How it unfolded
Held from August 6 to 14, 1936, this tournament was field handball's only appearance at the Olympics. Only six nations competed: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Switzerland and the United States. The game was played eleven-a-side on grass football pitches rather than an indoor court, under rules essentially codified by Karl Schelenz around 1919. Germany cruised through the group stage and beat Austria 10-6 in the August 14 final at the Olympiastadion. The official crowd recorded for the final round was 100,000, a figure no handball match has come close to since. Switzerland took bronze and Hungary finished fourth, while the United States, with almost no exposure to the sport, lost every match by wide margins. The tournament itself was as much a showcase for Nazi Germany as it was a sporting event: Germany placed onto the Olympic program a game it had codified at home and dominated on its own turf, and won as scheduled. But outdoor eleven-a-side never appeared on an Olympic program again.
Why it still matters
This was the first time handball received large-scale international attention, and at the same time it exposed the limits of the outdoor eleven-a-side format. Twenty-two players spread across a football pitch were hard to follow from the stands, and the game was at the mercy of weather and pitch conditions. This tournament marks the starting point of the three-decade process by which indoor seven-a-side took over as the standard, and field handball disappeared from the top level of the sport after its last world championship in 1966.