere of Detroit's Olympic Uprising. Photo by Jermaine Tripp

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Szymanski first heard about the controversial bid in 2011 when he relocated from London to work at the U-M School of Kinesiology.

“All I knew about Detroit at that time was that it was associated with cars and it was a Rust Belt city,” Szymanski says. “Coming here, I thought I’d ought to learn a bit more.”

Szymanski started reading about Michigan history and came across an article about Detroit’s ‘68 Olympics bid. The story mentioned a larger archive in the Detroit Public Library, where Szymanski later discovered 20 boxes of materials about Detroit’s decades of failed bids to host the Olympics.

Szymanski began teaching this history in his SM classes, asking his students to ponder why Detroit didn’t ever win an Olympic bid and whether it would be a suitable city to host the Games now.

“Usually, people think that’s a crazy idea,” Szymanski says. “But why? It’s interesting to ask people what it is about the Olympics that you believe that makes you say that a city like Detroit would be inappropriate.”

Szymanski and Weineck ended up writing a book about the history of Detroit sports and included chapters about two of the city’s Olympic bids. They even planned an exhibition for the Detroit Public Library that pulled from its larger Olympic archive to coincide with the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

The pandemic disrupted their plans (although they did create the website detroitolympichistory.com to showcase the materials), and the pair decided to up the ante for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Enter the documentary.

“The first step was to actually talk to someone in film studies and say, ‘Well, if you want to make a documentary, what do you do?’” Szymanski says. “It was a very slow start. In the first year, we didn’t achieve a great deal.”

Besides their lack of filmmaking knowledge, Szymanski and Weineck faced other challenges because of their chosen subject.

Finding television clips from the early 1960s proved tough; local TV stations didn’t seem very committed to covering civil rights at the time, Szymanski says, and the few that did rarely maintained archives of the footage from that period.

And many of the central characters in the story, including Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh, who championed the ‘68 bid; Fred Matthaei Jr., who planned and organized that effort; and Fred Matthaei Sr., who engineered most of Detroit’s Olympic bids (plus served as a U-M regent and donated the land that would become Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Radrick Farms Golf Course); had all died by this point. (Szymanski and Weineck were able to talk to children or grandchildren of these folks.)

The filmmakers’ luck turned when they connected with Luke Tripp (pictured below) and Charles Simmons, two civil rights activists who had protested Detroit’s Olympic bid in 1963 and were part of the Uhuru Movement, a precursor to many of the more well-known civil rights organizations that emerged later in the ‘60s.

“There was such a striking contrast with this quixotic bid to bring the Olympic Games to Detroit,” Szymanski says, “and a grassroots civil rights movement that was trying to address real practical problems that the city was facing.”

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We’ve already revealed the spoiler: Detroit did not win the Olympic bid in ‘63, and the city began to unravel just a few years later.

The documentary analyzes how much of the failed bid stemmed from protests by groups that felt the Motor City shouldn’t host a global sporting event when it was violating the rights of the Black communities actually living there. (There were certainly other factors involved, but you’ll have to watch the film to discover those.)

Detroit's Olympic Uprising leaves other questions to consider, too: Could hosting the Olympics actually have stimulated investment in Detroit? Might this have improved the city’s lot?

Szymanski, who specializes in sport economics, admits it’s ironic that he’s speculating about this alternate timeline at all.

“Economists don’t agree about much,” he says. “But the one thing we all agree on is that hosting these major sports events is a financial sink. It’s a way of dissipating very large sums of public money for no financial return.”

Szymanski has written several papers making this argument and says he’s generally quite skeptical about the long-term benefits for cities hosting the Olympics.

“Which is why, for me, this ‘what if’ about Detroit is so interesting,” he says. “Because this is one of the few cases where one might genuinely wonder if hosting the Olympics could have been a good thing.”

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Szymanski says he hopes to show through the documentary that sports and politics are “intimately linked.”

“There are many people who say that there’s no place for politics in sport,” he says. “That might be an aspiration that people have. But as a researcher, I say, ‘Well, if you think this is not political, explain to me why Detroit hosting the Olympic Games could be so controversial and why it could become a focus of civil rights protest?’ We’re trying to explore these links, show how they really work, and make the case that they’re still very relevant today.”

He also hopes the film sheds light on forgotten history — but that viewers understand this retelling is “just one version of history.”

“This is not the history,” Szymanski says. “This is the version that this particular group of people put together. History is not one fixed set of things that happened. It’s actually all interpretation. And that’s an important lesson.”

Fox 2 Detroit plans to broadcast Detroit’s Olympic Uprising at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 3, and will stream the film afterward on its website. (We will update this story when a streaming link becomes available.)